This month we present 50 of the most useful programs from the Internet.  The best part is that they are absolutely free for non-commercial use!

The Beatnik Plug-in manages the playback of audio files within your Netscape Web browser. RMF, MIDI, MOD, AIFF, WAV and AU audio files are all looked after by Beatnik and the sound quality produced is very good. The potential for interactivity is also impressive. JavaScript can be used by Web page developers to make a more personalised musical experience within a web page. Apart from playing music when the page is opened, Beatnik allows events such as mouse-click or mouse-over to trigger different music, or even to change the tempo, volume and pitch of the music.

Windows 95 relies too much on virtual memory and does not make full use of the system's disk cache. To improve system performance, many users have resorted to editing the SYSTEM.INI file to set the maximum and minimum cache sizes. Now Cacheman removes the hassle of editing the SYSTEM.INI file by allowing you to change the size of your disk cache. Cacheman's easy-to-use interface also removes some of the insecurity that some users have with editing system files.

Cacheman has five different optimal cache settings that have preset maximum and minimum sizes. These settings are for a standard system, systems with CD writers, power users,and users with low physical memory. There is even a setting for users who play Quake 2.

CatFish can also be used to launch any application or document by simply double clicking on the file.

Windows 95/NT

Download the version for your operating system here:

Windows 95/NT (103K)

Windows 95/NT

Download the version for your operating system here:

Windows 95/NT (535K)

Clipboard Magic is a very simple and unobtrusive program that archives all the pieces of data you copy onto the clipboard. It is not really a replacement for the standard clipboard, it is more of an enhancement.

Clipboard Magic runs from the system tray. When you want to change the contents of the clipboard to something that you have copied previously, you run the program and find the archived piece of data. Just clicking on the selected data will copy it to the clipboard, ready for pasting. My only grumble is that when the data is pasted from the archive it is not always pasted at the same size that it was copied at.

You can search your catalogue of disks to locate a particular file. Many search options are included to ease the pain of finding files.

The program doesn't let you easily locate large files, but is useful for getting a general overview of your system. It is certainly better than browsing manually through Windows Explorer. The sorting of disk space by file type is particularly handy for discovering wasted space taken up by image files, video files or possibly redundant DLLs. Duplicate files on your system can also be flushed out.

Windows 95

Download the version for your operating system here:

Windows 95 (378K)

You can use the program to free up space by deleting obsolete temporary files and removing duplicates by sending them directly to the Recycle bin.

Duplicate files on your system may take up valuable disk space that could be used for other things. Dupeless finds duplicates by comparing the name, size and content of all the files on your hard disk. Duplicates are then listed so that you can select which files can be safely removed. It takes some time to go through the grid of duplicate files, but if you are in need of some extra hard disk space or wish to find conflicting files of the same type, this may be your answer.

The source code of Dupeless has also been included with the install files so that curious programmers can see how Dupeless works. If you are interested, Dupeless was programmed using Borland's Delphi programming language.