Get Free and Useful Stuff at Microsoft's Sort-of Advent Calendar

As a kid, I had friends who looked forward to their annual Advent calendar at Christmastime, since each day revealed a little piece of candy. You weren't supposed to skip ahead and open the whole month's worth at once; you needed to exercise patience and only advance one day -- and piece of candy -- at a time.

Microsoft has something sort of like that on their Windows website right now; for the month of December, each day reveals some new Microsoft freebie for you to try out.

So far, you can get access to a free Zune trial, get a 25GB SkyDrive account, download Windows 7 themes, and get some Office document templates. Obviously, all this is stuff you can get for free anytime; you don't need to partake of the holiday calendar. But the idea is clever and you'd probably never check out most of this stuff on your own if it weren't for the calendar. So kudos to Microsoft for helping folks discover some interesting free goodies this holiday season.

Dave Johnson was employed by Microsoft Corporation at the time this article was written.