I stumbled on a new RSS news reader tonight, and it's fantastic. If you're using Windows check out FeedDemon.

It's a funny story how I stumbled upon it: My laptop was suddenly sluggish so I went to the Task Manager to check who was hogging memory. The worst offender was SharpReader (my former RSS newsreader) taking up a ludicrous 80 Megs. I killed it and griped how an RSS reader designed to experiment with .NET ends up consuming 80 Megs when minimized. The system got faster, but I was in the mood to kill processes. You know how it is, once you get the taste of blood. I noticed QCTRAY.EXE eating some memory and wondered what sort of animal it was. I searched the hard drive. Among other places found it in c:\windows\prefetch. That distracted me enough from the hunt to wonder what a prefetch dir is for. I googled it and found lots of info including a utility at http://www.majorgeeks.com to change the Windows prefetch behavior. I'm a Major Geek (as you can no doubt tell by the story thus far) so I went exploring what else was there. I stumbled on FeedDemon and since I was just griping about SharpReader (and because FeedDemon had a killer screenshot) I decided to give it a try. Now at the end of that odd path, I've got a nice new freeware newsreader that's stylish and feature-rich and lives in just 6 Megs.