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.

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.

The Font Thing: A thing for fonts

If you work in web design or graphics either professionally or personally, you’re probably used to dealing with fonts a lot from time to time. Well now things just got a whole lot easier thanks to The Font Thing!

You can type in a word and it’ll show you that word in all your different fonts. Also shows you that word in other fonts that you don’t have installed yet, and gives you the option to install them. It allows you to fully browse installed and even uninstalled fonts and view sample text in any color you want,so you can easily choose the ideal one you’ve been searching for from your collection. Also you can install or uninstall any number of fonts at once.

As a totally free program, you can’t go wrong in taking this for a test drive if you work with fonts a lot!

Check out the homepage here for the full list of features and to download it.

Shutdown your computer the intelligent way!

Intelligent Shutdown is a free program for turning off your computer at a specified time, among other things. It can also launch or close programs specified by you at a certain time. It can lock your computer and display a picture at a specified time too, for example when you’re gone to work (or gone home from work).

So no need to remember to lock it or turn it off, as its all automated. All these things can be set to run at at a one off time or at a regular schedule, daily, once a week or month, etc. You can also set reminders for yourself. It also has a memory and CPU monitor so you can set things to happen only when memory or CPU is above or below a certain level, and it also shows idle time and uptime.

This program could be pretty useful for anyone who wants to automate things a little on their computer without having to remember to do it all each time.

It’s fully functioning shareware but you have to register if you wanna get rid of the welcome screen that pops up on start up. Get more info and the download here.

RecentX: Say ‘Goodbye’ to your start menu and ‘Hello’ to saved time!

Normally when you want to launch a program, it can be a real time consumer. You first gotta click on the start menu and look through the long list of programs you may have aquired. Then when you finally find it you gotta click on its submenu and scan your eyes through it again, it can be a real pain. Similar thing when you gotta navigate through folders in order to find a file!

Well with RecentX, you may never have to go through that on a daily basis ever again! It automatically tracks what programs and even files and folders you frequently use and keeps them in a list (which is also searchable) It can also track your favorites and history from both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

What i like is that it doesnt degrade the system performance since it doesn’t index your entire hard drive like certain programs. After all, what’s the point in indexing thousands of files you’ll never need to access? It just keeps track of the programs, files and folders that you most frequently use! You can also quickly perform frequent tasks such as copying and pasting. It even lets you access frequently used files on a networked computer! A lot better than clicking on network neighbourhood (”My Network Places”) and navigating your way to ‘em.

Check it out here for more info and a free trial.

Registry Booster saved my computer!

When using registry cleaners, you really gotta be careful. It can be a little dangerous as they have the potential to delete things they shouldn’t, potentially really messing things up. Registry Booster is another registry cleaning program, but its not ju-u-u-ust another registry cleaning program! It seems to be a very safe one that knows what its doing! Unlike the vast majority of others!

It claims to be “the safest and most trusted solution to clean and optimize your system, free it from registry errors and fragmented entries through Advanced Error Detection Technology”. But I still recommend you create a system restore point before using software like this though! Just in case (better be safe then sorry)! As added protection, the program can also fully undo any changes it makes.

I have good faith in this program as it really saved my computer a few weeks ago when nothing else I tried would help at all (including some other popular registry cleaners). I was having some issues with my computer crashing just after start up and I tried a couple of different registry cleaners and this was the only one that totally fixed it. Everything was back to normal after i ran it. So now me and registry booster are pretty much the best of friends! If you check the homepage,you’ll see it received a bunch of awards, so i guess there might be something to it and i didn’t just get lucky!

Although someone else’s system may not react as positively as mine did. So make sure you know what you’re doin’ and do so at your own risk!

You can get more info here.

Acronis True Image: Clone an original copy!

Acronis True Image is the ideal solution for making an entire exact copy of the contents of your hard disk. This means an exact clone including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data. This is extremely useful if you’ve just bought a new computer or drive and want to move everything from your old computer or drive to the new one.

It does exactly what it claims to, all it takes is a few hours, depending on size of course, size doesn’t matter with Acronis True Image either!

It’ll work no matter how big your hard disk is, but obviously time taken to clone is relative to size, although it worked pretty fast cloning a 20 GB drive the time i used it. It can even work in the background. The best thing is that even though you wont need to clone an entire drive for upgrade purposes often, it works good as a ‘normal’ backup program too.

Tip: Check the site for updates first before using to avoid any potential problems.

You can get a 15 day trial and more info by going here

Avast Home Edition: Free Antivirus with style

If you’re looking for a decent free antivirus program with a nice looking user interface, you could do a lot worse than to check out Avast antivirus. As well as the regular on-demand and on-access scanner, it protects most email clients and p2p programs against viruses, also has a web shield and network shield and it’s also skinnable!

This is my free standalone antivirus program of choice, as it’s easy to use, looks good, has regular updates, and has a very good reputation when it comes to catching and eliminating viruses. It regularly recieves 100% in the “virus bulletin” test, a very good sign it protects good , see https://www.virusbtn.com for more info. (Requires free sign up).

On a side note its worth checking out this site to get the latest ratings of how good various antivirus software is at doing their job, they throw a ton of “in the wild” viruses (virii?) at them and see how they deal with it. (This program has scored 100% every month in the last 2 years). After all what good are its looks and features if it ignores all the nasty stuff!

Speaking of which, its also got very good eye and ear candy, because as well as a nicely designed and skinnable interface, it announces with a voice when virus database has been updated or when it detects a virus! So if you like that kinda thing (and what computer geek doesn’t! oh come on, admit it!) it’s well worth checking out as it does its job great and with style!

More info and the free download here http://www.avast.com/.

Partition Magic: Now for my next trick..!

If you ever tried to partition your hard drive, you know that it can be a very complicated process, best done when you are installing or reinstalling your operating system. But with partition magic there’s no need to worry because you can do it on your existing operating system without a complicated procedure.

It can be very useful to have at least one other partition, which the system then treats as a second drive, that way if for any reason you have to reinstall Windows, you only loose what’s on the “first drive”. Everything on the “second drive” (let it be drive D) stays untouched even after you reformat the main drive (drive C). Your computer treats it as two separate disks (even though in reality its still one, don’t worry, its not the old sawing someone in half trick gone wrong!.. after all this is partition “magic”!) So having a second partition for back up purposes alone is well worth while.

The other reason is you may want to be able to “dual boot” that is, to have a second operating system on the “second drive” with lets say, Windows 98 for games that don’t work on XP, or with Linux installed maybe. Partition magic allows you to do these things, and just about anything partition related you could ever need, such as merging, resizing, etc safely and effectively!

More information can be found here.

Diskeeper: No maintenance defragmentation

Your hard drive needs to be defragmented regularly to keep your pc running in optimum condition, or else your computer begins to slow up after a while due to files and parts of files being stored in scattered places all over the hard drive. Therefore it’s essential you defragment it from time to time. A lot of people probably don’t even bother or don’t know they have to, and if they do, it can be a slow or almost impossible process, as it can keep getting interrupted by screensavers, virus scanners accessing the drive, etc.


Leading to you going crazy and maybe even giving up on defraging altogether! That’s where diskeeper comes in, with its simple to understand, “set it and forget it” settings, it’s fully automated very regular defragmentation and some advanced options much better than what the built in windows defragmentation is capable of, such as defragging the MFT (master file table) and most times you won’t even notice it when its doing its thing and can continue using your computer as if nothings happening, it can’t even be interrupted by those other things i mentioned! So once you “set it and forget it” (yeah, it’s really what the settings called, i didn’t just make that up!) nothing can go wrong and you can rest assured your hard drive and files are being kept in top condition! Although in my opinion it could be a tad cheaper.

Go here to grab the trial version http://www.diskeeper.com/downloads/menu.aspx

Your Uninstaller 2006: Cleaning things up properly!

Even after you uninstall them, many program leave traces behind, which can clutter your computer after a while, slowing it up and even leading to errors. “Your Uninstaller” is an uninstaller program that cleans all that clutter and leftovers off your computer.

You simply uninstall the unwanted program through “Your Uninstaller”, it calls up the unwanted program’s default uninstaller and uninstalls the regular way, and then after that, it works its magic, scanning for leftover files, folders and registry entries that would normally be left behind by many programs if you dont use a third party uninstaller such as this one. Ive been using this for over a year and i highly recommend it for people who like to keep their computer running smoothly and error free and anyone who wants a safe, clean way to try out new programs from sites such as this one your reading now!

More info and a free download here

PhotoRec:Recover deleted files

PhotoRec is free software for recovering deleted files from your computer. Yes, even if you’ve emptied your recycle bin! This works because the files still exist on your computer,it’s just that all links to them are gone. It can recover lost files including video,documents and archives. It works with hard disks and removable media such as digital camera memory cards. It can even recover data from scratched cds in some cases! It recognizes more than 80 file types, the whole list is available here.

I know from experience that there’s nothing more annoying than losing photos from a digital camera memory card or from your hard drive, because they’re pretty much irreplacable! So if something like that happens to you its well worth checking this out! It’s freeware, so you have nothin’ to lose (and hopefully your files to gain), by going here for more info and the download!