Giveaways, more giveaways and even more giveaways. Seems we can expect more free software giveaways this year. It’s Avira again with a promotion to test the AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium for six months with no obligations whatsoever. All you have to do is fill out a small form and they will send you a working serial number that is valid for the next six months.

The premium version of AntiVir sells for €19.95 (that’s Euro) usually and adds protection against spyware, adware. pop3 email protection and fast updates through premium servers in comparison to the free version. Both versions protect against viruses, dialers, phishing, worms, trojans and rootkits.

Make sure you fill out the form above and download the Personal Edition Premium from the Avira servers.

found at TechYard

continue reading "Test Avira AntiVir PersonalEdition Premium for 6 months"

I guess ourTunes is a very popular application in Universities and IT departments. It basically lets you download songs from other peoples iTunes if they are in the same network and share their itunes library. I’m not in a network and don’t use iTunes at all so I can’t test how effective this method is compared to using ftp, network browsing or local copies but I guess some will like it because it is easy to use.

There is a good tutorial that explains all the steps to get this Java program to work at the save ourtunes forum. You have to download the newest ourTunes version, start iTunes first then ourTunes afterwards.

A list of shared libraries should become visible. Selecting a library in ourTunes loads that library in the iTunes sidebar and you can start listening to songs. Listening will actually download the songs which you have selected and you can speed up the process by pausing the stream. It takes a while to get the feeling for this but downloads should not take that long at all.

continue reading "Download songs with ourTunes"

Richard from Windows Observer send me a download link for Xobni, a plugin for Microsoft Outlook that extends the functionality tremendously. I’m not using Microsoft Outlook anymore since I started using Thunderbird and quit my day job where they forced me to use it. I still think that this an interesting plugin that should be mentioned here at Ghacks.

Xobni adds lots of functions to the Outlook sidebar, all of them are contact related. You see statistics about each contact, when and how often he send you mails, phone numbers found in signatures and mail bodies, people connected to that person, details about those people, a conversation history and quick access to email attachments of that person.

It is currently in closed Beta but Richard has some invites that he is giving away so check out his blog and the article if you are interested in this Beta. It is also possible to leave your email address and the developers will contact you once you have been accepted into the Beta.

continue reading "Xobni for Microsoft Outlook"

I’m looking for a software that offers an easy way to write down notes on my desktop. I do not need a fancy tool with lots of options, just something basic that is available immediately. I used to write down notes in text documents but my desktop soon got cluttered with lots of text documents containing notes and it was obviously not the perfect method.

Knot is a small application that displays notes on the desktop. Those notes can stay on top if you want and you can start Knot with Windows so that your notes appear instantly after system start. It does have some fancy options like different colors and shadows for the notes as well as multi-monitor and network support.

Users can create new notes by pressing F4 when a note is active which is my biggest problem with that application. I prefer a system wide shortcut that would create a new note instantly. The method Knot is offering is still better than the previous one using text documents.

continue reading "Knot Desktop Notes"

If you want to find out which programs have a standing Internet connection you could use the software Procx. Procx is a process and module manager much like the well acclaimed Process Explorer from Sysinternals. One difference though is that Procx is displaying a green icon next to each process or module if it has a connection to the Internet.

This is a great way to identify any process, program and module that is connecting to the Internet. These programs and processes can then be analyzed to determine if the Internet connection is needed and trustworthy or not. This should just take a few seconds for most processes listed there, we all know that Firefox and Opera need a Internet connection for example.

It becomes difficulty if general processes have a Internet connection, svchost.exe for example. It’s not clear if this is needed or not and it requires some research to find out. A quick research with Process Explorer revealed that this svchost.exe process was related to the RPC - Remote Procedure Call - service that is needed for Internet Connections.

continue reading "What is connecting to the Internet"