VHD--Virtual Hard Drive--as in the type of image file used to mimic hard drive partitions by Microsoft's Virtual PC (found in Windows 7), as well as the older standalone Virtual PC 2007 and Server 2008's Hyper-V virtual machine hosts. Free program Disk2vhd does exactly what it sounds like it will do: Turn a partition into a virtual hard drive that you can load and even boot from using the aforementioned virtual machine software.

If you've been looking for a way to create bootable PE flash drives that's easier than running a command line utility and hand-copying files--you've just found it. The free WinToFlash automates the transfer of your XP/2008/Vista/Windows 7 installation files to flash thumb drives or SSDs. You can also transfer PE and PE 2 (Windows PrE-install XP and Vista/7) utility discs to Flash drives. Assuming you own the discs you're copying and don't give the stuff away, Microsoft and the DOJ probably won't care.

Flash authoring tool KoolMoves is a very inexpensive way to get up and running in the world of Flash scripting. Flash is a powerful visual programming language that's responsible for all the web-based videos you watch frequently, most of the Web ads you see, and many entire websites. Normally, Flash authoring tools run into the hundreds of dollars, but KoolMoves ($49, free feature-limited demo) has positioned itself as an alternative.

Screen captures--pictures of what is on the computer monitor--are useful and fun. As software reviewers, we take screen captures of all programs that we cover, so you, our readers, can better understand what we are reporting. You might use them to show errors to tech support, to prove prices at online stores, or simply to show your friends that crazy thing you just ran across on the Web. On desktop and laptop computers, doing a screen capture is a simple matter of using hotkeys--but on Palm devices, it's not so easy. For our screen captures to go with our reviews of Palm programs, we purchased and use QuickTake ($5, 10-day free trial).

Faces are among the hardest things to photograph well, and the advent of high-end digital photography serves only to magnify and enhance the normal blemishes and unflattering facial details that most of us prefer not to share with the world. Faces are also incredibly hard to touch-up well, which is why Photoshop artisans who work for fashion magazines get paid the big bucks. For the rest of us, there's Luxand Glamourizer ($30, 14-day free trial).

If you use Photodex ProShow Gold or ProShow Producer to create your presentations and slideshows, adding the ProShow StylePack Volume 1 plug-in ($20, buy-only) will give you even more creative choices.

Do you want to create nicely designed and coordinated marketing materials, such as business cards, trifold brochures, promotional postcards, coupons and so forth? Quark (the folks behind respected professional desktop publishing program QuarkXpress) has a new, free template design software/service combo called Quark Promote.

Large swaths of the world are subject to censorship, or else track their citizens' use of the Internet. Free program Freenet lets you anonymously browse the Web, share files, chat on forums, and more--no matter where you are. Download and run the software, and you become part of a decentralized P2P network that uses encryption and other tools to keep you hidden and anonymous. As you browse, your data is encrypted and sent through a series of Freenet nodes, making it very difficult to track you.

In the age of Google we depend on our Web browsers--and on all the features which make them so efficient to use. Personal settings and data such as bookmarks, history, cookies, and saved passwords are essential to productivity. FavBackup (free) recognizes the importance of such data and offers an easy and comprehensive way to back it all up. Perhaps even more useful, you can use the program to migrate settings to a browser on a different computer.

Need to correct colors, remove red-eye, or change the format of an image? Don't want to shell out hundreds of dollars for Adobe PhotoShop? ImageAnalyzer is freeware, and light, and it does many functions that the big apps do.

IGetMusic ($40; ten-day free, feature-limited trial) is an interesting app that listens to Internet radio stations for you and turns their streaming music into numerous portable M4A files, which can be played on most MP3 players. iTunes or other music apps can convert these into MP3 files, if you wish, for total portability. Unfortunately, this isn't one of those easy-to-use, launch-and-go apps.

Popularized in many of the highly acclaimed PBS documentaries produced by filmmaker Ken Burns, the technique of turning historic still images into something more palatable for a television audience (by slowly panning across the images, and fading in to new ones) has become a common technique for videographers with limited shooting budgets. PhotoFilmStrip (free) provides a one-stop application you can use to generate just such a video montage out of a series of still photographs.