Featured Freeware: Stickies

Laugh it up all you want, you Web 2.0-using note takers. This simple note maker for your PC is small, robust, and excellent at what it does.

Stickies combines the best and most important features that you could want in a notes program. The program's main feature, the sticky note, can be customized on nearly every level, from font to color to behavior. The program installs a yellow sticky pad in your QuickLaunch bar. Double-click on it to load a new sticky, or right-click on it to access saved stickies and configuration options.

Fonts, hot keys, formatting, opacity, default window size, alarms, and more can all be tailored to your needs. There are multiple default settings for different users, alarm options can be sound-based or visually based, or both, the sticky can be attached to a program window, and the text can be locked so you don't accidentally delete important information. SSK files can be imported to skin your sticky experience, and you can use your network connection to send notes to co-workers. There's PocketPC and Palm support, and you can also easily export stickies to a removable drive and load them on a different computer.

Despite all these features, Stickies weighs in at less than 1MB and uses only about 20MB of RAM while in use. It's not quite as light as air, but it is far more environmentally and aesthetically friendly than covering the edge of your monitor with paper notes.