When a piece of software promises to make my life and work simpler, I'm eager to try it out. Each week, I get word of three to six small utility programs. Many of them are shareware, meaning you can try them out for free before you buy them. Most, in my experience, turn out to be of very limited use. But a few are extraordinarily helpful because they either do something wonderful or they do something fairly trivial but necessary in a tidy and efficient way.

Quick! Grab that address

The first of these programs is also the most recent I've found, Address Grabber Deluxe, by eGrabber Inc. (www.egrabber.com) in Saratoga, California. Suggested by a colleague, this US$49.95 program is one of the handiest items I've seen in a long time. Basically, you just highlight a name or address block in any window, then click on the Grabber button. The program captures the copy, looks it over and figures out what the name, title, company, phone number or e-mail is and presents it to you for an OK. Then, with a single additional click, it sends the information to your address book. Why didn't someone think of this before?

Disk housekeeping

As I put more and more data and applications on my hard drive, the amount of free space gets smaller and smaller, and performance begins to suffer as files get increasingly fragmented. Regular disk defragmentation becomes more important than ever. Built-in defraggers come with all versions of Windows, but they don't always work very well, and they don't work at all if you don't have a sizable chunk of free space (like 30 percent of your hard drive). In the past, I've turned to Norton Speed Disk from Symantec Corp. as an alternative, but I've since found a much better product: Executive Software International Inc.'s Diskeeper 6.0. This Glendale, Calif.-based company has produced the fastest, most intelligent defrag program I've ever used, and it can operate with an astonishingly small amount of free space. Better yet, it works with Windows 2000. It comes in both server and workstation versions, starting at $49.95. You can download both versions from www.executive.com.

The Oh Sh