Are you an serious, active stock trader? If so, you need Wall Street Analyzer. This free charting and analysis software has 30+ build in technical analysis indicators. You can also build your own custom indicators. Also includes backtesting capabilities for your own trading system. This software is for serious traders only as it’s a bit beyond the average investor. For the money (free) this is the best stock trading software.

Myzips.com has selected Back4Win as the #1 backup software application. This freeware uses industry standard zip compression to backup your data and make it recoverable on any OS. Perfect for backing up software to CDR and CDRW media. Backups can be saved as .exe as well in case compression software is not available. No size limitations and backups are timestamped for easy reference.

Want to find out what’s taking up all the space on your hard drive?

WinDirStat is an excellent application that will display the contents of any drive or folder you select in a way that makes it very easy to see how big every file it is. You may find old unneeded files that you had completely forgotten about are taking up space, or that a program you rarely use has spread itself over a large section of your drive.

Ever had one of those days when you were on the web one day and the next day your browser refuses to go to the sites you want and jumps from site to site.

Well I’ve had several of those days and I’ve got a program that you need if you want to be on the web each night without worrying what gets on your system. Developed by Sunbelt Software, CounterSpy 2.0 has succeeded where other applications such as McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 and Windows Defender has failed. Not only did it get rid of my browser problem, it alerted me to other security issues on my system (including tracking cookies) filtering out the bad and leaving behind the good.

You can get a free 15-day trial at the Sunbelt Software website and can upgrade to the full version for $19.95. I think it’s totally worth the price since it saved me from viewing webpages I had no interest in seeing. A word of caution though: Active Protection tends to go a bit extreme so try and create a system restore point before your first install and see how it works for you. If it doesn’t work out well the first time, use the restore point and install CounterSpy without enabling Active Protection. Good luck!

Smart Data Recovery is a nifty little (free!) data recovery application that we have found very effective at recovering elusive data that mysteriously got deleted! It is a Windows program that supports the NTFS and FAT file systems. It can recover data from hard drives, flash drives, digital cameras, USB drives, memory sticks, etc.

Smart Data Recovery can recover any deleted files, including MS Office files, photos, mp3 and zip files.

Also See:
Drive & Data Recovery

Our pick for the best firewall software is a no brainer. Zone Alarm is the industry leader in personal PC firewall protection. The free version of ZoneAlarm provides solid security for your internet connections. It is great at blocking hackers, spyware, and trojans from entering your computer via the web. It provides custom security controls which will allow you to make your PC invisible to hackers.

There are also more advanced versions of Zone Alarm which are available from $19.95 to $69.95 depending on the features you are looking for. Their top of the line product offers anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-phishing, spam blocking, parental controls, and identity theft protection. Not a bad package for just $69.95.