MiniMinder serves up a slick, daily countdown for all the upcoming events you wish to track. You can set yearly, quarterly, monthly or daily events, events such as the 4th Thursday of the month, events in increments such as every 28 days, and you can set alarms to popup at specific times throughout the day. Despite all these features and more, MiniMinder still manages to keep it quick and simple when it comes to entering your special dates.

With the optional Daily Quotes feature, you can choose from a number of collected quotes submitted by the fans of the MiniMinder. Alongside the existing Bible Verse, Facts & Funnies, Inspiration, Qur'an and Word-a-Day files, version 7.27 sees a submission from Randy of Arizona - 'Promises' - a huge collection of scripture and promise quotes from Samuel Clarke, D.D. (1675-1729).

Editor's review of MiniMinder Let me count the days

This piece of freeware helps you keep track of holidays, birthdays, paydays, and other events, and also can count forward from events such as sobriety dates or weddings. MiniMinder's Reminders window launches on system start-up so each day you can see how much time remains before your next event. Clicking the Edit button calls up the Events Editor, where you can create entries from scratch or choose holidays from a pull-down list.

In either case, you can specify how far ahead of the event the notification will appear. The Daily Quotes feature pops up lines from one of five included files, including ones containing Bible and Koran verses. MiniMinder now supports alarms, but setting them is awkward: you include the alarm time in the name of the event, inside angle brackets. On the other hand, ambitious users can edit the reminder file directly, as the format is easy to modify.

We wish MiniMinder could set reminders to count off hours or minutes before an event instead of only days. We also would prefer an integrated help file instead of the online assistance the program offers. Regardless, the small, focused, and free MiniMinder makes a compelling choice for almost anyone but power users.