The first of these programs is PS Tray Factory. Most people are unsatisfied with their task bars, because they have too many icons. While windows will hide inactive icons that are not used, you may have icons you want to hide forever, such as custom sound settings or other nonsense. PS Tray Factory lets you hide anything you want, in addition to letting you minimize anything to your system tray. That means if you have a program which you don’t want running on your task bar constantly, you can minimize it to your system tray with no trouble.

Another great program for saving yourself screen real estate is Deskscapes. Deskscapes is a free program which is offered by Stardock and acts as though you have multiple desktops. If you have several programs which you run in conjunction with one another, this is your best bet for keeping them together and off of your main screen while you work with other programs. Deskscapes is also great for multi-monitor users, as it lets you set each desktop wallpaper on your monitors separately.

If you do happen to run two monitors, it may annoy you that all of your programs are crowded onto one task bar, even if they’re on the second monitor. UltraMon is a free program which will fix this problem for you, by adding a second task bar to your second monitor. In turn, all of the programs which you have on your second monitor will be displayed on its task bar, instead of the original monitor.

Picking the best Firefox addons to run depends entirely on what you want your browser to do. These top five addons have been picked for the functionality they bring to Firefox, adding more than what any browser should be able to do.

• 1. FireFTP – FireFTP – turns Firefox into a robust FTP client which can be used directly from the browser, with no need to open a separate client. It supports all of the features you’d expect from an FTP client, including CHMOD.
• 2. FoxyTunes – This allows you to control your music collection directly from Firefox, with no need to run another client such as iTunes or Winamp. It supports playlists and pause and resume, which makes it just as robust as any other media player.
• 3. FoxClocks – FoxClocks is great if you do business or pleasure with people from around the globe. It can be difficult in keeping up with what time it is in the many timezones in which you have friends, but adding their location to FoxClocks will quickly tell you at a glance the time in many different locations.
• 4. Smart Bookmarks Bar – Many people recognize their bookmarks by the favicon alone, so there’s no need to have the text of the bookmark showing on your bookmark bar. In fact, if you have tons of bookmarks, you might not be able to fit them onto the bar. Smart Bookmarks Bar hides the text, making more bookmarks fit on your bookmark bar.
• 5. Google Redesigned – If you’re an avid user of Gmail and other Google services such as Reader and Calendar, you’ll love this addon. It gives your Google applications a uniform look which isn’t as white and simple as the rest of Google, making for a pleasing experience. Support for Google Docs is coming soon.