Alarms - you either love 'em or you hate 'em depending on what it means. If it means getting up for work, then chances are it's not your favourite sound but it doesn't have to be as painful as an annoying high pitched tone.

Citrus Alarm Clock is a simple but elegant alarm clock designed for those that want to wake up in style via their PC. It's much more advanced than a normal alarm clock and it gives you many more options over how you'd like to wake-up. The program is operated via a simple interface which allows you to set as many different alarms as you like using your existing media player. It therefore supports as many media formats as your player does which makes it pretty flexible in what tone, music or noise you choose to wake up to. You can even wake up to visual images of you want by setting it to play your TV Tuner or favourite show saved on your hard drive.

So that whatever you choose doesn't wake you too harshly, it features a gentle fade-in function to wake you up gently or you can choose to listen to it into your sleep up to a certain time when it will automatically mute until it starts again when you have to wake up. In this latest version, the developer had added a number of cool new features too including a snooze feature and a much more attractive and intuitive GUI.

Simple to use, powerful and completely free, this program could make those early starts just that little bit less painful.

Download Citrus Alarm Clock 2.0 in Softonic

Checking the current time from your PC couldn´t be easier thanks to this little gem of a program. DS Clock is a free desktop timepiece that displays variable date and time information built from the format string.

The program comes with a number of customization options. You can select any combination of date, time, and time zones, insert any text, pick custom colors and fonts, set custom sound to play at the top of the hour, and even play real Westminster chimes The program can also sync your computer with atomic clocks.

Download DS Clock 2.2 in Softonic

Organising contacts is an increasingly difficult task no matter who you are - if you add together all of the contacts on your mobile, e-mail and other external devices, it would probably be enough to go round the moon twice - or something like that.

Open Contacts is a brave attempt at trying to tie all these contacts together. The first thing that strikes you is that, it's not exactly the best looking program you've ever seen. It's more like an Excel spreadsheet with a few tasteless looking pink fields here and there. However, once you get working with it, you realise that it's not just an ugly face. The application has presets for various types of contact namely People and Companies. Both follow the same principle and the default layout gives you four fields within each one which you can move about. Each field expands into a whole page which allows you to enter just about everything from their eye colour to their favourite food if you so choose. In fact, few people will want or need to go into so much detail about their contacts but this is supposed to be a definitive kind of contacts book that you will refer to time and again although you get the feeling it's more like a police database at times. The program could have done with a few wizards to take you through the whole process a few times to begin with although the help file is extensive.

Open Contacts does help link and divide your contacts but it could do with a much better looking interface and a more simpler data fields for most people's needs.

Download Open Contacts 5.2.4.593 in Softonic

Want to keep time tracking on your project or view it in a timesheet later? Frequently forget schedule in the office or write it to the Notepiece on the wall but forget to look? Find something useful on the Web but tired of open NotePad to paste and save with a similar name then hard to find it? With TimeRecorder, all of these become easy, let the software do it for you.

TimeRecorder is a handy program for recording what do over a period of time, reminding you about everything, saving what you write or paste in the clipboard automatically. It can be run as a timer, reminder and memo, in other words, a Personal Information Manager.

Download TimeRecorder 4.36.5 in Softonic

Some people like to have absolute control over the way they spend time. Some other people simply have to, because their wages depend on the amount of hours they work.

In either case, ManicTime is a very useful application to control how and where you spend time while sitting in front of a computer. This program sits unobtrusively in the system tray and keeps track of absolutely anything you do with your PC: websites you open, e-mails you send, documents you write, etc. It doesn’t record what you actually write or read; it just controls the applications you use and the time you spend on each one of them.

With all the collected data, ManicTime generates nice, colorful timelines and charts with which you can have an accurate view of how you spend your time, either if it's for work reasons, because you want to put an end to your procrastination habit or just for fun. You can browse the list of activities, filter it to search for a certain element and also tag the information to make it easier to handle. It's a pity the program doesn't include an option to export data to other formats and create reports with it.

If you need to track the time you spend on the computer, be it for works reasons or just for curiosity, ManicTime is the tool you need.

Download ManicTime 1.0.0.47 in Softonic

Total Organizer is a Personal Information Manager software that allows you to store all of your contacts, notes, and to-do lists. What's unique about the app is that everything is organized into categories (or 'folders') as a hierarchical tree and each item (be it a note,task,contact etc) may belong to several folders. This is known as 'tagging' and what's more, these tags may be hierarchical, meaning that Total Organizer refers to them as 'folders' and not 'tags'.

Download Total Organizer 2.4 in Softonic

PrestoNotes is a freeware tool for Windows that lets you write little memos and stick them on your screen. The notes may be accessed through the control panel, or through a simple context menu sitting in the Windows toolbar. So, you can show or hide a note with only 2 mouse clicks!

PrestoNotes is totally multilingual thanks to the addition of language files. English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Polish and Swedish languages are included in the installation package, but you can easily create and add a new language for the program. Illustrated help notes are also included in the program.

Take a look at what PrestoNotes features:

• Customize notes in detail: background, text color, transparency, font, position, size, etc.
• Always on top of other windows, or not
• Possibility to open or save in an external file (.txt)
• Add an automatic reminder to any note
• Trigger one or more actions when a reminder is activated

Download PrestoNotes 4.80 in Softonic

Power Notes is a multi-featured desktop notes organizer, reminder and scheduler allowing you to create electronic sticky notes and display them at a set time. The program is very easy to use and has low system requirements.

The program allows you to perform the following:

• Create electronic desktop notes (stickers)
• Edit sticky notes in the quick and advanced modes
• Specify the date and time of reminder
• Customize the default parameters of notes (their size, text, background and title color, position on the desktop, transparency; shortcuts)
• Specify the date and time of a reminder in every detail with the help of "Alarm Wizard"
• Run programs and opening web pages when the note appears
• Print the text of stickers
• Save the text of a note to a file
• Anniversary and birthday reminder
• Use various skins
• Scheduling turning off the computer

Download Power Notes 3.32 in Softonic

With YouTube and other sites providing ever increasing amounts of video content, it's easy to lose track of all the clips you've downloaded - that's not to mention all your DivX films.

Personal Video Database is a very simple but functional database that gathers together all of the clips on your hard drive that allows you to catalogue them in some kind of meaningful way. perhaps the most aesthetically beautiful or complete in terms of functionality, but it works and All the basic features you'd expect such as cataloguing by genre, title, rating etc are there plus there's even a rudimentary online database check that can verify what your film or clip is based on keywords. This even extends to importing cover art of films and TV shows if necessary or available although you can disable this retrieval feature as it can take some time. If you want to expand it the program, you can do so via plugins that are included in the installation package although most of these plugins just extend the information retrieving functions.

It's not the best looking program in the world and it doesn't come with any outstanding features but its fast, lightweight and does what it's supposed to.

Download Personal Video Database Portable 0.9.8.10 in Softonic

Contact, calendar, appointment and diary are all a breeze to set up and edit (a handy bunch of wizards make sure of this) while offering a range of fields to play with. You can create groups and drag & drop freely to organize large of Contacts. As well as standard links to your browser and e-mail program, searching and dialer WinPIM can also generate useful summaries for your contacts perfect for printing.

The Appointments and the Tasks makes your time usage more productive and more rewarding. The Diary supports rich-text format contents, you can even add more than one diary to one day. And if they aren't enough you can add your own data into the 'information' section which makes WinPIM limitless in what it can store. And with SMS Messager WinPIM provided, you can even send your calendar to your mobile phone. WinPIM is perfect for personal use and more than sufficient for most professional users as well. As an added bonus you can download many reminder skins and schedules.

Download WinPIM XP 9.32.1770 in Softonic

Connect Daily web calendar software provides a place and a way for you to stay connected to your clients, partners, customers, staff, group members, associates, students, faculty and friends. Connect Daily is suitable for small, medium or large businesses, educational institutions, non-profit groups, government agencies, organizations and clubs.

Connect Daily web calendar software is designed to meet any schedule and many schedules, quickly and easily. You can schedule events that happen every day, every other week, every third Tuesday, at the end of each month, every ten years from now, whatever you need. Recurring events are scheduled once and Connect Daily web calendar software does the rest.

Download Connect Daily 3.3.8 in Softonic

Personal Video Database is a free way to catalog and file your favourite films. It features various functions including an easy to use User Interface, many different information fields (not needed fields can be hidden) and many configuration options to customise the program in the way you like.

It also features powerful filtering and grouping, the possibility to save Posters, Screenshots and Covers for each Movie and different Import / Export Plugins (for example: import movie information from the web).

Download Personal Video Database 0.9.8.15 in Softonic

Are you familiar with GTD (Getting Things Done)? It's a task management system that is supposed to help you be more productive and handle tasks and projects, both long term and short term.

EasyTask Manager is an application which supports GTD. You start by creating your different projects, then filling these with actions. You'll have to process your actions by putting them into the correct category. EasyTask Manager respects GTD terminology, so you'll find the traditional inbox, next actions, next days and someday folders, among others.

Once an action is finished, make sure to mark it as completed. EasyTask also allows you to sync your projects regularly. You'll have to enter an importance level, start and due date and ensure your tasks are in the correct context.

The interface offers a clear and detailed view of all your actions and projects. However I felt the buttons could be a little bigger and the whole interface a little more flexible to work with.

Still, if you're a big fan of the GTD method, you should find EasyTask Manager to be a good productivity tool.

Download EasyTask Manager 2.0 in Softonic

CATraxx is a powerful program for organizing your music collection. It can track a variety of vital information, including artist, title, format, label, condition, value, song titles, producers, musicians and instruments.

CATraxx supports CDDB2 - the worlds largest music database; you can catalog CDs by downloading disc data from the Internet. Designed for the Windows environment, CATraxx is comprehensive, intuitive, and easy to use.

Download CATraxx 8.11 in Softonic

If you're constantly looking for new ways to organise your life, then you might find that Agenda MSD Personal fills a gap that other programs have failed to.

Using an organiser like this has many advantages, not least that it saves you time and effort trying to keep track of what you have to do next and when you have to do it. The program doesn't win many marks for visual appearance - it's not exactly the most attractive organiser I've ever seen but what it does excel in is organisational features - there's just about nothing that you can't enter into this program. This includes everything from managing your daily activities, your phone book, and banking transactions to, if you're managing a business, your dealings with clients, suppliers and other contacts. It even stores essential passwords and usernames for your favourite sites and applications so that you don't waste valuable time in that department either. As an additional bonus, you can print out and save schedules and even histories in PDF format so that you've got a hard copy in case of any crashes to your system or confusions in your appointments.

If you're not bothered by looks or navigation issues, this is a fully comprehensive organiser that caters for every conceivable need.

Download Agenda MSD Personal 9.10 in Softonic

I must admit it: unless somebody is constantly on me, reminding me all the upcoming important events and tasks, I tend to forget my term paper's due date, the doctor's appointment date or even my mom's birthday. So if you're anything like me, you're going to like Note Mania.

This easy note application is more than just a digital post-it pad to jot things down. It's a complete personal information manager where you can store all the important dates, events, tasks and other data you can't miss. As the program supports note scheduling, you can use set reminders for yourself and also mark certain notes as recurrent events, turning Note Mania into a comprehensive calendar tool to schedule both your personal and professional lives. Notes are displayed as individual floating windows, listed on the program's main interface and also arranged on Note Mania's embedded calendar.

Besides its handy functionality, another outstanding feature in Note Mania is its support for customization. Notes can be personalized in many ways: paper color, text color, font face, size and event transparency level. Also, these settings can be applied globally or to each individual note. The program's calendar, however, uses your Windows wallpaper as background decoration and cannot be customized in any way.

With Note Mania you'll organize your tasks in a more productive way won't lose track of any important date or event in your life again.

Download Note Mania 1.3 in Softonic

Folder management is something that can easily be improved on in Windows and The Magic Folder aims to do exactly this.

The Magic Folder is basically a utility that helps you categorize and move files. When you drag a file into the utility, it will look at the file extension and place Document files (like DOC, XLS, PPT, etc) in the Documents folder. The same principle works for other file extensions - image files like (JPEG, PNG, TIFF, GIF, etc) are automatically placed into the Pictures folder. It's not fixed in stone however where the files you go. You can add/remove file extensions recognized by The Magic Folder and change where files go or even add your own folder locations. Alternatively, you can configure the program to prompt you for the storage location each time you move a folder.

The program does not operate entirely independently of Windows Explorer - when you click The Magic Folder you can select from the list of folders you want to access and then jump directly to that folder in Windows Explorer. Most recently, the developer has updated the folder graphics to encompass four different folder types.

If you don't have time to manage your folders or check where they've gone, The Magic Folder will ensure that you're desktop stays as tidy as possible.

Download The Magic Folder 2.0 in Softonic

Alive Organizer is a powerful system allowing you to manage your personal information, schedule tasks, maintain your address book, keep and publish your blog and much more. It is considerably better than its printed analogs as well as better than a lot of similar software because it provides you with a simple, effective and comfortable way to schedule your events, add contacts to your address book, create notes, keep and publish a personal blog. With Alive Organizer, you can easily generate your personal schedule for any date, get timely reminders about birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.

The features of Alive Organizer can be briefly described as "all in one". Indeed, Alive Organizer has all features necessary for such a description. Actually, Alive Organizer was designed to provide the user with constant control over all tasks, projects and contacts.

It should be specifically mentioned that Alive Organizer has a unique features allowing its user to keep and publish a personal blog on the Internet. This feature expands the horizons of using Alive Organizer because it often happens that our tasks, projects, ideas and plans are closely connected with what we write in our blogs.

Download Alive Organizer 3.2 in Softonic

Organising contacts is an increasingly difficult task no matter who you are - if you add together all of the contacts on your mobile, e-mail and other external devices, it would probably be enough to go round the moon twice - or something like that.

Open Contacts Portable is portable version of Open Contacts which is a brave attempt at trying to tie all these contacts together. Of course, if you're on the move a lot and making contacts all the time, then this version is much more suitable because it fits neatly on a Pendrive. The first thing that strikes with Open Contacts is that it's not exactly the best looking program you've ever seen. It's more like an Excel spreadsheet with a few tasteless looking pink fields here and there. However, once you get working with it, you realise that it's not just an ugly face. The application has presets for various types of contact namely People and Companies. Both follow the same principle and the default layout gives you four fields within each one which you can move about. Each field expands into a whole page which allows you to enter more details although the portable version is more limited than the original which is no bad thing. Few people will want or need to go into so much detail about their contacts as the original allows and so I'd rather use this version anyway. Although it's simpler to use as a result, the program could still have done with a few wizards to take you through the whole process a few times to begin with although the help file is extensive.

Open Contacts does help link and divide your contacts but it could do with a much better looking interface although the simpler data fields in this portable version are actually an improvement on the original.

Download Open Contacts Portable 5.1.1 in Softonic

If you have lots of photos, music, software and documents then it's probably a good idea to begin making backup copies, so that you have everything conveniently stored in CD or DVD. But how can you manage such a collection?

The answer is CD Archiver. This program helps you create an organized catalogue of all your recorded CD and DVD in a very easy way: insert a disc in the drive, choose or create the appropriate category and CD Archiver will read it and store its index of contents in the database. Be warned that, although almost fully automated, the whole process can take a while as the program is a bit slow indexing large discs.

Once you have your database, you can see a nice graphic that displays the distribution and percentages of file types but, what's more important, you'll be able to search for any file with the embedded search engine, without having to check discs one by one.

Download CD Archiver 5.3.3067 in Softonic