Figure 1

Launchy is a really cool program that not only saves you valuable time, effort, and screen real estate, it also looks really cool.  it's design is simply to launch a specified program simply by typing the name of it.

With Launchy, to launch an app, you press the desired keystroke (default -> ALT-SPACE) to launch the main Launchy menu (Figure 1) and simply start typing what you are looking for. as you can see from the image, by just typing the letters "ama" the suggestion to run the Amarok application has come up. Then when you press the enter key the selected application loads and the Launchy app goes back into idle mode.  When it is in idle mode it just hangs out in the background waiting to be launched again.  Out of sight, and saving all that valuable screen real estate that the Windows Start menu takes up!

So now you can hide that Windows bar, with confidence that you don't have to rely on it so heavily!

Launchy is available from: http://www.launchy.net/

This is great because most netbooks don't have a CD or DVD drive.  This would allow you to creat or download a disk image of an application CD or DVD, and use it like it was a physical disk inserted into the computer. When you mount an image through the tray icon (pictured) it becomes a drive listed in your "My Computer" icon, just like any other drive.  It loads, and works just like a CD would.

There are various free programs available that will allow you to create a disk image out of any CD or DVD.  A great one, that I recommend is called ISO Recorder (http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/isorecorder.htm).  You simply tell it what CD or DVD you want to turn into an .iso file and it does the work for you.  Therefore you could take the newest game you bought, and create an .iso file out of it;s install disk, copy it to a memory card or flash drive, mount it on your netbook and run it just like you had a drive installed onthe machine.

It is compatible with a LARGE number if disk images:

• BIN              (CDRWin)
• IMA/IMG          (Generic disk images)
• CIF              (Easy CD Creator)
• NRG              (Nero - Burning ROM)
• IMG/CCD          (CloneCD)
• MDF/MDS          (Fantom CD)
• VCD              (Farstone Virtual Drive)
• VaporCD          (Noum Vapor CDROM)
• P01/MD1/XA       (Gear)
• VC4/000          (Virtual CD)
• VDI              (Virtuo CD Manager)
• C2D              (WinOnCD)
• BWI/BWT          (BlinkWrite)
• CDI              (DiscJuggler)
• TAO/DAO          (Duplicator)
• PDI              (Instant Copy)

Enjoy this free program!

Some of the formats that VLC support are:

3GP,[17] ASF, AVI, FLV, MKV, Musical Instrument Digital Interface (.mid/.midi),[18] QuickTime, MP4, Ogg, OGM, WAV, MPEG-2 (ES, PS, TS, PVA, MP3), AIFF, Raw audio, Raw DV, MXF, VOB.
Video formats, Cinepak, Dirac, DV, H.263, H.264/MPEG-4 AVC, HuffYUV, Indeo 3,[19] MJPEG, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, RealVideo 3&4[20], Sorenson (thus enabling direct playback of the modified Sorenson H.263 encoded videos downloaded from YouTube), Theora, VC-1,[21] VP5,[21] VP6,[21] WMV, AAC, AC3, ALAC, AMR,[17] DTS, DV Audio, XM, FLAC, MACE, Mod, MP3, PLS, QDM2/QDMC, RealAudio,[23] Speex, Screamtracker 3/S3M, TTA, Vorbis, WavPack,[24] WMA.

the program also works amazingly well on a netbook, because it is so lightweight and it uses minimal system resources.  The full package is just over 17MB, and is distributed as Open Source software, so you can also download and compile your own copy, if you want.

The FREE Windows version can be downloaded from here: http://www.videolan.org/vlc/download-windows.html

One of the biggest downfalls to having a netbook, or a small laptop computer is having a small amount of screen real estate.  Plus with it being a NETbook is does spend a lot of it's time online online, so an ideal app would be one that solves these issues.

Well that's one (of the many) great features of the Google Chrome web browser.  It has taken the idea of browser tabs and pushed them up into the title bar, plus made it's address bar into a single bar and also included your nav buttons and your menu system.  Also, the status bar (at the bottom) is hidden, unless it is in use.

One of the other great features of this browser is that it is very very fast.  The initial program loading time is less than half the time it takes to load Mozilla Firefox, and the page loading time is faster than BOTH Firefox and Internet Explorer.  See this CNET article for more information.

It's a fast and compact browser that is free to download and works better than it's counterparts.  You can't go wrong!

Google Chrome is available for download from: http://www.google.com/chrome

GSView is a free frontend to the GhostScript application that it's original intention was reading Postscript files, but has evolved GhostScript into a full featured PDF viewer that is incredibly fast. The typical load times for the application ar a second or 2, and even loading a large - graphically rich - file loaded in a third the time Adobe Acrobat Reader took to load. It even beat Foxit Reader, which is another free PDF reader that is designed to be a more lightweight alternative to Adobe.

To install the reader, you must first install the Ghostscript application (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs864/gs864w32.exe for MS Windows) and then install the GSView application (http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/ghostgum/gsv49w32.exe also for MS Windows).

A great (and fast) program to get the best out of your netbook!