Adobe Photoshop costs a bomb, and while some people find it easier to crack it rather than buying it, it still takes up a lot of system resources. How about using an alternative that’s just under 700KB and comes free to use?

Fotografix is a nice little free alternative to the mighty Photoshop. It has a lot of features, brushes, and built in scripts allowing you to start editing right away. Although it is no real alternative to a graphic designer, the rest of us who like to use Photoshop for some trivial tasks such as working with Layers or resizing/adjusting images, this software should just about be enough. It’s an excellent Microsoft Paint alternative as well, standing in at just about 700KB in size and consuming less than 4MB of memory. Pretty cool right?

Download Fotografix (300KB) (Did we mention it’s portable?)

DirHTML is a free portable program that creates a list of the content in a folder and saves it as an HTML page.

You can choose what type of files to include, which folders to exclude, the sorting of the output, the format of the output (XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, etc.),  file date, file size, and lots more. You can also choose to save all these settings as a batch file so you can run it later in one click.

The HTML file output is pretty old school, but we’re not complaining. It does what it’s supposed to do. Check out the screenshot below.

Download DirHTML v4.84 (can be run in Wine under Linux)

Protect your USB drive from unauthorised file changes, malware, or simply to prevent accidental changes by using a portable write-protection software.

USB WriteProtector is a small (444KB uncompressed) and portable (no installation needed) software that runs off your USB drive and prevents files being written to it or modified. It can help protect your drive from those annoying virus that affect portable drives, and it can also save you from accidentally making modifications to files or losing them altogether.

Just extract the file and copy it to your USB drive along with the ‘Languages’ folder containing the English language file (the original language is German). You can then run it and choose to enable or disable write-protection. Unplug your USB drive from the system and plug it back again for the write protection to be enabled. (Removal is not necessary for removing the write protection.)

For added security and ease, you can rename the executable to anything you want (I named it “usb.exe”) and hide it. It can then be run from the command line like so: X:\usb.exe /on /nogui