You spend too much time at your computer.

But wait. Before you get up and walk away, consider how you can make your computing life more productive. I'm going to tell you about 15 utilities--most of them free--that will relieve much of the repetitiveness and confusion that make PC work slow and annoying.

Some of the programs simplify common computer chores, like launching programs and burning CDs. Others help you work smarter with files--finding the ones you want, renaming them en masse, and sending them where you want them to go. Still others help you automate your work with macros and boilerplate text. And the rest simplify tasks that shouldn't be as complicated as they are, such as using Office 2007 or figuring out your cell phone bill.

So invest a little effort--and maybe a little money--to make your life easier. Then you can take some time off and enjoy the hours you've saved.

Simplify Common Jobs

We all launch programs, burn data CDs and DVDs, and take extra steps to remove the formatting from text that we want in plain form. The programs in this category manage those tasks with fewer hassles, enabling you to save time and avoid prematurely gray hair.

Windows already has a command line, but Josh Karlin's Launchy has a better one. Just press ‹Alt›-‹Space›, and up pops Launchy's simple, menuless command window. Type a word, and the utility presents you with a list of matching launchable files--both programs and documents. For instance, when I typed word, Launchy responded by bringing up Microsoft Word, WordPad, WordPress (from my Firefox favorites), and a document named Word Play. Pressing ‹Enter› loads your selection and closes Launchy.

You can configure Launchy by right-clicking it. It comes with plenty of skins and with plug-ins that have names like Calcy, Explory, and Foxy (no Dopey, Sneezy, or Grumpy, however; come to think of it, Doc would have been a natural). Other plug-ins are available at the Launchy Web site.

Price: Free

Download Launchy.

Windows' Recent Documents menu is a great idea, badly executed. Microsoft still hasn't figured out that this list should be filtered by file type, and that users might appreciate some privacy.

Luckily, Flexigensoft did figure it out and offers a better alternative to Recent Documents called ActualDoc. The free program gives you two ways to find a recently used file. You can right-click the Systray icon for lists by category--Documents, Internet Documents, Drawings and Images, and so on. Or you can double-click the same icon for the full-fledged program, which you can use to narrow the selection further by date and file type (such as Word documents and text files).

Security options clear Windows' Recent Documents list and password-protect ActualDoc.

The ful-featured ActualDoc Pro (€20) adds file viewers, custom categories, and document search.

Price: Free (Pro version costs €20)

Download ActualDoc.

I try to keep the number of autoloading programs on my PC to a bare minimum, but I refuse to remove PureText from my system tray.

When you paste text into practically any Windows program, you get both text and formatting. But more often than not, all you really want is text.

Steve Miller's PureText gives you the option of choosing a text-only paste. Once you have this little freebie running in the background, you can strip all formatting out of the clipboard's text and insert it into your current application simply by pressing a user-defined hotkey. I recommend sticking with the default, ‹Windows›-V, because it's close to the ‹Control›-V standard for regular pasting.

Price: Free

Download PureText.

Burning files to a CD or DVD shouldn't be difficult. And it isn't with Cortex IT's free program. This one-dialog-box utility lets you select the file or folder that you want to put on the disc, and then just click Burn.

Command Burner does have some limitations. You can't drag a file or folder to the program. And the only way to burn more than one file is instead to burn the contents of a folder. And this is not a tool for burning music or movies. But if the job is data-oriented and simple, Command Burner is far easier to use than Nero, Easy Media Creator, or Windows' own burning tools.

Price: Free

Download Command Burner.

Work With Files Faster

Like car keys, house keys, and bicycle keys, files sometimes get misplaced, mislaid, or mixed up. Here are a few tools to help you find, control, and manage the files in your life.

Windows Vista comes with a great indexed search tool. Google offers a pretty good one, too. But Copernic gives away the best one of all.

Copernic keeps an index of words contained in your e-mail messages, productivity files, music, pictures, videos, contacts, favorites, and history, and it uses that index to report its findings almost instantaneously. One especially nice feature: Copernic has a preview pane below the file list that shows you the contents of the currently selected file along with the location of the search string within that file.

Price: Free

Download Copernic Desktop Search.

Anyone with a digital camera has undoubtedly felt the need to rename a whole bunch of files at once. Windows can perform this chore easily, but not well. The result is a bunch of files with the same name, differentiated only by a number in parentheses.

That's where Rename Master comes in. This freebie, brought to you by Jackass JoeJoe's Freeware Utilities (hey, folks, I pick the software, not the names), offers a cornucopia of mass-renaming options. You can add text at specific points in the names, replace text, remove unwanted strings, and even specify how you want the file names capitalized. You also have considerable control over the way the counter distinguishes one file from another.

And you can see the changes you're making before they become set in stone.

Price: Free

Download Rename Master.

Ever try to copy a large number of files to a new location? Everything goes swimmingly until Windows finds a file that, for one reason or another, isn't copiable. Then, instead of the taking the obvious step of skipping the balky file and going on to the next one, Windows stops the copying process dead in its tracks.

Ruahine.com's free Ycopy gets around that annoying frailty. You simply tell Ycopy what folder you want copied and where you want it copied to, and then you click Start Copy.

When it's finished with the entire assignment, Ycopy will inform you of the files it couldn't copy.

Price: Free

Download Ycopy.

If you manage a Web site, you probably upload files to Internet servers via FTP.

Peili Chen's SendTo FTP makes this chore about as simple as possible. Just right-click a file (or a selected group of files), and choose Send To•SendTo FTP. A dialog box will let you define a destination or pick an already defined one--and up your file(s) will go.

SendTo FTP hasn't been updated in several years, and we couldn't reach Peili Chen for comment, but the program still works. We noticed some minor problems that the utility had with Vista, which wasn't around when the program was last updated, but nothing serious.

Price: Free

Download SendTo FTP.

Automate Your Work

You have to do some repetitive, time-wasting jobs yourself. But that doesn't mean you have to do them over and over again. The programs in this category help you automate your own regular routines--everything from typing your mailing address to making a specific application jump through a specific hoop.

How often do you have to type your address, your phone number, or "To Whom It May Concern"? Only once, if you have Tagkeys, Valutilities.com's convenient tool for handling boilerplate text.

Tagkeys puts a tab on the right side of your screen. Clicking the tab activates the program, after which you can create, edit, or delete your boilerplates (which the program calls tagkeys). Once you've created one, you can insert it into any application that permits typed text entry: Just press the period key (.), type the appropriate tagkey's abbreviation, and hit the space bar.

An optional $20 registration fee fetches you backup, customization, and import/export capabilities.

Price: Free ($20 for a more powerful version)

Download Tagkeys.

Once you've taken the time to create them, macros definitely make life easier. With one or two keystrokes, you can repeat just about any complicated series of commands.

Hot Keyboard Pro lets you create macros within any program or across several programs. The utility's setup wizard helps you set up likely macros to launch favorite programs and to insert common boilerplate text (such as your e-mail address). It even prints out a reference card.

You can create macros from scratch, too, by recording keystrokes and mouse movements. I recommend using keystrokes whenever possible--they're more reliable.

Price: $30 (shareware)

Download Hot Keyboard Pro.

When you search for and replace text in your spreadsheets and word processing documents, you're limited to working on one file at a time. Actual Search & Replace lets you perform this most basic of computer chores on multiple files, searching your hard drive (or a selected folder) for any file that contains the specified text string, so you can transform that string into something else.

DivlocSoft's $30 shareware program lets you search by phrase, by all of the entered words, by any of the entered words, or in accordance with a Google-like syntax. It displays the names of found files, along with information on them, and the search string in context. You can choose to replace the found text or to insert the new text before or after it.

You can even automate the process by creating projects.

Price: $30 (shareware; 30-day free trial)

Download Actual Search & Replace.

Simplify the Complicated

Some jobs are needlessly complicated. And some are complicated for a reason that's not in your best interest. The programs in this category can help bring some sanity to the chores you do.

Here's a combination photo viewer and touch-up tool that's simpler than Photoshop, more powerful than Windows' own limited tools, and free for personal use.

FastStone Image Viewer for Windows looks like Windows Explorer, with thumbnails in the right pane and tree and preview panes on the left. It only shows graphic files, of course. But besides showing them, it can resize them, crop them, fix red eye, draw them, and rotate them.

Like all photo programs, this one has a full-screen mode, but with FastStone Image Viewer you can move the mouse pointer to the edges of the screen to select options from some extremely useful menus. You can adjust color, sharpen or blur, or examine and edit attributes with a full-screen view of the image.

Price: Free (personal use) or $35 (business use)

Download FastStone Image Viewer for Windows. 

Here's a free and easy way to clean up the tracks left on your computer as memorials of past activity--markers  like cookies, the Internet cache, your various histories, and even file fragments that threaten your privacy.

What makes CCleaner a time saver as well as a privacy saver? Check the option to run this utility at startup, and you won't have to think about it again. The program will do its automated cleanup quietly, without so much as opening a window.

CCleaner has other tricks, too. It can tidy up the Registry and help you reduce the number of autoloading applications. It plays it safe with these issues, explaining Registry problems before permitting you to delete them. That chore, of course, can't be done automatically and without user intervention at bootup.

Price: Free

Download CCleaner.

For people who've been using one of the older versions of Microsoft Office for years, the latest version is like a whole new program--one with a very uninviting learning curve. And Microsoft has done nothing to ease the transition.

Enter Addintools, which fills the gap with Classic Menu for Office 2007. This program does just what its name would lead you top expect: It places the old familiar menus on all of Office 2007's major applications.

And it does so in a way that doesn't force you to pick one interface or the other. It simply creates an additional tab, called Menus, consisting of the old menus and toolbars. This arrangement allows you to adjust at your convenience to the new way of doing things without having to stop and figure out which tab is harboring some beloved feature that seems to have disappeared into Microsoft's version of a witness protection program.

Why couldn't Microsoft think of something like this?

Price: $30 (complete package) or $16 each (individual modules for particular Office apps); shareware

Download Classic Menu for Office 2007.

Verizon Bill Calculator

If you have a Verizon cell phone account--and especially if you have a family plan--you may have discovered that the company's book-length bills are almost impossible to decipher. Jamin Szczesny makes life easier for all Verizon users with his Verizon Wireless Bill Calculator.

The calculator is actually a Visual Basic for Applications macro contained in a Microsoft Word document. Load the document into Word, and up comes the program. Then grab the .pdf version of your bill from Verizon's Web site, copy its complete text to the clipboard, and click the appropriate button in the Calculator.

You'll get a concise display of all of the bill's most important information, including who in the family is using all those minutes. The Calculator even finds calculation errors in the bills.

Price: $2 (the free demo version is essentially useless)

Download VerizonBillCalculator.