The biggest drawback of the clipboard is the fact it can only one hold item at a time, which is why there’s a veritable cottage industry of clipboard-replacement tools falling over themselves to allow you to store more than one item in the clipboard at once.

Many of these tools develop over time into powerful – yet complicated – beasties. M8 Free Multi Clipboard doesn’t bother with all of that: launch it from the Start > All Programs menu and it’ll appear in your Notification area. Each time you copy an item (M8 supports both text and images) into the clipboard you’ll hear a ping, and you can rest assured it’s been added to M8’s list. Up to 25 items can be stored at once – once you copy in item number 26, it’ll replace item number one on the list, and so on.

By default, pasting from M8 involves double-clicking its Notification area icon, then clicking the item you wish to paste (roll the mouse over it to view a preview of the image or entire text snippet that’s been stored). Too much hassle? Select Tools > Options and you can have a Clipboard button appear whenever you roll the mouse to one or more edges of the screen, or create your own hotkey (how about something obvious like [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [V]?) to bring up the clipboard. If you then choose View > Keyboard Pasting Characters, you can then paste any selected clip using a letter from A to Y.

It’s as simple as that: a simple, quick and easy clipboard replacement tool. The program also comes with a trial version of its more fully functional replacement called Spartan, but if you’re looking for a more powerful feature set, you’ll find plenty of free clipboard replacement tools on this very site.