CDBurnerXP Pro: It’s hot!

CDBurnerXP Pro is CD/DVD burning software with quite a lot to offer, considering it’s totally free!

It supports creation of multi-session disks, which is always useful if you have discs you want to keep coming back to add data or files to. It also creates Audio-CDs from mp3, wav, ogg and wma files. In addition to CD burning, you can also rip audio CDs, normalize WAV files, encode MP3 files, and erase disks. All this and it supports use of high write speeds too.

It’s able to write CD-R, CD-RW, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW discs, creating either data or video discs. It can also rip audio-CDs, burn and create ISO images, convert WAV files to MP3 and vice versa, verify discs after burning, create bootable discs, print covers for your creation, convert BIN/NRG to ISO, etc. It supports Burn on the Fly and Burn-Proof hardware.

If you’ve been looking for CD/DVD burning software but don’t have money to burn, you won’t be playing with fire if you check out this freeware software right here! Some screenshots of this tool ‘in work’ can be found here.

MouseAway: Get that mouse away!

MouseAway is a simple and very small program that you may find useful. It simply moves your mouse cursor out of the way if you’re typing, so that you don’t have to manually move it yourself each time.

It’s a pretty basic program that only does exactly as it says. The upside to it being so small and basic means it takes up very little memory. So if this is an minor annoyance for you, having to move the mouse cursor out of the way every time you type, then maybe it’s worth trying out!

(If its a major one, you really need to chill out a little!)

It’s freeware and you can download it from the homepage right here!

Cloudmark: Bye bye spam!

Cloudmark is an add-on for Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express to prevent spam and also prevent and report phishing attacks. It can also block email viruses before they can do any potential damage.

To give it it’s full name, Cloudmark Desktop (formerly known as Cloudmark Safetybar) installs directly inside Outlook and Outlook Express, filters through your mail as it downloads, and moves suspected junk into a folder for you to review it later. The filtering mechanism is based on the Cloudmark service, the largest community-based platform used to stop the plague of junk email and email fraud, and it doesn’t require you to create any filters or rules. You can however create a white list, to make sure certain contacts will never be filtered, and also re-classify selected messages.

This is how it works. When a user clicks the ‘Block Spam’ or ‘Block Phish’ buttons, Cloudmark compares this feedback with feedback from other users. If other users in the network also consider the message to be spam or fraud, then similar messages are automatically blocked in the future, for all users in the network.

Likewise, if a user drags a message out of the Spam folder or clicks the ‘Unblock button’, Cloudmark compares this feedback with that of other users. If they agree, the message is unblocked throughout the Cloudmark network.

Well worth checking out if you’ve had it with too much spam. You can check out more info and a free trial by going here.

Acereader: Learn to speed read!

Every once in a while i come across a unique program that promises to teach a useful skill,through the magic of some well thought out yet simple technique. This is one such program.

Speed reading is simply the ability to read very fast by learning to scan the words rather than thinking about them or pronouncing them in your head. I’m not sure how well this works if you have something important to read as scanning things doesn’t really focus your attention on them, but anyway!

Acereader uses two techniques, Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (R.S.V.P.) and Tachistoscopic Scroll Presentation (try saying or even reading that 3 times!!!). It’s pretty easy to use, you can open any text file inside it or copy and paste. It has different grades from beginner to advanced and you’ll be amazed at how naturally you read fast using the method of having the words appear and scroll in front of you. It’s won a bunch of awards as you can see here for being “best educational software”, so it’s not as crazy as it sounds!

Go check out the demo and a lot more detailed info here.

Speedfan: Keeping things cool!

Speedfan is a free program for showing the information from the sensor chips in your windows system tray. It can sense and show voltages and the temperatures from your hard drive, CPU and graphics card. It can also sense and show the speed of your fans. It’s more advanced settings allow you to control the fan speeds, reducing power consumption and noise, but you need to know what your’re doing so your computer doesnt overheat! You need to register (free) from inside the program to check if it supports your motherboard type, but apart from that it’s totally free. It also supports S.M.A.R.T. drives (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology).

This program is most useful for advanced users who overclock or build their own pc’s, as for the rest of us, we don’t need to worry about this kinda stuff! But for more info, you can go check it out here.

Visipics: Detect Duplicate Pictures

If you save a lot of images to your hard drive or do a lot of graphics editing then you might wanna check this out. Chances are you have at least some unneeded duplicate images taking up diskspace and cluttering your hard drive, possibly a lot more than you might realise.

This program scans your drive for duplicates. It uses four image comparison filters to find duplicates and it’ll detect two different resolution files of the same picture as a duplicate, or the same picture saved in different formats, or duplicates where only small cosmetic changes have taken place.

You can adjust the similarity levels and it starts to display the results while scanning,so you don’t have to wait to delete em’. Quick and simple way to tidy up your “picture collection” ; )

So if this sounds useful to you, you can read more and download it for free by going here.

MaxType Lite: Free Typing Tutor

Maxtype Lite is a totally free program for teaching yourself how to touch type.
In my personal experience, it’s just as easy to learn how to type the right way as it is to learn the wrong way (a.k.a the two finger, search and stab method!)

All it really takes is a little self discipline and pretty soon it becomes a habit. After that, you’ll just get better and faster.

This program allows you to test yourself and gives you your W.P.M (words per minute)CPS and CPM(yeah i didn’t know what they stood for either! Characters per minute and per second). As well as the typing speed for each hand, altogether 20 (!) statistics on your typing. Also you can load any text file at all that you wish to practice with, so you won’t get bored!

You can grab it for free here and use those other 8 fingers! (Well 6 fingers and 2 thumbs).