Utilities

RogueScanner

Think your home or small office wireless network is safe? Do you have any idea whether any intruders are on it? This free program is a great way to find out.

Run it on a PC attached to your network via Ethernet. (The program won't work in Windows Vista, so you'll need Windows XP.) When you run it, it immediately does a network scan, finding the wireless and wired devices attached to it. For each device, it lists the unique MAC address (a kind of serial number), the IP address, the manufacturer if it can figure it out, and model number if it can find that. It also tells you what kind of device it is, such as a router, printer, PC, and so on. And it will also flag any suspect devices it finds.

Just compare the information it finds to what you know of your network. If there are any wireless devices connected that you don't know about, you may have an intruder.

ClamWin Free Antivirus

Antivirus software tends to be big and bloated, use plenty of RAM and system resources, and generally clog up your system. Worse is that increasingly, antivirus vendors make it difficult to buy antivirus software by itself, and include firewalls, antispyware and other software with it.

If you want a clean, mean piece of antivirus software that does just one thing -- protect against viruses -- you'll want this program. It has a small footprint, and doesn't take up much system resources.

It will scan your entire hard disk at once for viruses and spyware, or can scan individual files and folders. It also includes a Microsoft Outlook add-in to remove virus-infected attachments automatically from your e-mail. The program has one drawback, though: It doesn't include real-time virus protection.

FileZilla

FTP lives! This file transfer protocol may seem old-fashioned and ancient, but the truth is, it's often the simplest way to transfer files between PCs, or between a PC and a server.

It's especially useful for transferring large files, because ISPs often block e-mail attachments over a certain size. And it's great for transferring groups of files. FileZilla has just about every FTP feature you need. It's a breeze to set up and edit new FTP connections.

The interface is particularly easy to use, so that you can easily navigate external FTP servers and your local hard drive, and transfer files between then. You can also use multiple simultaneous connections to speed up file transfers.

TrueCrypt

Do you have files that you want to keep safe from prying eyes? Then you need this program. It lets you create special, encrypted volumes on the fly, and then place files in those volumes. It uses powerful encryption technology to keep them safe.

This program differs from just about any other encryption program you've used, because of the unique way it creates volumes and protects data. When you save a file to an encrypted volume, you're actually saving it to RAM, rather than to disk, making it even more difficult for anyone to view the volumes or files.

When you turn off your PC, the files become inaccessible, but are encrypted and stored on disk. When you turn your PC back on, you have to remount the volume and type in a password for them to be visible to you again.

7-Zip

Windows includes a built-in archiving utility that can compress and decompress files in the .Zip format, but it's nobody's idea of particularly useful.

If you need to do more than the most basic of archiving tasks with the Windows zip tool, you're out of luck. 7-Zip comes to the rescue. It offers you considerable power over compressed archive creation and extraction, including several different archive formats and compression methods and levels, and lets you create encrypted, password-created archives. The interface is quite configurable, and can even create a two-pane view, which is rare in archiving programs.