RealPlayer seems to be making real progress on not giving as many headaches as it used to. I don’t feel that it’s any worse than using Windows Media Player in most cases. You may want to try it if you love to download or rip videos from YouTube, Google Videos, Vimeo, DailyMotion or even a few NSFW video sites.

VDownloader lets you search several video sites, view the videos, then download and convert them to your favorite video format such as AVI, MPG, iPOD/iPHONE, PSP, 3GP, NOKIA N8×0, VCD, SVCD, DVD, FLV or MP3.

Windows will let you change the icons associated with file extensions or file types, but it’s not always easy. Here’s a tutorial demonstrating a small free stand-alone program that makes this change seem very simple.

Are you getting tired of seeing the same old drab icons on your desktop? I’ll show you how to change Windows desktops icons no matter what version of Windows you are using.

Is your Windows system a little slow because your PC is older than the Windows OS that you are using? Maybe you just like the old Windows Classic themes of Window 98 and Windows 2000? In any case, here’s a trick that lets you optimize your Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 in favor of performance instead of eye candy.

The uninstalll procedures in Windows Add/Remove will often leave you with dozens of junk files, empty folders and broken registry entries. Some third party uninstall utilities can really help you clean up when you decide to uninstall an application. I’ll tell you about two free uninstall utilities that have really been useful to me over the years.

When you double click to open a file, you may find that it opens up in an application that you don’t want to use. Something might have changed your file extension type associations. I’ll point out some ways that you can correct this. I’ll also tell you how to change your file type settings back to what they were when your copy of Windows was new.

Designing websites is a constant challenge for webmasters. One challenge is that web browsers are using many different screen resolutions. Here I’ll offer three easy solutions that allow easy viewing and testing of multiple screen resolutions in web browsers.

If you like green, you’ll love the new themes from Gmail, especially if you mate it with the grass theme in Google Chrome web browser. Why stop there? There are plenty of grass wallpapers out there to green up your desktop as well.

You don’t have to install Opera10 to try it out. You can download a portable freeware version of the new Opera web browser for a very easy trial run.

Running AntiVirus on a machine that won’t boot Windows is a challenge that you can answer. If you’d like to resurrect instead of re-install, you should consider the following option. Most of the major AntiVirus vendors are offering free antivirus rescue CDs. Would you like to find out where to get these CDs and how to use them?

You can repair, enable or disable the default behavior of ZIP files in Windows XP by using two commands. If you have Vista or Windows 7, you can also make these changes, but it’s not as simple.

Does Windows file search need a coffee break before it goes to work for you? I’ve found an easy solution to create quick file searches without the need to install any new software on your machine.

Over the years, I’ve tried at least 30 different Notepad replacements. Despite that, Metapad is the only free text editor that I’d really hate to live without.

CopyShell allows you to right click on any file, folder or shortcut and grab the full path to it. The path is copied into the Windows Clipboard.