Although I'm not the type of person who forgets appointments, like my flatmate, I do find it difficult to remember 'important' dates of public celebrations, birthdays and anniversarys for example. Having a program that reminds us of all these significant days can be really vital!

QReminder is free and lets you set many options for the notes you write. You can view them in an editor to have a quick glance of all your reminders and you can create a textbox post-it on top of the screen, to write reminders on the fly. The clear and simple design is what you need when you have too many messy notes. The good thing is that after writing there is no need to press any save button. The program automatically saves changes and new entries.

The downside is that you can't set to be alerted on something before the day of the event. That forces you to write entries with a prior date so to be alerted in time. How absurd, considering you write reminders exactly to know in advance when you have to buy presents or to write cards. Moreover, the program bar stays always on top and if you right-click on it, no menu appears to close it. I had to use the Ctrl+alt+canc task manager tool!

QReminder lets you write notes and reminders in a simple way and it can be useful to have an idea of all you have to do, but the reminder function is greatly limited as you cannot be reminded of an event before the date in which it is due.