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.
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.
XeroBank Browser, or xB Browser which was previously called Torpark, is a portable browser based on Firefox with security and privacy add-ons that can be run out of the box. The burden of installing all those extensions and softwares and making sure that they work correctly is taken of the users hand which should appeal to many users who do not have the time or knowledge to take care of that by themselves.
More than 6500 internal emails from anti-piracy company Mediadefender have been leaked on the Internet as one big Mailbox file that can be imported into email clients. Mails give in depth information about tactics that have been used to spread fake releases, fake edonkey servers and their opinion about several bittorrent clients.
Userbars can be used to display custom messages in signatures that are displayed in forums and other places. The difficulty is creating those userbars which normally requires knowledge of image manipulation applications such as Adobe Photoshop or Gimp. There are several softwares that take that burden from the user and make it quite easy to create userbars with a few simple clicks of the mouse.
Experts are able to gather sensitive data from your computer if they gain physical access to it. This can be achieved by various means like Live CDs, accessing unprotected accounts or administrators that take a look in your profile folders. They can search the files on your hard drives, read documents, look at your Internet cache, the mailboxes which contain all of your mails - even the deleted ones - and histories of downloaded files.
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.
If you do not know yet there is a Skype worm spreading around that is affecting Skype Windows clients. The virus automatically sends a chat message to other Skype users containing a link to an image on a website where he is prompted to download a file with the .scr extension using a simple redirection
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.
Paying $0.99 for a single Ringtone is way to much especially if you already bought the song from iTunes or have it available on CD or as mp3.The funny thing is that Apple introduced a new format for ringtones with the extension .m4r which is simply a renamed .aac file which are the files that you download when you make a purchase at iTunes.
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.
The IT Crowd is one of the best British comedy series ever produced. It's up to the point, uses nerdy characters that remind me of many of my work colleagues.The IT Crowd is about three guys - actually two guys and their female boss - from the IT appartement and their daily life in the office.
If there is one thing for sure it is that spammers are creative in finding new ways to bypass anti spam filters. They send distorted pictures, add random text to their messages, zip their spam, use excel files, pdf files and nowadays fdf files. Fdf files ? What's that again ?
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.
You decided to export your Outlook data to a new computer only to realize that all Outlook categories have not been exported. Instead of manually creating those categories again you decided to search for a solution to backup the categories on the old computer and add them again to the new pc.
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.
I bought a lot of games, dvds and cds in the last 25 years and have a rather large collection at home. I also lend media to friends and sometimes forgot about it for a couple of months or even years until my friend brought it back to me. Using a software to organize all my books, games, CDs and DVDs was never a top priority in my life because it would literally take ages to add all of my items into the software.
I would have never thought that a company like Sony would not learn from its mistakes especially after the first rootkit debacle which was a major public relations fiasco for Sony. The first rootkit was placed on several audio CDs that were distributed in 2005 and led to a $6 million settle case in the United States. While the rootkit was intended to make it impossible (albeit ineffectively) to copy music from the CDs it was effectively used by producers of malware, trojans and spyware to hide their code from antivirus software.
It is important to know what to do if your Internet Service Provider decides to throttle or block certain ports that are used by applications that use the Bittorrent protocol. Comcast recently started using an application called Sandvine which uses a new way to throttle or block traffic. Sandvine uses something that is called session management which basically limits the number of open connections on your computer without caring about ports and protocols for instance.
The Internet community has been pestered with yet another wave of spam mails containing fake membership information and e-cards. The spammers use two attack vectors if you click on the ip that is listed in those emails. They try to convince you to download a so called Secure Login Applet which is nothing more than an infected executable named applet.exe and also try to use several known exploits.
Many users do not like to use the Adobe Reader because of its slow loading time which is mainly caused by the many plugins that are loaded. It seems to take ages until Adobe Reader initializes itself and displays the pdf document that one wanted to view.
I barely finished the article about the first USB devices with an build in Iris scanner when the next developer announced a system to secure data on USB devices called Flash Padlock. It is basically a a USB stick with one or two Gigabytes of space that is protected by a pin that has to be entered on the device itself to be able to access the data on the stick.
Many private torrent websites have a user limit in place which makes it impossible for new users to sign up unless an old user gets kicked out of the system, deletes his account or the admins raise the user limit. It is a tedious task to visit those sites daily to make sure that you can sign up eventually.
Would you be able to write down the serial number of your Windows operating system if I would ask you to do it ? Or of Microsoft Office ? This is normally not a problem because you have the serial number in written form and can look it up if it is needed. But what if you can't find it anymore because it somehow got lost during the last move ?
The article about working with multiple rar files at once was highly productive if you consider that I was able to write two more articles from links that have been posted in the comments of it. Extract Now is a software that has one main purpose and that is to extract multiple files at once.
I love it when someone mentions a great software or tip in the comments of one of my articles. Mouser from Donation Coders mentioned his program Drag and Drop Robot in my article that explained how to unrar multiple rar files at once. It is basically a more versatile software that has - amongst others - the functionality to unrar multiple files.
World Display is a free wallpaper locater and changer for Microsoft Windows that offers several ways to find wallpapers. The main feature of World Display is to display beautiful locations of the world as your background in Windows. You can use the build in Google Maps tool to browse to interesting locations, preview the images available and add the location to your selection or the preview image to your favorites.
Microsoft introduced the .docx file format in its new Office and Word applications and wants it to replace the commonly used doc format. The problem with the change from doc to docx is that many users are still working with prior versions of Word or no Microsoft product at all and face the problem that they can't load the docx file because it is not supported in their application.
Windows Vista in its default state needs a lot of battery power on my notebook which is why I deactivated several features like the Vista Aero theme or the sidebar when working without a power source. The free software Vista Battery Saver which is currently a beta offers a way to manage the power handling automatically.
Driver Grabber is a small application for Microsoft Windows operating systems which grabs all device drivers except drivers from Microsoft and saves them in the same directory where Drive Grabber was executed from. This can be extremely useful but the application is mainly geared towards techies and not casual users.
If you are looking for a quick and easy way to backup your files on your Windows operating system you should take a closer look at Everyday Auto Backup which is a basic but useful backup utility which is able to schedule backups of files and folders that you have selected.
Microsoft USB Flash Drive Manager is a free software for Windows XP created by Microsoft to make it easier to backup and restore files on USB devices that get connected to the computer. It was primarily designed as a backup and restoration utility but offers several other features that make it worthwhile.
Torrent Swapper is a bittorrent client with some interesting features that make it stick out of the crowd of bittorrent clients. First of all it was written in Python making it independent from any operating system. Several other clients offer this as well though and the main feature that distinguishes Torrent Swapper from other clients is the feature to share upload speed between computers.
The Firefox Environment Backup Extension -short FEBE - offers a great and easy way to backup all Firefox settings, themes and extensions. I was looking for a way to synchronize all of my settings from my desktop computer to Firefox that was also installed on my notebook.
I wrote an article about the software Rapget yesterday which could be used to queue downloads for files that are hosted on file hosting websites such as rapidshare or megaupload. Rapget had the problem, that the download from rapidshare for instance was not working if you did not have a premium account.
Keyloggers can generally be classified as either software or hardware keyloggers. Software keyloggers are running as a background task on the system while hardware keyloggers are little devices that are most of the time connected between pc and keyboard recording every keystroke in their own memory.
Did you know that the iPod is supporting two additional audiobook features ? Audiobooks in the m4b format support the adjustment of the reading speed and pointers to the last reading position of the audiobook. Those features are not available if your audiobooks have the extension mp3.
