• Tips

Christmas is very nearly upon us, and over the past couple of weeks we have been collecting together some of the best festive offerings available. Whether you’re looking for some seasonal games to keep the kids (or yourself) entertained, a festive app for your iPhone, or something to give your desktop a more Christmassy look, there’s something here for you. In this round up we take a look at some of the software you may have missed.

For fans of simple strategy games Christmas Troubles -- Tower Defense Game 1.0 is a great way to get into the festive spirit. With fun graphics and instant appeal, this is a game that’s suitable for all ages. If you’re more of a puzzler, Christmas Puzzle 1.0 is a festive take on the classic game Bejewelled, while Christmas Crisis 1.3.9 is a vertical scroller in which the aim is help Santa deliver his presents all over the world.

Continue reading →

Italian security vendor NoVirusThanks has just made four of its previously commercial 32-bit system monitoring tools available as freeware. And while there’s nothing here to compete with the troubleshooting power of, say, Sysinternals Process Monitor, the new freebies are lightweight, portable and (for the most part) very easy to use.

Have you ever wondered what files an installation program has added to your system, for instance? The File Extension Monitor makes it very easy to find out. Simply launch the program, and it’ll run in the background, logging files as they’re created, along with the date and time, and the process that created them.

Continue reading →

It’s often useful to be able to grab some of the information contained in an application window.  If you need to share a complex error message with someone else, say, then being able to copy it immediately to the clipboard will save time and avoid the potential confusion that might arise if you make a typo or two while manually reentering it somewhere else.

But there’s a problem: in many cases text is presented in a way that makes it very hard to extract and use elsewhere. If you want to make a note of all 100 languages supported by a program, say, there’s no standard right-click option that will extract it from a listbox and copy raw text to the clipboard.  And so under normal circumstances you’ll have to manually read and retype the information yourself.

Continue reading →

The standard Windows desktop clock doesn’t exactly come with many configuration options: you can set the date and time, and add a couple of extra clocks for other time zones, but that’s about it. If you need a little more versatility, then, you’ll have to look for some third-party help. And there are few options quite as configurable as DS Clock.

Initially, for instance, the program will display both the date and time in the top right-hand corner of your desktop, but you can configure this to show whatever you like. You can choose from multiple date and time formats; add the time in selected time zones; select custom separators and more, creating a format string that defines exactly what you’d like to see.

Continue reading →

Does your PC feel in need of a good system tune up? With the Holidays just around the corner and some potential quality time with your PC beckoning, IObit’s flagship tool Advanced SystemCare PRO 4 is just the tool you need to get to the root of your PC’s performance and stability problems with the minimum of fuss.

To celebrate the recent launch of Advanced SystemCare PRO 5, we’re giving away full, unlimited versions of ASC PrRO 4, worth $19.95, helping to deliver you the perfect present of a faster, less frustrating computer for the Holiday season.

Continue reading →

Hard drive specialist O&O Software has released a free license for its labs-based SSD Migration Kit. The program is a straightforward tool that makes it easy to migrate your system partition from a regular hard drive to an SSD.

You could of course do something similar with many hard drive copying tools, but the SSD Migration Kit does have a couple of advantages. In particular, it makes sure that your partition is properly aligned on the SSD, which, the company says,  improves SSD write speed by as much as 40 percent when compared with a misaligned drive. And the program also allows you to exclude unwanted files from the copy, useful if your SSD doesn’t have the space to hold all the files on your system partition.

Continue reading →

When you need to tweak the volume on your PC then the standard Windows sound applet will get the job done, but it’s a little basic. You’ll have to click it first, and if you want to adjust anything other than the full volume for all your channels then you’ll need to explore the Mixer settings, too.

If that just doesn’t suit your needs then you may prefer NirSoft’s Volumouse 2, a powerful tool that comes packed with time-saving volume control options.

Continue reading →

It may only be the second week of December, but the Christmas feeling has already taken over. Software publishers are still releasing software throughout the festive season and we’ve collected together twenty of the biggest titles from the past seven days that you may have missed.

Whether you get a new camcorder for Christmas, or you’re using an existing camera to capture the seasonal excitement on film, CyberLink PowerDirector 10 Ultra (build 1129a) includes everything you need to edit, burn and share your footage. If your needs aren’t quite as high, you could opt for the slightly cheaper, but still powerful, CyberLink PowerDirector 10 Deluxe (build 1129a).

Continue reading →

Taking care of your computer means that it will serve you well and hopefully delay the need to upgrade your hardware for as long as possible. The festive season is now upon us, which  means over-indulging in the food and drink departments and generally failing to look after ourselves. But this does not mean that our computers also need to be neglected.

If you’re feeling the pinch after splashing out on Christmas presents for friends and family, our great sale prices on optimization and maintenance software means that you will still be able to keep your system in top shape. There are a number of tools to choose from, all of which are very gentle on the pocket.

Continue reading →

System Restore is an excellent Windows technology, one that’s saved our PCs many times -- but it’s not exactly flexible. You can restore an entire system point, or maybe a shadow copy or two (right-click a folder, select Properties > Previous Versions), but that’s about it.

So it’s good to see System Restore Explorer offering an alternative approach. Launch the program and it’ll display a list of restore points, but when you choose one of these it’ll be mounted and displayed in an Explorer window. So you can now manually browse through the restore point, and if you locate a file which you need, then retrieval is as easy as a drag and drop.

Continue reading →

Google has updated its popular cross-platform image-viewing, editing and sharing tool, Picasa to version 3.9. Despite the minor version number, there are a significant number of new features and improvements.

Google is keen to showcase Picasa’s new Google+ sharing capabilities, but of more interest to most will be the smorgasbord selection of new photo editing effects and the ability to compare “before” and “after” images side-by-side.

Continue reading →

PortableApps.com has announced the first public release of Platform 10, a powerful framework for building a customised portable toolkit that you can carry around on a USB drive with you.

And if you’ve always liked the idea of doing something along those lines, but never quite managed to make it happen, then Platform 10 could be very useful way to make it happen.

Continue reading →

Does the world really need another PC maintenance suite? Probably not, but they keep coming anyway. And at first glance, the latest, Toolwiz Care, didn’t look like it would exactly break new ground. The program includes a Registry cleaner, for instance. A module to free up a little hard drive space (though not as much as if we’d just installed CCleaner). And another to help control our Windows startup programs: it all seemed very ordinary.

When we took a closer look, though, some interesting differences emerged. So the Startup Programs module didn’t simply provide a list of applications and leave us to make the difficult decisions. It actually makes sensible recommendations about what you should disable or remove to accelerate your boot time. And provides figures to help put your boot time in context in the first place: our boot time is apparently 30-percent faster than the average of other Toolwiz Care users, which tells us it’s probably not worth expending a great deal of effort in trying to improve it further.

Continue reading →

There are countless ways to customize the look of Windows -- the operating system itself has some scope for personalization even if only through changing colors and desktop background. If you would like to take things to the next level, you’re going to need some third party tools. The sheer number of ways in which Windows can be customized means that you could end up installing a large number of apps and spending a huge amount of time tweaking and tailoring different aspects of your system to your liking. If time is precious, you may want to try out a skin pack -- and what better place to start than with a Christmas skin to give your computer a seasonal look. Enter Christmas Skin Pack 1.0 (32-bit).

This is the 32-bit version of the skin pack, but there is also a 64-bit version -- be sure to install the correct version. The Skin Pack includes all of the tools that are needed to install new icons and cursors, change the boot screen, add a new look Start menu and much, much more. This isn’t likely to be a theme to keep installed all year round, but throughout December and January, it is a great bit of fun. The automated installation process makes customizing your desktop a whole lot easier than having to track down the individual tools needed to tweak different parts of your system to your liking.

Continue reading →

The release of OS X Lion unleashed some cool new features. It also seemed to turn some other cool, established features on their head. Suddenly, things that worked perfectly adequately in Snow Leopard changed, leaving users first scratching their heads and then frustrated at having to learn new ways of doing things.

Thankfully, it’s possible to revert back to the old way of doing things. And while it’s not always intuitive or easy to do so, there are free third-party solutions available. One of the newest is Indonesian firm TweakNow’s Lion Secrets.

Continue reading →