The fact is, although Windows 7 offers a lot, it's still lacking in some important areas: file zipping, encryption, and antivirus, to name a few. The good news: There are some outstanding free utilities on the market that have been tested with Windows 7. Here are a few.

Task Switcher

Microsoft has tried to make task switching simpler and more elegant with each new version of Windows. First there was Alt-Tab. Then, in Vista, Flip3D was introduced -- activated by pressing Windows Key-Tab.

But the programmers who developed the free Switcher (http://insentient.net) have outdone all of Microsoft's efforts with a utility that takes the guesswork and finger strain out of task switching once and for all. Once installed, Switcher is activated with the key combination of the Windows key and the letter S on the keyboard. Once pressed, you can release the keys.

Switcher takes a snapshot of all running applications and shows them, along with their contents, as different-sized thumbnails on your computer screen.

Switching to a particular application is a simple matter of surveying what you have open and clicking the program you'd like to use.

Switcher gives you a good amount of control over how the thumbnails are displayed, too. And if you have so many applications open that finding the one you want is still a bit of a chore, you can simply start typing the name of an application, at which point you'll realize that there's a Switcher search box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen. Type "Word," for instance, and only those instances of Word that are running will be displayed, making it very easy to select the one you're looking for.

Encryption

The Enterprise and Ultimate editions of Windows 7 come with BitLocker for encrypting USB drives and external volumes so that your data is secure as it travels with you. But if you don't use Enterprise or Ultimate, what should you do? One answer is TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org), and open-source disk encryption application that works with Windows 7 and previous versions of Windows. (continued...)

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