We have covered the video DVD creation software DVD twice here at Ghacks. First a review of the Windows version (see Video To DVD) in 2008, and then of the Linux version (see Create DVDs in Linux with DeVeDe, mkisofs, and K3B in 2009). The Open Source software has been in continuous development, especially the [...]

Have you ever had troubles finding the perfect profile picture for your Facebook profile or another site on the Internet? Or maybe you have taken the photo of a person and need to modify parts of the photo because they do not appear right, or do not reflect the person in front of the camera. [...]

Audials Moviebox 9 offers a versatile set of video and movie related applications that allow users to download videos from the Internet, rip DVDs, convert media, synchronize their collection and play videos. When you first start the application you will notice that the interface can be divided into three modules. A maximum of two sections [...]

TeamViewer is without doubt one of the most popular remote access and support applications. Part of the software’s success stems from the fact that it is free for personal use and portable if needed. Nothing beats installing TeamViewer on family or friend computer systems to save time fixing computer problems. TeamViewer 7 is now available [...]

The Skype software lacks options that allow users to better manage the program’s chat history and call logs. As far as chats go, there is no option to delete specific messages from within Skype. While there is an option to clear the Skype chat history manually, it requires at least a basic understanding of using [...]

Many spyware programs on today’s market, regardless of being free or commercial, concentrate on the removal of spyware and other forms of malware on the PC system. Only a few try to block spyware before it makes its way on to the computer. Spyware Blaster focuses on preventing attacks from happening in the first place. [...]

When it comes to file transfer software, I have been using WinSCP for the past years. But there have been other applications that I looked at and evaluated. Cyberduck is one of them. Back in March I published a guide on how to upload multiple documents to Google Docs from the desktop and Cyberduck was [...]

Office documents may contain images and other media besides text. I sometimes get article suggestions by email in Microsoft Word format. These articles often contain one or multiple images that I need to extract, since it is not possible to copy and paste them into the article on the Internet as it is with text [...]

Amazon S3, which stands for Amazon Simple Storage Service, is an online storage service by Amazon that gives web developers access to a scalable and fast infrastructure. Webmasters and services may come into contact with Amazon S3 in various ways, for instance when setting up a content delivery network (cdn) or during new product launches [...]

I have not looked at Pandora Radio ever since the service closed down its international access. Before that, I published two guides on saving Pandora music. That was back in 2006; Five years later and the situation has not changed a lot. Pandora is still only available for US Internet users and those who use [...]

In the world of media players, it often seems the sun doesn’t shine on anything new. Between Windows Media Player, Winamp, RealPlayer, VLC, and iTunes, it seems as though everybody has maximum market penetration and saturation. Enter the not-so-quiet contender, JetAudio. You can get JetAudio at this link: http://www.jetaudio.com/download/ Installation is easy. Click through the [...]

File verification software can be used to verify the integrity of files. This is for instance helpful when verifying the integrity of data backups, or files on a web server to make sure that attackers did not modify them. All programs that offer the functionality work alike. They process a list of files, create checksums [...]

USB is currently the most popular way of connecting external devices to the computer. The majority of external storage devices, printers, scanners, audio devices with built in sound chips and other peripherals are connected via USB to the PC. You sometimes may want to prevent that other people connect USB devices to your PC, for [...]

Piriform, company behind popular programs such as CCleaner, Defraggler and Speccy, is currently producing and releasing updates for all their applications to improve SSD detection among other things. Speccy, which has been updated yesterday, is the latest to receive that treatment. And since the last review dates two years back, I thought it is as [...]

Have you ever worked with a folder full of photos? I’m talking hundreds or even thousands of photos taken with different camera models and in different years and locations. It is pretty difficulty to find specific photos or events in a folder filled with such an amount of photos. The free software Photo Event Organizer [...]

There are several interesting application docks available and several of them have been mentioned on this site. Desktop customization is easy with Windows 7 and many users enjoy personalizing as much as they possibly can. You can fill up your Toolbar with icons and have the ordinary look or you could use other application dock [...]

Microsoft Office 2010 is available in different editions just like the Windows operating system. There is Microsoft Office Home and Student 2010 or Office Professional 2010 for instance. And there is at least one version that is only available to OEMs: Microsoft Office Starter 2010. This version is usually only available for users who purchase [...]

There is not really a lot that users can do to improve the performance of a hard drive on a computer system. This however is changing currently with the introduction of the first Advanced Format hard drives that some PC manufacturers have started to add to their systems. The main difference is that AF drives [...]

The Windows operating system saves thumbnails in a file called thumbs.db whenever you change the folder view mode to thumbnail view. This basically caches the image thumbnails so that they are displayed faster the next time you open that folder with that view mode. I personally have disabled the thumbnail creation on my system as [...]

With so many new and exciting apps coming out for mobile operating systems like Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, it only is natural that some users want those apps to work on their desktop PCs as well. Maybe they want to utilize the bigger screen of their computer system, show off an app or device, [...]

I usually give away old computer systems to friends or family when I build a new one. And since I’m building a new PC every one or two years, there seems to be always someone who could make good use of my old computer system. I prepare the old systems before I give them away. [...]

Text- to-speech applications are plentiful. They are showing up on web browsers like Google’s Chrome Speak and Firefox’s text-to-speech plugin. Then there is speech-to-text software such as Dragon and many others including the built-in feature in Windows 7. If you are searching for text-to-speech software that is free and does more than just give you [...]

The display is without doubt one of the most important parts of a computer system. Display related issues, like blurry text, a bad refresh rate or colors that do not really match can impact a user’s work experience on a computer. Imagine having to work ten hours a day on a computer with blurry or [...]

It can sometimes be very handy to have an USB drive filled with self-booting troubleshooting tools in reach. Creation used to be difficulty, especially if you wanted to add more than one tool to a drive. This changes with the release of the multiboot USB creator YUMI. The free portable software for Windows offers the [...]

People with disability may have difficulties working on a computer. Sometimes it may not be possible to use a mouse or the computer keyboard. When that’s the case, special software for people with disability comes to the rescue. These programs often emulate mouse and keyboard, for instance with head movement or eye pointer software. A [...]

When you download music from the Internet, you may sometimes download file formats that your default audio player, mobile phone or mp3 player does not support. Maybe it is a Flac, Ogg or Ape file, audio files that are not that commonly supported. If you are lucky the site that you have downloaded the music [...]

I know users who change wallpapers and themes regularly, and others who have never changed the theme and still use the standard default theme that ships with Windows. Statistics to compare Windows 7 theme usage with theme usage on previous Windows operating systems would be nice to have. I would expect that there are more [...]

There are many ways that Windows users can manage hard disk space. You can manage your hard drives with the Windows Disk Management utility, but it is somewhat difficult to navigate. Programs like WinDirStat are great for getting a good visual scheme. Tools with visual graphing for hard disk management are ideal. Everybody has their [...]

Microsoft’s free security software, Microsoft Security Essentials, has become a very popular program in the world of Windows. There is no single reason for that, factors that weight in heavily are that it is free, relatively lightweight and unobtrusive, and that it is developed by Microsoft directly. Microsoft yesterday has opened registrations for the next [...]

It is good that Microsoft offers a 60 day trial of Office 2010, but once it expires and you try to open Word or Excel Files, you will get an error message stating that it cannot be opened because the file is not a valid Win32 application. Sure, you can rearm the Office 2010 trial [...]

When it comes to downloading movies and videos from the Internet, users have lots of options. They can install browser add-ons like Download Helper for Firefox, the myriad tool reviewed in our guide to download YouTube videos or third party programs like Freemake Video Downloader. I reviewed the program for the first time back in [...]

A corrupt game save for a single player title can set you back lots of hours of game play time. Even worse, you may be demotivated to replay the stages of the game that you have already played and decide to stop playing the game completely. Some games, especially online games, save games on servers [...]

You may know that I’m using the MSI Afterburner software to record game videos on my PC. The software has been in beta for quite some time. One issue I experienced is that the beta versions have fixed expiration dates, which means that they expire at a given point in time. While this is usually [...]

Steam is a popular online game distribution platform by Valve Software, the creators of Half-Life. It was definitely one of the first movers in the niche and moved from a rough start to a popular platform used by millions of gamers. Steam for the most part works just fine, the platform does have a few [...]

I have covered TED, which stands for Technology, Entertainment and Design, before here on Ghacks. TED is about sharing ideas on stage with an audience and on the Internet. When you look at the list of speakers, you will notice that it ranges from everyday people fighting for a cause to book authors and celebrities [...]

When you are holding presentations on a big screen with a computer mouse you know that it may be quite difficulty to follow the mouse cursor around. That’s fine if you have presentation software that gives you the tools at hand to highlight areas or write on the screen. If you are stuck with the [...]

Two of the three hard drives in my main computer are Solid State Drives (SSD) that do not need defragmenting. In fact, running defragmenting software on them could have an opposite effect on the drive’s speed and health. One of my personal criteria therefor is that defragmentation software needs to be able to block those [...]

I have reviewed quite a few programs to download photos from Flickr in the past. From Flickr Download and Flickr Downloadr to Flickr Mass Downloader and the more recent Flickr Mass Downloader. All tools have in common that they can be used to download public photos that are hosted on Flickr. They differ in handling [...]

Microsoft has announced changes to the Windows Update mechanism of the upcoming operating system Windows 8. When you look at the current state of Windows Update, you will find it to be relatively disruptive to the user experience. This stems from the fact that the majority of updates require a system start before their installation [...]

While I’m personally not a huge fan of anything animated on my desktop, I know quite a few people who love some level of activity on their desktop. When it comes to Christmas some users like to decorate their computer desktop much like they decorate the rest of their house and property. Th next best [...]

Internet users have lots of options when it comes to listening to music on the Internet. They can tune into Internet radio stations, visit free music repositories like Jamendo, find new and rare songs on YouTube and other music portals or visit music information portals like Last.fm to listen to music. Music downloading is often [...]

One of the issues that users from all over the world may have experienced with the recently released Windows 8 Developer Preview is that the interface language of the operating system was only available in English. Big problem for users who want to try the release but do not speak English at all, or those [...]

Sometimes you may want to benchmark drives or servers connected to your computer system, for instance to compare them to other devices or to test optimizations that you plan to make. Parkdale is a free benchmarking software for the Windows operating system that can be used to benchmark all drives that are currently connected to [...]

If you are like me you have some documents and files stored on the desktop for fast access. Some users may prefer to pin those files to the taskbar or start menu instead, or use a program and file launcher. When it comes to icons on the desktop you have only a few options to [...]

One of the things that still has not been fixed or resolved in the Windows operating system is that desktop icons change their position automatically when the screen resolution changes. Most Windows users will probably never come into a situation where their desktop icon positions change, considering that most won’t change the screen resolution unless [...]

With a focus on touchscreen devices – which are predominantly mobile in nature – comes the requirement to reduce a computer system’s power consumption to increase its battery life. According to a new blog post over at the Building Windows 8 site, Microsoft has made important changes to their upcoming operating system’s power consumption. The [...]

When you reinstall the Windows operating system you may need to reinstall other software like Microsoft Office as well. It may then be necessary to activate the software again which may not be a big problem in most cases, but might be one if the computer Office was reinstalled on has no permanent Internet connection. [...]

Today Microsoft has released security updates exclusively for Microsoft Windows operating systems. Of the four bulletins released today, one has received the maximum severity rating of critical while the other three have received one of important. Maximum severity means that at least one Microsoft operating system has received the critical vulnerability rating. In this case, [...]

My program of choice to download lots of images from image hosts like Imagebam is Bulk Image Downloader, an excellent program to download images from hundreds of image hosting sites. Windows users looking for a free alternative could take a closer look at Mourao Image Grabber which offers the same basic functionality. The program can [...]

For a while now I received an error message whenever I tried to run the file deletion software Eraser. Eraser, which I reviewed in 2005 for the first time here on Ghacks (see Securely Delete Files), can delete files so that they are not recoverable anymore on the system. When you delete files regularly in [...]