Best Clipboard Manager

A clipboard manager (or extension) under Windows is a computer program that adds functionality to the basic Windows clipboard (i.e. the famous copy-and-paste).

Ditto is the best clipboard manager out there, featuring:

• easy-to-use interface
• search and paste from previous copies
• full Unicode support among others.

Most importantly, thanks to the excellent SQLite database, it can store all your past copies casually yet provide fast searching and a low memory footprint.

Best BitTorrent Client

The P2P concept and the original BitTorrent client have created a phenomenal change in how people share digital data.

But the original client is also infamous for its bulkiness and drag on system resources. Since its release, there has been numerous attempts by others to release compatible, better clients. Some (very) good examples include Azureus, BitComet, and a few others.

But the best of the best, compatible BitTorrent client is (as of today) µTorrent. Fast, efficient, small in size (at only 170KB!), lightweight, free (as in beer), excellent are some of the popular words people use to describe it. A nicely created piece of computing art.

Best Personal VPN

There are a lot of reasons to securely connect a group of computers together over the Internet. File sharing, remote desktop, and gaming are just a few popular applications. But when it comes to VPN, even IT professionals will find it a tedious and complicated topic. Obscure jargons like PPTP, IPSec, SSH, SSL tunneling start to appear and you get everything but fun.

Not until the arrival of Hamachi.

It requires virtually zero configuration. Even a layman can build his/her personal VPN in minutes. Once set up, each of your computer will be assigned a permanent address in the 5. network and can communicate with each other directly using this special address. Needless to say, all traffic is encrypted with the industry proven AES-256 algorithm. Available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Best PDF Creator

If you google for "freeware PDF creator", believe it or not, you get almost 3 million results! Many of the PDF tools are free (as in beer), such as CutePDF, PDF995, Go2PDF, PDF4Free, etc. Yea, it's not difficult at all to locate a free PDF tool, the real challenge is which one is the best?

My vote goes to PDFCreator, a free tool for creating PDF from any Windows applications. It is installed as a virtual Windows printer. It supports PDF encryption for both 40- and 128-bits! It can merge multiple files into a single PDF. As well, it's under GPL so it's 100% free for both home and commercial use!

The tip from me is that in order to create the highest quality PDF files with lossless pictures, you can change the image compression algorithm from "JPEG" to "ZIP", and down sample the resolution to "120". This resolution is generally good enough for distribution.