It's nice to have access to a program that knows all the hidden nooks and crannies of your computer. Like your desk draws, your hard drive has tons of places for things to get hidden away.

CCleaner is a freeware system optimizer that can run through your computer and remove unused and unnecessary files quickly and painlessly. The result can be a faster computer with more available hard drive space.

For me, the selling point on CCleaner was the fact that it hit just about every nook and cranny that tends to build up on your PCs hard drive. Temporary files, form histories, browsing histories and even document drafts can be wiped out all in one pass! The first time I ran it on my desktop PC I was surprised to find nearly a gig of cached files that I really didn't need to have.

If you're computer is running slow, or your running low on disk space, you might give CCleaner a go first.

CCleaner is made by the folks who also made Recuva, a data recovery program recently featured on Lifehacker.

I hate Adobe Acrobat! It's slow to load, slow to open files, and even slower to close and go away.

The only thing it does quickly is crash Firefox!

The good news is that there's a solution, Foxit Reader from Foxit Software. Foxit is free, lightweight and portable. While you can certainly install it on your local PC you can also easily run it on a flash drive.

For PC installations you can simply download the installation .exe file and start it. If you want to run Foxit Reader from a USB drive you can simply download the .zip file and extract it to your USB drive.

While I do currently have a printer attached to my network, there are times I'm at my laptop and want to save something for later printing. Now, it's possible to save things like web pages and digital receipts onto your computer but often times doing this will create a series of sub folders that really aren't necessary and can be a bit unwieldy to manage.

The solution I've come up with is printing to PDF. Rather than save a website / receipt and have to deal with sub folders containing all the images, I can print to a single file that maintains all the images and which remains digitally placed on my PC.

After searching around and checking out various files I finally settled on CutePDF purely because of how easy it is to use. Simply start printing the document and select CutePDF from the list of available printers. CutePDF will then ask you where you want to save the file ... that's it.

I stopped using AOL Instant Messenger AGES ago. I got sick and tired of dealing with that damned program (especially when it started running video ads in the background) that I just had to get rid of it. I bounced around between a variety of different Instant Messenger Clients and finally settled on Trillian from Cerulean Studios.

Why Trillian? First off, the free version is ... well ... free. It's also fully featured. You can connect to all the major IM services (except Google - but are they really a major IM service?) at the same time in one window. You get tabbed conversations and a pretty decent archive of all your conversations.

While Trillian 3 is excellent, Trillian Astra (their un-released new product) also looks fantastic. If you still manage a lot of contacts through IM Trillian is worth a closer look!

One of the ways I keep my (virtual) desktop clutter free is by keeping absolutely no program icons on it. My Desktop is basically my virtual inbox, with the exception of 'My Computer,' 'My Documents,' and a few assorted shortcuts leading to important directories my website only houses images and documents that I'm currently working on.

I've found that most people end up with program shortcuts cluttering up their desktop. What I've done to cut down on this is adopt the use of a program called SlickRun. SlickRun is a customizable command line program which allows you to create "MagicWords" to run programs.

SlickRun is a free floating command line utility for Windows. SlickRun gives you almost instant access to any program or website. SlickRun allows you to create command aliases (known as MagicWords), so C:\Program Files\Outlook Express\msimn.exe becomes MAIL.

If you're comfortable using the keyboard in place of the mouse SlickRun can be a huge time saver. The added bonus of a clutter free desktop is also great!