You might remember the technology demonstration a few weeks ago that introduced a new way of intelligently resizing images by automatically defining important and lesser important parts of the image. The results looked way better than the traditional approach which did not care about importance but reduced every aspect with the same ratio.

It sometimes might be a good idea to get a list of all installed Windows Updates on your system for administration or security purposes. WinUpdatesList is a sweet small software from one of my favorite developers NirSoft. The software lists all installed Windows Updates on your system detailing all updated files on your system.

So, you have been on holiday in that beautiful country making lots of photos but after a year you realize that you can’t remember the names of most places and people that you took a picture of. Or, you have been at a family reunion or anniversary and after looking at the pictures taken you are not able to identify some of the people on the images.

Joost has released yet another version of their acclaimed Internet TV client that streams prerecorded TV shows to the users computer. The new version has one feature in particular that was well overdue. Joost can now be updated from within the client. Users do not have to download and install new versions from the Joost website anymore.

Preezo is a fast powerpoint maker on the web. Like most of the web 2.0 apps it uses Ajax to power its site. To use the application you need to register and log in. The first thing I notice is there is no lag at all using the different features. It is very responsive. Even with Google Docs there is some lag while adding stuff. I would happily use this on my browser.

Source Engine games are Half-life 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike Source and others. Those games, or better part of those games, can get internally defragmented and can’t be optimized using a software that defragments Windows hard drives. It is a good idea to defragment those games regularly to speed them up.

I never thought about processing the images that I used to take with my digital camera to make them look better because I thought those softwares would not be able to improve image quality by a lot. I nevertheless tested several softwares that are supposed to improve image quality and found one sticking out: Digital Camera Enhancer.

A new version of Driver Max has been released just recently.Driver Max is a software to backup all your Windows system drivers to be able to import them again at a later date. The user may select the drivers that he would like to backup in case it is only some of them that he would like to have a backup of.

Welcome to another post in my weekly Software Updates series. I write about software that has been updated the last week on every Wednesday with a focus on software that has already been written about here at Ghacks. I encourage everyone to post findings of their own in the comment section which will give me the opportunity to check those applications out and write an article about them.

Who needs Windows Vistas parental control if you have all the options in Windows XP as well if you download the Microsoft software Steady State which probably was not designed with parental control in mind but with user control in general on Windows XP systems. The major benefit of Steady State is that you can create user accounts, restrict those accounts plus define that all changes made with these accounts are undone after rebooting the system.

I have written about a way to manually repair file type associations in Windows by using two commands and the Windows command line. While this works in most cases and is certainly faster than using a software for the matter it has its limitations.

If you would like to take a look at up to date weather forecasts and weather reports for your location you might want to take a look at the software Weather Watcher. Weather Watcher displays all the relevant information that you would expect. You can choose to display the weather forecast for one of the more than 77000 cities that are stored in the database.

What would you say if there is an easy way to reduce mobile phone SMS and call costs ? I’m using a service called Cellity for some time now and was able to reduce my mobile phone bill tremendously. I do write the occasional SMS which usually costs between €0.10 to €0.20 per SMS. Cellity reduces this to the cost of the data transfer rate of the SMS which is just a few Kilobytes the most.

I have to regularly resize images to make them fit into my articles here at Ghacks which I used to create using a combination of a screenshot software and the image manipulation software GIMP. While this method worked flawlessly it simply took to long to start GIMP and resize the image.

What do you normally do if you want to share your screen with someone else who is not sitting in the same room ? You could use a software like Screen Stream to stream the contents of your monitor to the other person so that he would be able to see your actions on his monitor.

If you regularly work with textfiles you might find the software Txt Collector handy. Txt Collector is basically a text file merger which can be used to merge an unlimited number of text files into one. This can be pretty useful in many ways. You could for instance combine all readme documents of applications that you use into one text file for faster (no more where was that readme again) access or combine log files for better processing.

Download music from myspace and other sites such as Imeem, Pandora and iJigg, that is what most users would like to do. I recently wrote an article about Free Music Zilla which allowed everyone to download ten songs per day with ease from many social music portals. Ten songs however is not enough for most users which is why I would like to introduce another possibility that I wrote about earlier this year already.

One click downloads of Flickr Images have become a reality. Flickr Downloader is a software for Microsoft Windows including Windows Vista that lets you download Flickr Images with the click of the mouse button. Configuring Flickr Downloader is done in the matter of seconds.

I’m currently using several tools to clean my system, change settings to increase security and privacy, control startup items and tweak system settings to improve performance. Softwares like CCleaner, Xpy, Autoruns and several others do the job just fine with the only minor issue that I have to open them if I want to change specific settings. It would be far easier to use one software to do all of those tasks.

Page Defrag is a tiny 70 Kilobyte software that displays information about how fragmented your paging files and registry hives are. Defragmenters running in Windows have no way of defragmenting those paging files and registry hives which usually means that they get fragmented over time which can degrade system performance.

Microsoft released the Office 2003 Service Pack 3 just a few hours ago which contains the latest updates for Office 2003. The pack with a size of 117 Megabytes contains 22 security patches and updates as well as the previous two service packs for Office 2003. The main emphasize of this service pack seems to be security related because 14 of the 22 updates are security related.

From now on I will post interesting software updates once a week on Wednesday. The list usually will contain between five and twenty softwares that have been updated in the past seven days and will only contain softwares that I have been writing about before here at Ghacks.

I was looking for a way to start softwares at a given time of the week and found X-ecutor to be the perfect choice for that. X-ecutor actually gives you even more options that that. It allows you to start softwares at system start, shutdown and at a selected time or day.

Germans rejoice. The Internet TV client Zattoo can now be downloaded by German users to watch 21 TV stations using their computer. There are no information about payment at this moment and it is possible to download and run the client without reading anything about costs and payment. So, you can download and run it for free at the moment.

While the official release date for Open Office 2.3 is still September 17th it can already be downloaded using various official Open Office mirror sites. It seems that the releases get spread throughout the mirror sites first to be ready when the announcement is made on the official Open Office website.

A new beta version of Winamp 5.5 has just been released as usual in a full, pro and lite version. Winamp lite is basically a music player supporting many different audio formats while the other Winamp editions support video playback, cd ripping and an integrated browser to browse sites like Shoutcast.

Free Music Zilla is a great software – besides it silly name – that lets you download music from popular social music websites such as Mog, Imeem, Last.fm, Pandora, Myspace, iJigg, Radio.blog.club and many others that have not been tested yet. The simplicity makes it a great software, there is no need to be an expert anymore and look in the html source code to get some details that you need in order to download a song from myspace.

If you install many softwares you notice that some of them add entries to the Windows Explorer menu. The menu looks crowded after some time and it takes longer to find and click on the entries that you use often.

The software with the rather strange name MMM steps in and lets you rearrange all menu entries. This is done by offering a way to hide entries that you never ever use and a way to add entries that you rarely use to a submenu. My initial right-click menu had ten items listed of which I moved five to the hidden area making it look so much better afterwards.

A new version of iTunes Sync has been released today and can be downloaded from the developers website. The software syncs iTunes with mp3 players other than iPods. I’m still not sure why users would want to use iTunes but I suppose it has something to do with the ability to buy music and videos there.

Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 is currently priced at $619 at Amazon. Microsoft knows that only a few students have the money to buy a software suite for roughly $600 which is why they decided to run a promotion that sells Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 for $59 which is an absolute bargain.

Windows file operations are displayed in an basic window with no option to enhance them at all. This can be really tiresome if you copy hundreds of files only to realize that the operation was terminated somewhere in the middle. There is no possibility to resume transfers as well and no list showing all file operations including their status.

Enter Startup Delayer. What this software does is to list all applications that are started when Windows starts. You can then delay the startup of applications that are not system critical. I would for instance instantly start my security applications but delay the start of lesser important programs such as Office, iTunes and other applications of that kind.

Firefox, Word, Thunderbird and several other applications all have a build in spell checker that warns the user if a word that was written was not found in the dictionary file. There is however no general spell checker in Windows which means that users have to write their texts in softwares that have a spell checker and copy paste them into the software that has none. Or they could write their texts without spell checking.

Windows does not handle Wallpapers for Dual Monitors very well. If you ever tried to use different wallpapers on each monitor or stretch a wallpaper across both you know what I mean. We – again – have to rely on third party softwares to add functionality to Windows.

Beta 2 of Windows Live Messenger has been released today and can be downloaded from the official Microsoft Live Messenger website. The successor of MSN is available in more than 30 languages and can be installed with several additional products such as Writer, Mail, Photo Gallery, Toolbar and Family Safety.

If you are looking for a sophisticated file and directory monitoring software that looks rather complex on first sight but offers a lot of possibilities if one works for a short time with Log Monitor. Directories or files that you add are monitored in intervals – even realtime is possible – that you specify and commands are executed if checks that are performed in that intervals return a positive value.

Retroshare is a secure Instant Messenger with File Sharing options. It uses a 2048-bit RSA encryption keys in combination with trust style authentication to ensure maximum security. Connections are only established to friends who received your Retroshare certificate which is of course a little bit more complicated but it is well worth it.

A new version of the – in my opinion – best media player SMPlayer has been released and can be downloaded from the website of the developers at Sourceforge. SMPlayer is a Mplayer frontend that plays most video codecs out of the box which means that you do not have to install codecs to play the majority of video – and audio – formats. It does play for instance Apple Quicktime .mov videos without the need to install Quicktime at all.

Nero Burning Rom is a great burning suite capable of burning almost anything that you throw at it. The major problem that I had with Nero in the past was that I felt it was to huge and contained to many modules and features that I never used. Only a handful of users surely use included applications like the Nero Waveform Editor, Nero Sipps which offers Voip functionality or Nero Search which is a desktop search application.

Foobar2000 is a music player that is very lightweight and simple to use when you first install it.
Some people find this perfect as the interface is very clean and you don’t have all kinds of things in the user interface that you will not use anyway.
But others want the music player they use to look more modern, or they want a certain feature to be available.
Most people who first start using foobar2000 don’t know that it also provides these options, and that you can have a music player that is able to beat most others when it comes to looks and options.

Gili over at Connected Internet compiled a list of 15 applications that he calls the best free software for your computer. We all know that it can be quite difficulty to compile a list with the best because the best is nothing more than a personal judgment. I would agree that about half of the recommended softwares are must haves while the other half are nice to have but not really required.

Several softwares have been released today in new versions and I thought it would be nice to give you a quick overview over some of the more interesting applications that have been updated. All of them have a large user base and it is not unlikely that you are one of the users.

Windows Vista does have some nice features that are a great addition but not enough to justify a purchase. That is why clever software coders stepped in and implemented those features for Windows XP. XP has the major advantage that it is a fairly stable system that is not as resource hungry as Windows Vista is.

The first release candidate of the upcoming Open Office 2.3 has been released today and is available on the Open Office development website. The release notes show a huge list of changes, as far as I can tell there have been a lot of fixes and improvements in this version and it should be worth the download if you are an early adopter.

I have been working with the ftp client Filezilla for some time now and switched to release candidate three of the new and upcoming Filezilla 3 just recently. I have to use ftp clients on a daily basis to upload files to my websites and edit php and html files that are already on them. They are indeed useful for webmasters but on a decline when you take a look at all Internet users – my opinion but supported by the fact that most modern browsers support ftp downloads as well.

It happens from time to time that folders are not deleted when uninstalling software in Windows. It can also happen that other applications move data and leave folders intact in the process. This happend to me when I used a new mp3 tagging software that moved all my mp3 files to a new directory leaving the old folders empty.

Ebay Sniper tools give users the edge over those who do not use them. It takes just a fraction of a second to bid on an item using eBay Sniper softwares while it usually takes between 5-10 seconds if you bid on an item manually. These tools are usually configured to make a bid just a second or two before the auction ends making it impossible for manual bidders to place another bid before the auction ends.

If you want to show of your Windows Experience Rating in Windows Vista which displays a hardware rating of your computer but have a rather weak score you should consider tweaking the results to get a better score displayed at the end. The Experience Rating is derived from five subscores which are: Processor, Memory, Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Primary Hard Drive.

I have been using Norton products in the past and was always astonished how resource hungry those products were. They surely looked professional which was the main reason why I did install them but they slowed down the system and were really hard to remove from the system.

I have written several times about the Autopatcher project which was basically providing users with the opportunity to download one executable file that contained all official patches for their Microsoft operating system. This method had a lot of advantages over downloading patches from Microsoft servers: You would save bandwidth if you had to apply the patches to more than one operating system and did not have to rely on the automatic updates website to select the patches.