Recently a customer had an issue with travelling back and forth between two networks with his laptop. One network (his home) used dynamic IP, the other (his office) used static IP. The constant messing about with the control panel and network connections was causing him grief, and sometimes he would forget the numbers to key in. So, I wrote two scripts and placed them on his desktop.
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The other day I was reconfiguring a network with multiple PCs, wireless access points, bridges, and the like. In the midst of this, I noticed that one of the PCs had a “page could not be displayed” message instead of the site being visited, which was amazon.com. Google’s site came up fine, but not amazon. I went to another PC - same issue. There is a great resource for this situation - www.downforeveryoneorjustme.com. I tried it and sure enough - www.amazon.com was not reachable! The outage only lasted a brief while, I saved this screenshot for posterity. Next time you have trouble reaching a site, why not see if others are having the same problem?

7Zip is a free open source file archiver/unarchiver that handles Zip files and many other formats. It is completely free to use on a personal computer or a commercial computer.

Features:

• No registration or nag screen
• Supported formats: ZIP, 7z, GZIP, BZIP2, TAR, ARJ, CAB, CHM, CPIO, DEB, DMG, HFS, ISO, LZH, LZMA, MSI, NSIS, RAR, RPM, UDF, WIM, XAR and Z
• Right-click integration with Windows Shell
• Command line version
• Pretty darn fast

Supports Windows, Linux, and also Mac OSX (sort of)

You can find 7zip here

PDF is the de facto standard for the distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms around the world. CutePDF Writer allows you to easily create PDFs on any 32-bit or 64-bit Windows PC. CutePDF Writer installs itself as a “CutePDF” printer. Once it is installed, you can open a document / webpage / whatever and print to the CutePDF printer. Your print output is then saved as a PDF. FREE for both commercial and non-commercial use, with no watermarks or pop-up ads.

You can get it here

Sometimes it seems that your internet connection is not as fast as it should be. Intermittent problems are hard for ISPs to fix, but it helps if you can give their technicians some accurate information to work on. Use the site www.speakeasy.net/speedtest to run several speed tests on your connection, choosing a server from the menu that resides in a city nearby your location. Run the test several times, perhaps using several PCs if you have a network. If your problem is intermittent, you may need to keep a log over several days and give the resulting information to the ISP’s technicians.