Windows: Ever download a movie from—oh, I don't know—some far-reaching nether-region of the internet, and when your download finishes realize the video is split into multiple parts? AVI Joiner quickly combines those split videos in just a few clicks.

Using it could not be easier. Just run the app (AVI Joiner.exe), drag and drop the files you want to join into the Files to be joined pane, make sure they're in the correct order, and click the Run AVI Joiner button. The app will ask you where you want to save the joined video (name it and make sure to add the .avi extension to the end), then sit back as it fires up a command line and starts the joining process. I joined a couple of 700MB files into a 1.4GB video in roughly a minute.

This awesome little app was built courtesy of the Lifehacker Coders group over at the Productive Geek forums. You can currently grab the download hosted over at drop.io here. We reached the download cap—get the ZIP here instead. (For a portable version, grab the AVI_Joiner.zip file; if you want an installer, grab the setup.exe and install.nsi files. Make sure you grab the newest versions, and if we happen to hit a bandwidth cap at drop.io, be sure to let me know.)

AVI Joiner is a free, open-source application for Windows only.

Last week we asked you to share your favorite software update tools, then we rounded up the five favorites and you voted for the utility you liked best. Thousands of votes later, here are the results:

The default package management and software update tools for many Linux distributions, APT/Synaptic won the title of most popular software update tool with 37% of the vote. Windows users chose FileHippo Update Checker as the most popular software update tool for Windows with 31%. Finally, Mac users may want to check out the close-to-third place AppFresh.

For more details on each app, check out the full Hive Five Best Software Update Tools.

Windows only: Portable application NirLauncher bundles 100+ of the best NirSoft utilities into a single launcher window, and even allows you to add your own utilities to make a killer flash drive toolkit.

Once you've downloaded the zip file, you can extract the contents into a new folder on your desktop or flash drive, and then launch the NirLauncher.exe application from that folder, which will give you quick access to the 100+ NirSoft utilities included in the package.

It's important to note that because of the system-tweaking, hacking nature of the NirSoft utilities, they sometimes come through as a false positive on your anti-malware utility—but that doesn't mean that they are infected with a virus. Depending on the type of system protection that you have installed, you might have to remove the files from the quarantine folder in order to use all of the utilities.

Tweaking the Launcher

You can edit the included NirSoft.nlp file in a text editor to add or remove the utilities that you prefer—or you can even create a new .NLP file with your own customized settings. Just make sure to use relative paths to the executable files to make sure that they will be portable when you put it onto your flash drive.

The NirSoft blog even provides a launcher file for the suite of awesome, portable, system-tweaking tools from SysInternals—simply download the launcher file and extract all of the SysInternals applications into a folder, and then use the Launcher -> Add Software Package menu to add the entire group into the application. Once you've got them there, you can switch between the NirSoft and SysInternals groups with the F3 key, or through the Launcher menu.

NirLauncher is a free download for Windows only. What applications would you include in your own portable flash drive toolkit? Tell us in the comments. Thanks, Scott!

Windows only: When you upgrade your video card—or even just the drivers—the old version leaves settings and registry entries cluttering up your system—but you can clean them up.

Driver Sweeper works by removing all the extra stuff that the driver uninstaller leaves behind—so you'll need to first uninstall the video card, motherboard, or sound card drivers, and then run the utility to remove all the extra traces. Once you've done so (and rebooted), you can proceed with installing the newer drivers. It's one of those really useful utilities that isn't necessary for most people—in fact, not recommended for the less tech-savvy—but a critical tool that I've used whenever I do an upgrade.

Driver Sweeper is a free download for Windows only. If you have a device that isn't supported, or want to remove drivers the built-in Windows way, I've previously written an article on how to boost performance by removing old drivers after upgrading to new hardware.