HiJackThis is a sophisticated security tool that checks a computer running Windows 2000 or higher for possible signs of hijacked applications. It does check lots of different elements like startup items, Browser Helper Objects, running processes and the like and presents a log of the results at the end. This log is hard to read for beginners because it contains “good” and possible “bad” elements in it and it requires knowledge of those elements to make a distinction between elements that you have to keep and those that are indeed malicious in nature.

Adobe has released the version 8.1.2 of Adobe Reader which is a critical update that patches a security vulnerability. Adobe recommends that users patch their version of Adobe Reader to the newest as soon as possible to close the security hole. The strange thing about this update is that only 26 of the 27 fixes of this update are listed in the release notes and that the security vulnerability that has been fixed is not listed on that page.

I’ve always loved Greasemonkey scripts and in fact, they are easy to install and manage, but now you can also compile one into a single Firefox addon (xpi file) without any programming knowledge. Off the top of my head I can think of about 50 reasons this is great. I like it a lot, because [...]

Today’s software updates are delivered later than usual but don’t worry, I have not forgotten them. I’m currently working on a new blog with Everton from ConnectedInternet which will go live soon. I’m taking a look at the last seven days and mention all applications that have been updated in this time. Only applications that have been mentioned on my blog before are mentioned in this article, every other interesting program received its own article so that you are not missing out any great apps.

I always knew that Lifehacker has some software available like Better Gmail, Better Google Calendar, but they actually have a whole line I didn’t even know about until a recent post. They have some pretty useful stuff, all of them are “micro programs” designed for one specific use. They have a great text replacement utility [...]

I have never seen that many shutdown options in my life. That was my first thought when I saw a screenshot of Dshutdown, a software created by the Italian programmer Dimio. It offers normal shutdown options like shutting down at a specific time or when a program is closed. These are normal shutdown options that many programs offer but here are some that you might have never heard of before.

Easy to use backup and sync utilities are in high demand and I would like to introduce one that’s definitely easy to use. Toucan is a portable application which means it can be run from any location on a system. Two of its main functions are the backup and sync function. Backups are done with just a few clicks. Select the source folder(s) and destination file name, the format for the file name (zip or 7z), the backup type (update, incremental, complete and restore), add a password if you like, exclude files or folders and click on Go.

I’m a big fan of online radio. There are lots of wonderful radio stations out there to cater to a variety of tastes and you can listen to your favorite music 24/7. Another massive bonus is that it’s all free. With the advent of online radio, a whole host of recording software has emerged too. [...]

When you right-click a CD, DVD or removable drive and select Properties from the menu you find a Autoplay tab there that displays applications for certain media that are put into the drive. An action like playing or opening can be selected or that the user will be prompted every time a media of that type is inserted.

Just when I thought I tried them all I find another promising image viewer called Imagine deeply hidden on the Internet. Imagine is a fast image viewer, it opens and displays images faster than any image viewer that I have tested so far, at least that’s my personal opinion on the matter.

It came as a bit of a surprise to me that Microsoft is working on a list creation program, much like the web 2.0 list apps we can see around the web. I took a quick look, but since it’s only a tech preview, it’s quite basic, and only has bare-bone features. This shouldn’t be [...]

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 [...]

I was thinking on rounding up some of the net’s best freeware apps and putting them into one easily installable pack. As these things go, it seems like some clever people have beaten me to it. While I am a bit sad, I am actually really happy to have found this, since they did a [...]

I think we can all agree on the fact that multi-monitor support in Windows is not what it could be and that Microsoft does not seem to put lots of efforts into changing this status any time soon. We have to rely on third party tools to add the functions and features that we demand from a multi-monitor environment and Multi-monitor taskbar is one of those applications.

I had planned to review this website earlier but then forgot about it till Jajay commented about it in one of Martin’s earlier articles. Most of us will have needed to convert files between different formats at one time or the other. The most common reason would be that a particular file format is not [...]

Notepad is fast and that is probably the only good thing that I can say about the software that ships with Windows. It has a file size limitation and a lot of other limitations as well. Many users prefer to use so called Notepad replacements that do not have the limitations and I would like to introduce one that is called Akelpad.

Mind maps are said to be the most effective way to plan things because they follow your thinking better than any other method can. I have serious doubts about the global truth of that sentence, but true enough, at times it can prove pretty useful. The great thing about a mind map is that it [...]

This is this years last Software Updates article and I will continue listing all updated applications that have been written about here at Ghacks of the last seven days on every Wednesday. I still hope that you find this list useful and helpful in determining which software that you use has been updated.

I think we can all agree on the fact that the Adobe Reader is bloated if you only use it for opening PDF documents. It comes with so many plugins that the loading time is sometimes longer than the reading time of the document that you opened. I have been using a software called Adobe Reader Speedup to speed up loading times by disabling plugins that I did not need. This had the result that the Adobe Reader would open almost instantly just like his alternative Foxit PDF Reader.

Many download websites and developers display a so called MD5 hash code of the application that you want to download on their website which can be used to verify the integrity and authenticity of it. This can be done by comparing the MD5 hash code of the downloaded file with the one on the homepage where you did download it from.

After such word processing giants as Google Docs and Zoho Writer, is there room for another one? The answer has to be a definite yes, I think there is always room for anything new, but let’s see if Adobe’s fancy-pants buzzword delivers the goods. First of all, yes, it does look awesome. It uses the [...]

ImageSorter provides a way to automatically sort pictures of a directory by using several parameters such as color, name or size. Results will be displayed in a picture matrix and the user can zoom in and out fluently, use the mouse to navigate through the displayed thumbnails and click on images to load them in their original size.

Most people will be using Gimp, Photoshop, or Paint for their image editing tools. However, since I am not proficient in either one, I often look to simpler alternatives for my needs. My problem came about when I attempted to convert an Internet article to a Pdf file. I successfully captured two separate pages as [...]

The problem with the net is that there isn’t a sure-fire way to ensure that you will actually have access to it anywhere. If you have Wi-fi you are quite well of, but of course only near cities and towns. Even then, if you find hotspots you’re fine, but otherwise no internet for you.

My Pictures 3D is a 3D screensaver that offers virtual tours through different environments such as castles, exhibitions and a space station showing pictures that you have selected on the walls. This means that you can create a very unique screensaver by adding pictures of the last holiday or family meeting for instance which are then shown while walking through the halls.

If you love to read but don’t like taking millions of things with you you will be quite delighted to know that you can take your books with you on your iPod. I originally stumbled on to this story on Lifehacker and found it worth your time because it eliminates the need to carry one [...]

Thumbs.db files are database files that are created automatically by Windows whenever you have viewed a folder in thumbnail view and changed that to another view later on. More or less a thumbnail cache. Unfortunately though that file could pose a privacy risk. Even if you did delete images in that folder the thumbs.db file will still contain the thumbnails of the deleted images.

Windows XP does not save the location of the icons on your desktop which means that a resolution change will change the location of the icons on your desktop as well, the bad thing about this is that Windows offers no way to restore desktop icons. That means that icon positions change whenever you install new drivers for your video card.

Keyboards have limited space and offer only a certain number of accents that can be typed normally. Those are normally the accents that are used in the country where that keyboard has been sold, all other accents however are not that easily accessible and users have to use keyboard shortcuts to write down those letters.

The Open and Save file dialog in Windows is not really optimized and Microsoft somehow misses to improve that dialog with every release of a new Windows operating system. Saving different file types in different folders always means to click through your folder structure whenever the file type changes which puts a strain on the right (or left) trigger finger.

Wridea is a service I got to know about two months ago and in fact, I still use it today sometimes. Every now and again I find myself in a situation where I need a lot of little bits of info to store for a small amount of time. Wridea is a perfect companion for [...]

Whenever you start Skype, which loads the process Skype.exe, another process named skypePM.exe is loaded. SkypePM.exe is the Plugin Manager of Skype that is always loaded during the start of Skype even if you are not using a single plugin in Skype. This is not really efficient considering that this process uses 15+ Megabytes of RAM for doing nothing at all.

How do I open .docx files was an article that I wrote some time ago. It explained how users that did not use Microsoft Office 2007 were able to open .docx documents that they downloaded or received from users who were using Office 2007. Some time has passed since writing the initial article and I thought it would be nice to take a look at more methods and programs that let users open. docx documents.

While surfing the net I tend to download a lot of stuff. Not because I enjoy cluttering my hard drive with thing’s I’ll never look at again, but for example to make a blog post I need a picture from here, a link from there, all this mounts up to a lot of stuff. When [...]

When it comes to media players, there’s no doubt in my mind that Mplayer is head and shoulders above the rest. In fact, I think it’s even better than VLC. The only drawback is that Mplayer is primarily a Linux player, which means it depends on command line instructions. Luckily, there are a whole lot [...]

Apple iTunes has no way of detecting new music additions to your music folders which means that you have to add them from within iTunes manually to be able to play them in the software or sync them with your iPod music player.

Microsoft is providing download versions of the Windows Server 2008 release candidate free of charge right from their website to anyone interested in downloading them. A product key can be requested as well which will make the product valid until April 7, 2008.

You might have cursed the developers of Notepad for instance if you ever tried to open a file in Notepad with a different extension than .txt. Notepad can only filter file lists for txt files or display all files. If you were looking for a php or htm file for instance you had to display all files in that folder and search for the file that you wanted to open.

Mouser of Donation Coder was so nice to email me informing me about the results of a little coding challenge that they had in November. The Getting Organized 2007 Programming Challenge was to write a computer program (or web service) which helps people be more productive with their time that had not been published prior to November 2007.

I have to say, that while I love web 2.0 applications and shiny new things, I rarely actually adopt them for the long term. I usually find that it needs this one small thing I would love, so I just scratch the whole idea. This is not so with Remember The Milk, hands down my [...]

This is going to blow you away. What do you normally do when you save a file or want to open a file in a specific folder on your hard drive ? You click your way through the folder structure of your operating system until you finally reach the desired folder. This is a thing of the past because we can use bookmarked folders to reach those folders instantly.

Have you ever wondered why the mouse cursor stops when you reach one of the monitor borders ? It feels like it is bumping right into a wall. CursorUs is a tiny 22K software that extends the mouse cursors functionality and lets the user move beyond this invisible wall. The mouse cursor will appear at the opposite end of the screen whenever it reaches the border of the monitor.

A long time reader of Ghacks mailed me yesterday evening asking me if I knew a way to download the multimedia streams from the BBC website. He used dialup to connect on the Internet and it was painfully to watch the streams online and far better and smoother to download them and watch them offline.

I have explained the concept of par files before. In short, they can be used to repair any rar file that is part of the archive as long as the blocks of the par file are at least of the same size than the corrupt rar parts. A software like Quickpar can be used to split big files into smaller ones and create several par files to be able to recover the whole archive if part of it gets corrupted.

When I first read about Backup to Email I thought that surely no one wanted to backup files and folders to email. I never thought that email would make a good backup alternative for backing up large files and folders considering file size limitations and upload speeds of the own Internet connection.

I sometimes want to cut mp3 audio files into separate parts, mainly because the single file is that large that it does not fit on my mp3 player. This is also useful to create mp3 ringtones who only use the first 30 seconds of a song anyway. It does work the other way round as well.

You might be puzzled at first if you encounter an audio file with the ape extension for the first time. Trying to play it in Winamp, Windows Media Player and XMPlay will not be successful, in fact, the song will not be loaded at all. The Ape file format is a lossless compression format of the compressor Monkey’s Audio.

If you are looking for a highly configurable system monitor you should take a closer look at Glint. The software displays system activity of many – and I really mean many – different values. The default program window alone displays 26 different values like CPU Processor Time, Disk Read and Write Bytes and Memory Bytes available.

You might have never entered a Windows or Office product key before in your life. If you did buy a preinstalled version of Windows for example it could already be activated by the default. The product key can be usually found on the Recovery CD that comes with the purchase of the hardware, on the hardware itself or on a booklet.

It is Wednesday again which means it is time for the weekly software updates article. I try to list all applications that have been updated in the last seven days that have been mentioned at Ghacks previously. This is usually a list of 10-20 applications with links to the homepage of the developer so that everyone may download the new version immediately.