Hotmail is offering free mail alerts via SMS.The best thing about this is that it works on any phone which supports SMS.You need not have a GPRS connection or a JAVA enabled phone.This is one important feature lacking in gmail.

LiveLinux USB Creator (formerly uSbuntu) is a free software for Windows that allows you to create a bootable Live USB key with a Linux on it.It supports many flavours and distros of Linux.The best thing about this software is that it offers an exclusive option of automatic virtualization using portable virtual box to directly run Linux in Windows without any configuration nor installation.