(Previous coverage: 10 must-have plug-ins, Use Dropbox to sync profiles across multiple PCs)
Better still, stash a portable copy in Dropbox, synced to that same profile, and you've always got a chat client ready to go on any Windows system. Sync your Pidgin profile with Dropbox (a download also included in this pack), and you don't have to mess with settings anywhere or go hunting for chat logs. Set up Pidgin with your AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, MSN, or other chat accounts.
And with Google's support for offline Gears on the wane, Thunderbird's smart download-then-work-offline feature is great for air travel and other non-connected situations. Why keep a desktop client connected to a webmail service? Because IMAP clients tend to still let you access Gmail, even when it's "down". But Thunderbird is free, and its latest version is easy to set up as a kind of backup tool for Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, and most non-Exchange email services.
It opens those PDFs quickly, seems to support the majority of PDF features, including tables of contents, and offers smart navigation shortcuts for those who want to learn. SumatraPDF downloads PDFs and opens them, rather than try to offer a browser plug-in experience.
If you've got a bug complaint or code to add for Texter, you can contribute through GitHub. It can work with text from the clipboard, insert times and dates, and make semi-personalized email responses and signatures a snap. It saves time and mental cycles by filling in long passages and tricky code when you type in a few key characters, and it is, in fact, how most of the Lifehacker editors track and write the HTML and text snippets that get reused everywhere.