When you're setting up a home office, chances are your budget doesn't include springing for a photocopier. But it may include a scanner and a printer. If so, an open source utility called iCopy can help you get the copy machine you've always wanted.

A tiny (554 KB) app, iCopy can either be installed on your PC or run off of a USB drive--no installation needed. It should find both your scanner and printer automatically, and with the click of a button, lets you scan pages and then print them back out. It's almost like a photocopier, albeit a bit slower.

You can choose to scan single or multiple pages, and can scan in color, grayscale, or text mode. iCopy also lets you adjust the resolution, brightness, and contrast of any images you scan, and lets you enlarge or shrink images, too.

Beyond simply printing pages back out, iCopy has additional uses. Once you scan documents or photos, you can print them to a file--and if you have a PDF writer like the free CutePDF, you can use it with iCopy to scan files and create PDFs, for free.

Despite its many good points, iCopy is not without its flaws. It didn't recognize my printer automatically; I had to manually direct the app to find it. And although it found my HP scanner and worked with it seamlessly, it's not compatible with all scanners. But since it works relatively well--and because it's free/donationware--iCopy is worth a try. Especially considering you don't even have to install it to take it for a test run, there's nothing to lose.

Note: This program is donationware. It is free to try, but the author accepts and encourages donations towards further development.

--Liane Cassavoy