Many of us use our email inbox as a to-do list. Keeping that to-do list organized and easily accessible is a daunting task--especially with scores of new messages arriving daily. Each of these programs and services has its own spin on reminders.

Followup.cc

Out-of-date drivers can keep devices form working properly. Manually updating drivers is a dull, tedious task easily forgotten. PCWorld recently reviewed several automatic driver update utilities that pledge to make the task less onerous. Some of these programs (particularly the free and demo versions) identify driver updates for you. The full-featured, more expensive ones will update them as well. We show you which programs are worth the download, and which you should give a miss.

Driver Reviver

Like its rival Perfect Updater, ReviverSoft's Driver Reviver begins to scan your PC for out-of-date drivers as soon as you launch the app. I prefer the approach taken by another rival, DeviceDoctor.com's Device Doctor, which waits to begin scanning until you've manually started the process. But you can pause the scan, and in all other areas, both PerfectUpdater and Driver Reviver drastically outperform Device Doctor.

Ever dream of designing three-dimensional models for games and animated movies? We examine two free options and a new version of a well-known professional 3-D modeling program. Each has its own niche and can produce excellent results--but if speedy creation is your goal, you may get what you pay for.

Blender

Powerful and complex, Blender seems best suited to designers with a coding background.Blender is pretty daunting to someone who's never used 3D modeling or animation software. For me, using Blender 2.60a was somewhat like having to know exactly how my car works before I can drive it: a no-brainer for some people, but it's not for everyone.

The latest five products reviewed in PCWorld Downloads are a mixed bag. Some are excellent and some show the potential for excellence. Due to a closed beta and some steep prices, some are hard to obtain. Each of them is intriguing in its own way, and worth a look.

Carbonite

Carbonite 5 is the same easy-to-use backup product, but new Home user pricing plans offer different features.Version 5 of Carbonite Home offers some new and possibly handy functionality in two new tiers of service. Otherwise, it remains the same affordable, easy-to-use, but sometimes restrictive online backup service we reviewed last year.

PCWorld's reviewers examine so much software for desktop and Web, it can be easy to miss some of the reviews. Our most recent finds: three mindmappers, a differential tool for coders, and a space empire-building game. For downloads and full reviews, follow the links.

TheBrain

What if you were able to put your entire brain into one computer program? Every thought, work-related or personal, with links to Web pages or files on your computer, and any additional notes you'd care to make. And what if you could then link those thoughts together, weaving them into free and complex associative patterns, much like an actual train of thought going through your head? That's what TheBrain ($249, 30-day free trial) tries to let you do.

At PCWorld, and especially at PCWorld.com Downloads, we love trying out software. October's breakout stars were utilities: Everything from video file conversion to software updates to running Android apps on a PC. We'd be happy to see productivity-enhancing programs like this any month of the year. To see all these downloads in one unranked chart, check out PCWorld Reviewers' Favorite Files: October 2011.

BlueStacks App Player runs Android applications within Windows.You don't have to have your Android phone charged--or even have an Android phone at all--to use Android games and other apps. BlueStacks App Player (free alpha version) comes http://cms.pcworld.com/cms/article/edit.dowith several popular Android apps.

Every Halloween, PCWorld editors dig up some free scares for your desktop. Favorite fonts, themes, and screensavers haunt us year after year...and this October, a few new ghouls rise to capture your imagination. PCWorld's latest Halloween collection includes a frightening font, Windows 7 themepacks, and two exclusive wallpapers from horror artist Chad Savage of Sinister Visions.

Sinister Visions' Autumn Harbinger Desktop Wallpaper glows with Halloween spirit.The zombies of Savage's Zombo-o-Lanterns Desktop Wallpaper appear to be dressing up as jack-o-lanterns, but with the determined way they reach their rotting fingers toward the viewer, nobody's giving them candy. They're after your brains. For a treat with fewer tricks, invite the deep blues and fiery oranges of Autumn Harbinger Desktop Wallpaper onto your PC. Two grinning pumpkinheads cross their skeletal hands across a backdrop of a setting sun and a sky brimming with stars. If it weren't for the golden "Happy Halloween," the scene could edge into November as a solemn harvest image.

These days, I’m busy creating a new online store, a process that involves quite a bit of user interface design. To make matters more complicated, my colleagues are spread all over the globe, so we can’t just walk up to the office whiteboard and quickly flesh out ideas. It used to be that to show them a new UI layout, I had to draw it from scratch using CorelDRAW--and even MS Paint, just that one time. WireframeSketcher ($75, seven-day free trial with watermarks) changes that, and lets me present slicker UI designs much faster.

WireframeSketcher’s interface is not without its quirks, but it offers a rich array of UI widgets and excellent layout tools.A wireframe is a non-working mockup of an interface, much like a sketch on a napkin. While there are online tools for creating wireframes (such as Mockup Builder), some situations call for a downloadable application that can be used offline.WireframeSketcher starts you off with a blank canvas, on which you can drag and drop any number of widgets. Some of these widgets can be as simple as a button or a label, while others can be as complex as “cover flow” (à la iTunes) or a video player. You can also customize them: For example, the table widget lets you control the number of columns, their width and their contents, and you can even add icons into cells (not just text).

The Elder Scrolls, Chapter II: Daggerfall from Bethesda Softworks is the critically-acclaimed sequel to The Elder Scrolls: Arena, the very first game in the famous Elder Scrolls series of PC roleplaying games. Daggerfall expands and surpasses on every aspect of Arena’s gameplay, delivering you into a sprawling fantasy world teeming with villages, tombs and castles to explore. Playing Daggerfall on a modern PC can be jarring--the game was released in 1996 for MS-DOS--but once you get used to playing a game with outdated graphics and cumbersome controls, you’ll discover a well-written role-playing game that sucks you in for hours with a surprisingly exotic and engaging adventure. Of course since Daggerfall was released in 1996 you need a DOS emulator like DOSBox in order to get it running on a modern PC. For more information, check out our handy guide to playing Daggerfall on your Windows 7 PC.

The art in 1996's Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall looks dated today, but the absorbing gameplay never gets old.You start the game by creating a character from one of 18 classes and 8 different races, allocating points to a variety of different skills like archery, pickpocketing or thaumaturgy. Daggerfall has one of the deepest character creation systems I’ve ever seen in a PC game, more akin to a proper pen-and-paper role-playing game than a modern RPG like Fable: The Lost Chapters. If you’re in a hurry you can breeze through character creation by answering a series of hypothetical questions and allowing the game to create a character based on your choices, much like the morality quizzes that distinguished character creation in the Ultima series of games.

Knights of the Chalice ($24, free demo) is a cheerfully old-school game in which blocky, two-dimensional characters wander a blocky, two-dimensional world in order to gut and eviscerate everything that moves and haul off as treasure everything that isn't nailed down. In some contexts, this would be the work of sociopathic brigands; in the world of role playing games, it's called "adventuring."

Knights of the Chalice lets you say, "Of course we want to search in the barrels of junk! What could go wrong?"Instead of a limited subset of the main game, you get a small, standalone adventure, with pre-generated characters. If you like the gameplay and purchase the full Knights Of The Chalice game, you get a much larger game (going to level 20 instead of 3) and you can create your own band of intrepid heroes. This unusual demo model gives enough of a taste of the gameplay, tactics, and interface that you'll quickly know if you'll enjoy the full game.

Canadian font designer Peter Rempel brings his love of handwritten letterforms to the screen with a free download of PR Uncial, a playful introduction to the art of calligraphic forms.

PR Uncial brings medieval style to the screen with bold, round strokes.Time was when letterforms came about from hand and nib not click and pixel. Beginning around 200 AD, a particular style known as Uncial was the go-to choice of scribes writing out Latin and Greek texts. Uncial relies on simple, rounded strokes from a pen held in one position.

The free version of Revo Uninstaller is well-known among PC technicians as a serious, no-nonsense uninstaller and system cleaner. Revo Uninstaller Pro ($39.25, 30-day free trial) takes the basic facilities the free version provides, and adds two key features that some users might be willing to pay for.

The Traced Programs feature is Revo Uninstaller Pro's main selling point.When you uninstall an application with its included uninstaller or through Windows' Add/Remove programs feature, you’re actually running its installer again--this time with an instruction to remove the application rather than install it. Not all installers are made equal; some uninstallations are thorough, removing all traces of their application from your computer and leaving it squeaky clean. Others… not so much.