Looking to cut your ink and paper consumption--or maybe just to whittle down your printer costs? Give the free GreenPrint World a try. This useful, clever program will remove pages that it determines are unnecessary, such as those with no text on them. It also permits you to remove images or text from pages, or to delete whole pages, before printing. Alternatively, you can create PDFs from the pages instead of printing them, saving even more ink and paper.

GreenPrint World is simple to use. It installs as a printer driver; when you're ready to print, you just select it rather than your normal printer. It previews your pages so that you can remove any unwanted portions before it proceeds.

GreenPrint World also attempts to estimate how much paper, money, and greenhouse gases you save when using it. The program is ad supported, but the ads are for the software itself or for socially and ecologically focused organizations--a change of pace from the ads we're usually bombarded with.

Note: This software comes in 32-bit and 64-bit versions. This is the 64-bit version, which is for 64-bit PCs running a 64-bit OS. If your PC is running a different supported OS, please download the 32-bit version instead.

--Preston Gralla