Small programs doesn't mean they're bad programs. Think about the build-in programs in Windows like Notepad and Calculator. They're not bad at all. Here's a list of over 50 small (Under 1 MegaByte in download!) Windows applications that are really useful and will make your life easier.

Most of these programs are freeware. Some have an ugly website or UI, but don't let that fool you. They're really powerful and do what they do. Nothing less, nothing more.

Image related

Color Cop

Color Cop is a multi-purpose color picker for web designers and programmers. It features an eyedropper, magnifier, variable magnification levels, 3 by 3 and 5 by 5 average sampling, snap to websafe, color history, and a 42 color complementary palette.

Mihov Image Resizer

Mihov Image Resizer is a handy tool for batch resizing images in bmp, gif, and jpg picture formats. You can make pictures or any kind of images smaller or bigger - whichever you need at the time.

MWSnap

MWSnap is a small yet powerful Windows program for snapping (capturing) images from selected parts of the screen.

Search & Replace

ReplaceEm

Welcome to the wonderful world of ReplaceEm, your premiere-quality, freeware string-replacing utility for Windows. At its core, ReplaceEm is essentially a text search-and-replace program. However, unlike the search-replace functionality of a standard text editor, ReplaceEm is designed to operate on multiple files at once.

Replace some bytes

A.F.9 lets you edit files by replacing characters or any other bytes. The functionality is similar to a replace function in text editors, but there are a few differences.

Music

musiCutter

musiCutter is mp3 and ogg vorbis joiner/cutter (without need to decode and reencode) that can use a CUE sheet

Volumouse

Volumouse provides you a quick and easy way to control the sound volume on your system - simply by rolling the wheel of your wheel mouse. It allows you to define a set of rules for determining when the wheel will be used for changing the sound volume. For example: You can configure Volumouse to use your mouse wheel for volume control when the Alt key is hold down, when the left mouse button is down, when the mouse cursor is over the taskbar, and so on...

DeepRipper

DeepRipper is freeware that can convert music files from AudioCDs into practically any format you'd like, including: MP3, WAV, OGG, and others.

File renamers

Bulk Rename Utility

Bulk Rename Utility is a utility which allows you to easily rename files and directories, based upon extemely flexible criteria. Add date-stamps, replace numbers, insert strings, convert case, add auto-numbers, process folders and subfolders....plus loads more!

Lupas Rename

Lupas Rename is a program developed to rename a big number of files.

Flexible Renamer

A file/folder renaming utility, which can use Wildcard or Regular-Expression and Tag-information (MP3, EXIF).

File managers

XYplorer

XYplorer is a multi-tabbed file manager for Windows (98, NT, ME, 2000, XP, XP x64, 2003, Vista, Vista x64) targeting everybody who is looking for a real alternative to Explorer.

Restoration

Restoration is an easy to use and straight forward tool to undelete files that were removed from the recycle bin or directly deleted from within Windows, and we were also able to recover photos from a Flash card that had been formatted.

E-mail

FreePOPs

FreePOPs is an easily extensible program, which allows access to the most varied resources through the POP3 protocol. Mainly, it can be used to download mail from the most famous webmails, but it could also be used as an aggregator for RSS feeds and much more.

POP Peeper

POP Peeper is an email notifier that runs in your Windows task bar and alerts you when you have new email on your POP3, IMAP (with IDLE support), Hotmail\MSN\LiveMail, Yahoo, Mail.com, MyWay, Excite, Lycos.com, RediffMail, Juno and NetZero accounts.

K9

K9 is an email filtering application that works in conjunction with your regular POP3 email program and automatically classifies incoming emails as spam (junk email) or non-spam without the need for maintaining dozens of rules or constant updates to be downloaded.

ePrompter

ePrompter allows you to compose, forward and reply to the messages that have been retrieved for you.

File Erasers

UltraShredder

UltraShredder is a standalone, USB portable file shredder which deletes sensitive files by overwriting them with random characters, saving it to disk each time, and then bypasses the recycle bin, thus acting as your personal, portable file shredder.

Editors

Notepad2

A fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry.

Archive Utilities

7-Zip

7-Zip is a file archiver with a high compression ratio.

Sticky Notes

ATnotes

ATnotes is a program which creates notes on the desktop. It sits in the taskbar and takes very few resource.

StickyPad

StickyPad is an invaluable, easy-to-use tool that lets you place sticky notes on your desktop. You can type notes to yourself, set meeting and appointment reminders, keep track of a to-do list, and anything else you would do with paper notes.

Stickies

Stickies is a PC utility I wrote to try to cut down on the number of Post-It notes I was leaving stuck to my monitor. It is a computerised version of those notes.

Hotkey Utilities

PS Hot Launch

PS Hot Launch is meant to quickly run different applications, open documents, go to the right folders and web pages, send mail to a specified address, etc.

SlickRun

SlickRun is a free floating command line utility for Windows. SlickRun gives you almost instant access to any program or website.

Security

Sandboxie

When you run a program on your computer, data flows from the hard disk to the program via read operations. The data is then processed and displayed, and finally flows back from the progam to the hard disk via write operations. Sandboxie changes the rules such that write operations do not make it back to your hard disk.

SpywareGuard

SpywareGuard provides a real-time protection solution against spyware that is a great addition to SpywareBlaster's protection method.

Panda Anti Virus Anti Rootkit

Panda Anti-Rootkit is a program that uses latest generation technology to detect and remove rootkits. Rootkits are programs designed to hide processes, files or Windows Registry entries.

Registry Cleaners

Eusing Registry Cleaner

Eusing Free Registry Cleaner is a free registry repair software that allows you to safely clean and repair registry problems with a few simple mouse clicks. The Windows Registry is a crucial part of your PC's operation system.

RegSeeker

RegSeeker includes a powerful registry cleaner and can display various informations like your startup entries, several histories (even index.dat files), installed applications and much more.

PC Resource Meter

TinyResMeter

TinyResMeter is a small tool that display usefull realtime system resources informations, but it also give much more details thru context menu when you right-click over displayed fields.

ProcessExplorer

Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded.

Clipboard Replacement

ClipX

ClipX is a tiny clipboard history manager. It is sweet, it is free, use it.

Clipomatic

Clipomatic is a clipboard cache program. It remembers what was copied to the clipboard and allows you to retrieve it, even after you've copied something else to the clipboard. Clipomatic only works with text.

ArsClip

ArsClip is a utility for the windows clipboard. ArsClip monitors the clipboard and keeps track of the entries. Press a configurable hotkey and select an item (or items) to quickly paste into a program.

Download / Upload meter

NetMeter

Simple NetMeter showing up and download.

NET Traffic Meter

NET Traffic Meter allows you to monitor the traffic on a selected network or modem interface. The main interface displays a simple traffic graph, but looking closer reveals that it includes many useful features to monitor your volume, down and upload rates as well as general statistics (daily, weekly, monthly).

File cleanup

CleanUp!

CleanUp! is a powerful and easy-to-use application that removes temporary files created while surfing the web, empties the Recycle Bin, deletes files from your temporary folders and more.

PC Decrapifier

The PC Decrapifier will uninstall many of the common trialware and annoyances found on many of the PCs from big name OEMs.

Windows Tweaks

The Wonderful Icon

The Wonderful Icon 2.2 is a small Windows utility that resides in your PC's taskbar tray. Try it and you'll be hooked!

Tray It!

TrayIt! allows to save precious Taskbar space for minimized windows. For each application which applies TrayIt! it creates a small icon in the System Tray. (System Tray area is located near the Clock).

4t Tray

Minimize Outlook, Internet Explorer, Firefox and any other applications to the system tray! 4t Tray Minimizer lets you running applications minimized as System Tray icons, which helps free up space on your taskbar.

Sizer

Sizer is a utility that allows you to resize any window to an exact, predefined size. This is extremely useful when designing web pages, as it allows you to see how the page will look when viewed at a smaller size.

WinRoll

Make a window roll into its title bar, send it to the back or make it stay on top. Minimize, maximize or close all visible windows, including minimizing to the tray area. Make a window translucent on Windows 2000 or above.

Taskbar Shuffle

No hotkeys, no extra steps, just rearrange the buttons on your Windows taskbar by dragging and dropping them. Allows you to rearrange your system tray icons by dragging and dropping as well (but that does require a hotkey).

Desktop List view

View the icons on your desktop as a list, instead of icons. It's a stand-alone program, and can be placed in your windows startup folder.

PowerMenu

PowerMenu is a small application I wrote back in 1998 that some extra menu items to the windows control menu in addition to the standard "Close", "Maximize", etc options. The extra menus are: Always On Top, Transparency and Minimize To Tray.

Other

FlashMute

FlashMute is a tool which allows you to mute/unmute Flash Movies loaded in a browser exclusively, or alternatively all sounds produced by the browser.

Address Flipper

A application to store all your friend's addresses in. Includes 2 name fields for all those Internet friends that you know rather by alias-name than by RealLife name.

ShowIP

ShowIP is a freeware application which simply does what it's name says, it shows you your IP-address. Useful for those who need a quick way to check or share their IP to their friends.

Unlocker

Ever had such an annoying message given by Windows? "Cannot delete Folder". Unlocker is the solution!

EndItAll

EndItAll2 is also handy for closing all programs before installing software, which I always recommend.

Wallpaper Master

Wallpaper Master is a powerful and highly customizable desktop wallpaper manager and cycler. It will automatically change your background wallpaper with a huge range of options, and is great for indexing large collections of personal photos or any kind of image.

If you have any more of these programs, feel free to add them in the comments. I'll add it to the list. Just remember: The download must be under 1 MB.

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