It’s one of my favorite pursuits to try out bushels of open source and freeware applications, looking for gems. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose on the hunt, but there are definitely a lot of applications out there that cost nothing but pack powerful punches.

Here are three Windows freeware applications that rose to the top of my favorites list in 2008–ones that I use every week.
Startup Delayer immediately struck me as a very useful Windows utility when I first wrote about it in early October. Indeed, I use it every day and love it.
Startup Delayer is designed to do what its name implies: It lets you set delays for the various Windows applications you load when you boot your computer, so that they don’t attempt to load all at once, slowing boot time down. You just drag applications around in a simple, shared white space to set the delays. If you load a lot of software all the time, as I do, and if you load a fair number of applications upon bootup, Startup Delayer will deliver its maximum benefit.
After taking a look at the Top Downloads list at Download.com, I’m not suprised to see Malwarebytes’ Anti-Malware on the top 20 list. I wrote about this utility here. It’s very common for Windows users to find their systems running slowly and inefficiently over time. Files get littered around hard drives in Windows, registries get mucked up, and more. While there are lots of free tools for task such as disk cleanup, this one consistently ferrets out gunk that other applications won’t.
Finally, IrfanView is a fantastic freeware graphics application that I’ve written up a couple of times. Its latest version 4.23 adds lots uf useful features, including expanded history lists for slideshows, the ability to create multi-page PDF files and more. This application opens and closes like a snap, but is surprisingly powerful, especially in the latest version.
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