A quick search on desktop utilities will reveal a plethora of bells and whistles. Sometimes it’s challenging to discern between the helpful suggestions and self-promotion. After trying many utilities, there are a few that have worked their way into my daily work life, utilities I depend on to help me through my day.
- Keepass
– I don’t know what I did all those years without a solid way of storing passwords. What a conundrum it poses. On one hand, best practice says to use unique passwords that are long and cryptic. On the other hand there needs to be a system for storing them. Perhaps I’m showing my age but I find it more and more difficult to do so. Keepass is a small utility that stores passwords in an encrypted file on your desktop. I also heard of some IT folks storing the file on a server and opening it locally for a shared resource. - Google Calendar Sync
– After years of ambiguous and conflicting appointments between work and personal life, I’ve started syncing my work calendar in Outlook to Gmail. For Getting Things Done enthusiasts, this one is a no brainer. It’s nice to open-up my calendar mindspace and not worry as much about calendaring conflicts. 
Beyond Compare – This little utility, free for the 30-Day trial then $30 to by, allows you to synch files between two folders. Originally I used it to synch web folders but have found it very useful for backing-up documents to a network drive.
YouSendIt.com – Moving large files around the globe can be a real hassle. Our intranet system is in development and sometimes there’s no more efficient way to get stuff to folks than uploading it to a second party. The service is free though as a department we’ve subscribed to their first tier of service. They also offer secured service if you have highly sensitive information.- Google Adwords Editor
– The Adwords Editor just makes life a little easier for maintaining one or more accounts. Management of the campaigns can be handled from the desktop and then sync’d when done. Works nicely when multiple folks are working on the same account as well. - FireFTP
– This FireFox plug-in gets constant use. It keeps life streamlined for me to pop open an ftp client within the browser. It’s quick to launch and works pretty darn good. I’ve used it for upwards of a year now and have very little complaints. - Gmail Manager
– Another FireFox plug-in, but probably the most used utility I posess. It enables me to keep a constant eye on email w/out going to the account. If there were such a bird for Outlook my work life efficiency would be near shangri-la. - MeasureIt – A little FireFox plug-in that measures anything on the screen.
I should mention Colorzilla as well though for some reason just don’t use it as much. MeasureIt is uber handy for getting dimensions when modifying graphics for a web page. - Ad-aware
– We use Norton Anti-virus at work and to put it mildly, it’s under par as an all-encompassing anti-virus utility. I prefer AVG Anti-virus which is free though I have a paid subscription for my home computing environment. Regardless of the version of anti-virus software I use, Adaware does a decent job of catching malware and spyware that they others let slip by. - Microsoft PowerToys Image Resizer
– This little utility performs a nice function to resize images with a right-click. While I absolutely love working in Photoshop, it’s a real hoss in terms of launching the program and a pain when a simple resize is all that is needed. Image Resizer is an ideal utility especially for blogging.
There are many other utilities that are credible and that I use fairly regularly, but these mentioned above range between hourly to weekly, stuff I depend on. What ones could you not live without?