A meaty Thanksgiving download: “The pumpkin pie might not even be on the table before you get that inevitable request: ‘Can you take a look at my computer? It’s been really slow lately.’”

Pretty cool little free photo editing application. This is what should ship with Windows instead of Windows Paint or with most digital cameras. It’s nowhere near a Photoshop killer for heavy retouching duties and special effects, but it’s very good for most basic tasks such as resizing, cropping and adjusting images. It’s lightweight enough that I may just start using it up for simple tasks. Even with a 2.8Ghz Pentium 4 machine and a gig of memory, Photoshop CS2 takes a few minutes to start up. It’s a PITA for a quickie photo crop and fix.

Jason’s Free Useful Software List

Other than games (I’m currently enjoying the recently-released Half-Life 2 expansion episode) the main reason I don’t abandon Windows in favor of Linux full time at home is lack of a decent image editor (Gimp isn’t good enough). Pixel image editor could change that.

Hard Disk Scrubber (overwrites only deleted files on your drive) and DriveScrubber (kills everything). Both are US Department of Defense (DoD 5220.22) compliant.