Computeractive! Latest downloads

Super Flexible File Synchronizer 4.78

Tim Smith — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 19:39:49 GMT

Tim Smith, V3.co.uk, Saturday 7 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Synchronise documents between different locations

If you regularly transfer and work on files in different locations it can often be difficult to make sure that you are always using the latest version. Super Flexible File Synchronizer takes care of that for you by updating the contents of different folders.

Each synchronisation is set up as a different profile that you can run when you want or update if your needs change. Files can be synchronised over networks or with internet sites.

There is a wizard mode as well as an advanced mode that can schedule synchronisations to happen automatically.

Paint.NET 3.5

Chris Wiles — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:29:36 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Saturday 7 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Powerful & modern paint program

Jointly developed by Washington State University and Microsoft, Paint.net is intended to be a replacement for the free MS Paint software provided with all Windows operating systems.

It offers many of the powerful features found in commercial editors, including the ability to work on multiple layers, full transparent PNG support, unlimited history, and a plethora of visual effects.

An interesting feature is the way each tool window becomes transparent when covering the image. This enables better implementation of effects and is something the big image editors are currently lacking.

New v3 features include a multi-document, tab-based interface, so you can open and edit more than one image. An improved and more powerful toolbar and user-definable colour palette are some of the other highlights.

Foxit Reader 3.1.3

Max Fernandez — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:52:14 GMT

Max Fernandez, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Portable & quick PDF reader

When it comes to PDF readers, the abundance of free and competent titles suggests that the need for anymore is unnecessary. The Foxit PDF Reader is, however, slightly different.

With a download size of less than 4MB, Foxit is an extremely light and speedy PDF reader with an almost non-existent installation process.

This makes it extremely portable; just slip it on a USB key or CD and you can use it anywhere with little fuss.

Unlike many mainstream readers, Foxit is not resident on your PC so it doesn't sap anymore memory than it should. Obviously, this does mean fewer features but the simplicity and portability of the software easily makes up for this shortfall.

Note that this release is much more than a PDF reader. Some of the new features include a form designer (but some of these features are evaluation only with this Reader Edition), enhanced zoom tools, spell-checker for PDF forms, an improved IE-plugin and much more.

The latest v3 ships with a host of new features include an updated select tool, advanced toolbar control, improved popup notes, Firefox support (so you can see your PDFs within Firefox) and much more.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5.5

Chris Wiles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:52:13 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Minor release of the popular web browser

Some users were disappointed with the release of Mozilla Firefox 2.0. After months of betas, release candidates and previews, the new features weren’t as spectacular as people expected. However, there is only so much you can do to improve a web browser.

With the release of Mozilla Firefox 3, Mozilla decided to work hard on speeding up the rendering engine, so the web graphics has received a completely new upgrade. Dubbed ‘ Cairo’, the new graphics rendering engine should improve the output across different platforms, as it’s being developed as an open-standard.

With other improvements in the way that pages are ‘painted’ on screen, improved SVG support and CSS enhancements, the general improvements for Firefox 3.0 are based around the way it will render web pages through the browser. The new browser also ships with a new user-interface, improved bookmarks and many other new features.

This is the major new long-awaited v3.5 release with features such as private web browsing, speed improvements and much more.

Mozilla Firefox for Mac 3.5.5

Lee Collins — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:52:13 GMT

Lee Collins, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 12:20:00

Minor release of the popular web browser

This is the major new long-awaited v3.5 release with features such as private web browsing, speed improvements and much more.

Nero Free 9.4.12.708

Chris Wiles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:52:13 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 14:34:00

Burn basic data & audio discs with this free tool

For most people, simple burning software is all we need on a day-to-day level. Some of the popular burning applications have migrated in to multimedia production suites over the last few years, which means they ship on a DVD-based installer, rather than a simple download to burn data and audio CDs.

Some software developers have recognised this and there are now many smaller simple burning tools that do a few things well – burn data, audio CDs and produce disc labels. Nero have also recognised a need for this market and have released a free basic version of their burning suite.

Nero Free is a simple cut-down version of the full burning package and enables you to burn discs, quickly. Quite a few features are missing. With any free burning software, you won’t be able to work with MP3 files or burn a DVD, due to the lack of an MPEG-2 codec. If you need these features, you’ll need to upgrade to the full version.

There’s no time limit on this application and it’s completely free.

VirtualBox for Windows 3.0.10

Chris Wiles — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:36:45 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Host a virtual operating system

This is the software publisher's description.

Powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See "About VirtualBox" for an introduction; see "innotek" for more about our company.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while innotek ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.

On the VirtualBox site, you can find sources, binaries, documentation and other resources for VirtualBox.

Version 3.0 ships with major enhancements such as support for up to 32 CPUs per virtual guest OS, the ability to use DirectX 9 within a Windows guest, support for Windows 7 and much more.

VirtualBox for Mac 3.0.10

Lee Collins — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:36:45 GMT

Lee Collins, V3.co.uk, Friday 6 November 2009 at 12:00:00

Host a virtual operating system

This is the software publisher's description.

On the VirtualBox site, you can find sources, binaries, documentation and other resources for VirtualBox.

Version 3.0 ships with major enhancements such as support for up to 32 CPUs per virtual guest OS, the ability to use DirectX 9 within a Windows guest, support for Windows 7 and much more.

XP-AntiSpy 3.97-5

Chris Wiles — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:40:32 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Disable spyware functionality within Windows

Many of us are very wary of the information our computer is sending back to software suppliers over the internet, security issues with the software installed on our computer and scares regarding the Windows operating system.

XP-AntiSpy is a tool that enables you to configure Windows so that it doesn't use the internet to either submit feedback or download information without your knowledge.

For instance, Windows Media Player will look to the internet for information regarding song titles and will automatically download codecs when required.

It has been reported that it might submit usage information to Microsoft, and will save usage information to your system and much more.

Of course, most of this is speculation in the same manner that some of us worry about what supermarkets do with our personal shopping information when we use our 'loyalty card'.

Generally speaking, they do nothing apart from use the information for statistical purposes. However, this doesn't stop us worrying about submitting that information in the first place.

XP-AntiSpy will go deep in to your Windows operating system and enable you to turn off anything that you feel you do not want reported or submitted over the internet.

K-Lite Mega Codec Pack 5.4.0

Chris Wiles — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:40:32 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Collection of video & audio codecs

There are three or four key compression formats that most people use to compress video (or audio) for playback on the Internet and users will generally use QuickTime, Windows Media Player, RealPlayer or DivX Player to playback your video.

However, it’s not always as simple as this. Some people avoid the mainstream players, as these players require the end-user to register in order to use their software and people see this as an invasion of their privacy. However, some of the freeware and Opensource video players don’t always ship with the relevant codecs. Indeed, if you try and playback a video compressed in the 90’s, you might find it was encoded with an old Intel codec or other popular codecs that have long-since been discontinued.

The K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools that will enable you to playback just about any video/audio format you’ll find on the Internet. A codec is short for Compressor-Decompressor. Codecs are needed for encoding and decoding (playing) audio and video. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play all the popular movie formats and even some rare formats.

Note: with K-Lite's developers linking directly to the download on our server, and then this being mirrored across the Internet, we've had to take this direct download offline. The download here now links you to the K-Lite download page on their server.

Flock 2.5.5

Chris Wiles — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 15:40:32 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 11:04:00

Test the latest browser based on the Firefox 3 engine

Flock is a web browser that combines integrated photo sharing, social networking with RSS support.

Bloggers are a target audience for Flock, which is based on the Mozilla Firefox, because it has been designed to keep people up to date with news, blogs and when friends appear online.

Favourite websites can be kept up to date with other computers that a user may have access to by using the del.icio.us and shadows services. These websites can then be shared with other users,

Flock organises news from RSS feeds in a pane rather than as bookmarks. Each feed is checked for new stories hourly. Flock shows an incon in the address bar to show that a feed is available from that page. Simply click on that icon to sign up.

Flock can automatically add photos and snippets of other webpages to blogs written with Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad and WordPress. A special web snippets bar has been added to store quotes from other websites. Users simply drag pictures onto the Photo icon to upload, or drag and drop images which are automatically stored on to a Flickr or PhotoBucket account.

Search with Flock is slightly different from other browsers because as text is typed in, Flock will start searching from the web as well as a user's favourites and history. These initial results are shown in a drop down menu.

Note that this is the major release of v2 based on Firefox 3.

Nocs Google Docs Editor

Tim Smith — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:33:47 GMT

Tim Smith, Computeractive, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 11:14:00

Edit Google Docs online and offline

Nocs is a Windows Notepad-style application that uses Google Docs to synchronise text files.

Editing in a browser can be powerful but it is sometimes problematic. Nocs is a basic editor that can create and edit word-processing documents online using Google Docs.

You cannot apply formatting to text but Nocs has a tabbed interface to edit more than one document at a time. As the documents are held on Google Docs it is also possible for several people to edit a document at the same time.

Nocs can be set to autosave documents if it is left idle, a useful idea to avoid losing work. It can also encrypt text before it is sent to Google Docs to avoid anyone snooping on your work on the way.

The editing font can be changed, which is a good idea as Courier New is not easy to read for long periods.

The developer can be followed on Twitter so you can see the latest news and submit your own suggestions.

Taskbar Meters

Tim Smith — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 11:03:32 GMT

Tim Smith, Computeractive, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 10:49:00

Get more information about computer health from the Windows 7 computer

Taskbar Meters take advantage of the improvements made to the Windows 7 taskbar.

Taskbar Meters displays a separate icon for CPU, memory and hard disk activity that gradually fills as the computer works harder.

The icons also serve as useful shortcuts to the Task Manager and Resource Monitor to get more information on how the computer is being used.

The update frequency can be adjusted and you can also change the level at which the bars change colour from yellow or red to indicate utility-resource usage.

Paragon Disk Wiper 10 Personal

Chris Wiles — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:47:55 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Completely wipe a partition or drive

There are fewer reasons to justify upgrading your old PC, apart from the graphics card if you’re a seriously gamer or the hard drive if you find you’re running out of space. Upgrading your hard drive is far easier than you would expect. There are tools such as Paragon Disk Copy or Hard Disk Manager that will copy the entire contents of your old drive across to your new drive. Simply connect the new drive and remove the old one, then reboot. Simple.

However, what happens if you want to get rid of your old slow hard drive? There’s no point connecting it up as a slave drive as you’ll probably find that it slows down read/write access to your new and primary drive. You might want to give it to someone else or simply throw it away. Whatever option you choose, you need to dispose of the contents. Even if you re-format the drive, there are many tools that will enable another user to retrieve the pre-formatted contents.

The solution is a disk wiping tool that will completely erase the disk contents but also uses an algorithm to make sure that by wiping the contents, the old content can’t be retrieved.

This is a tool you’ll probably use very infrequently, but it could prove invaluable if you want to make sure a partition or entire drive is completely wiped and contents are irradiated.

Note that this trial version will not actually wipe your disk. It will only show the functionality involved.

Process Monitor 2.8

Lee Collins — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:30:55 GMT

Lee Collins, V3.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Monitor open system activity

This is the software publisher's description.

Advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. It combines the features of two legacy Sysinternals utilities, Filemon and Regmon, and adds an extensive list of enhancements including rich and non-destructive filtering, comprehensive event properties such session IDs and user names, reliable process information, full thread stacks with integrated symbol support for each operation, simultaneous logging to a file, and much more. Its uniquely powerful features will make Process Monitor a core utility in your system troubleshooting and malware hunting toolkit.

This major update to Process Monitor adds real-time TCP and UDP monitoring to its existing process, thread, DLL, file system and registry monitoring. You can now see the TCP and UDP activity processes performed, including the operation (e.g. connect, send, receive), local and remote IP addresses and DNS names, and operation transfer lengths. On Windows Vista, Process Monitor also collects thread stacks for network operations.

Defraggler Portable 1.15

Lee Collins — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:15:32 GMT

Lee Collins, V3.co.uk, Thursday 5 November 2009 at 10:43:00

Defragment your drive with this portable application

Your old system might appear to need an upgrade, if you’ve been using your computer for over a year. It just seems to become slower, over time. Windows takes longer to boot, applications take a few more seconds to start and your system can feel a lot more sluggish. One option is simply to purchase a brand new and faster hard drive. Re-install Windows and your favourite applications and you’ll suddenly find everything is a lot more snappy. However, after a few months of using the new drive, your system will be sluggish again.

Why does this happen? Simply as the more applications you install and remove from your computer, the more likely your drive will become fragmented. This occurs when files are stored in different locations on your drive and your drive has to spin more than usual to load Windows and your applications. Defragment your drive and the contents will be stored in one continuous block, so you’ll find your system starts more quickly and your PC appears to be running more smoothly.

The Windows defragmentation tool isn’t the best available. It’s rather slow, so if you have a huge hard drive it can take hours to finish defragmenting your drive. Worse, you can’t really do anything whilst it’s performing the defragmentation process.

Defraggler is a new tool from the developers who brought you CCleaner. It’s small and compact and will enable you to defragment a collection of files, as well as your entire drive.

Note that this is the portable version of Defraggler.

Paragon Drive Backup 9 Professional

Chris Wiles — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 21:00:31 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Backup or restore your hard drive

Most of us use our computers daily, but few of us backup our data on a daily basis. What happens if you spend an afternoon working on a professional project that is due within the next 24 hours, only to find a power failure results in you losing important data?

There's a likelihood that you wouldn't be able to restore this information and you'd have to start again from scratch.

Protecting your system is relatively easy. You can schedule a backup so that it backs up your important files at either the end of every working day or week. This can be an automated process so it all happens overnight and your system goes to sleep, once the backup is complete.

Paragon's Drive Backup is a backup tool that will backup an image of either your entire hard drive or a partition.

Better still, with the new Hot Backup function, you'll be able to backup your data whilst you're still working on your computer, with minimum impact.

If you find you have a problem and you need to restore your data, you can restore from a backup image at any time, without requiring you to install further software.

The new Paragon Drive Backup 9 now enables you to backup files and folders, rather than your entire drive, exclude certain files or folders from a drive backup and also restore your drive to a different drive or system, if necessary.

Note that there's an alternative download that supports Vista 64-bit.

Auslogics Disk Defrag 3.0.3.50

Chris Wiles — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:08:35 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Defragment your hard drives

This is the software publisher’s description.

Hard disks are by far the slowest component in your computer, particularly if you’re a laptop user with a 2.5” drive. CPU and memory work much faster than hard disks because they do not have moving parts. Therefore fragmented disks often become a bottleneck of the system performance.

Besides causing slowdowns, fragmentation makes the hard drive disk heads move frequently when reading files which leads to freeze-ups and system crashes. It is important to keep your disks defragmented and optimised as much as possible.

Disk fragmentation leads to system slowdowns, PC crashes, slow startup and shutdown and sometimes to system failures.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is designed for fast optimisation of today's modern hard disks. Get the maximum performance out of your expensive hardware investment.

This v3 release now ships with a number of new optimisation features within an enhanced user interface.

LogMeIn Hamachi 2.0.1.66

Chris Wiles — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:08:35 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Create a zero configuration network

These days owning more than one computer is the norm. They're just so cheap, so we often have one in the living room, one in our home office and the kids usually have their own machine too.

However, we don't all have the same operating system, but we do want to be sharing our music, files and network games around the house.

How many of us really know how to configure our machines so they can talk to each other, without having to spend hours attempting to get them to talk or spending money employing someone to do it for us?

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application that resides on all the computers you want to connect within your network.

It's based on peer-to-peer technology, which 'just works' out of the box. However, this is closed peer-to-peer, which means that only people within your network can connect to your machine(s).

If the computers you want to join your local network are situated outside your home, they can join too, which means you can have your own file sharing or game network between people within your local neighbourhood.

Note that Linux and Mac OS X versions are available to download on the Hamachi homepage.

Defraggler 1.15

Chris Wiles — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:08:35 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Defragment your hard drive

Defraggler is a new tool from the developers who brought you CCleaner. It’s small and compact and will enable you to defragment a collection of files, as well as your entire drive.

PrimoPDF 5.0.0.19

Chris Wiles — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 10:17:04 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Wednesday 4 November 2009 at 09:41:00

Output any document as a PDF

Work with the Mac operating system and you’ll find that you can print just about any document as a PDF file, which you can then use to email to other users or send for commercial printing. PDF documents are widely universal and can be opened by most users, irrespective of operating system. Better still, PDF documents hold the information required for printing, so you get the correct fonts and page layout. Give a high-quality PDF to another user and they can print on the desktop printer and the printed page will appear exactly as you outputted the document.

Send someone a Word document and they need the same fonts you used and may not be able to open the page if you are using a newer version than the version of Word they have installed. With a PDF, you can even extract words, edit pages, add comments and more, if required.

PrimoPDF is the free version of the PDF creation tool designed to enable you to output documents from just about any Windows applications a PDF document. With the free version, you can create a low-resolution PDF required for web download or a hi-res document you’d need for printing commercially. You can password protect your documents and much more. The free PrimoPDF supports the latest PDF 1.5 standard.

Note that the Professional version contains a ton of additional features, including support for editing PDF documents, conversation, form creation and much more.

VLC Media Player Portable 1.0.3

Lee Collins — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:20:13 GMT

Lee Collins, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 3 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Free portable media player

This is the software publisher's description.

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats, including MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, MP3, and OGG, as well as for DVDs, VCDs and various streaming protocols.

It also can be used as a server for unicast or multicast streams in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network.

Version 0.8.6 adds, amongst other things, MacIntel support, improvements in the Audio CD playback (CDDB), and a a new AJAX HTTP interface. There are also Mac and Linux versions available.

This is the portable version which enables you to take your music and videos along with you, as well as something to play them on.

O&O SafeErase 4.1.103

Chris Wiles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:20:13 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 3 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Safely eliminate unwanted files & data

Undelete utilities are an invaluable way to rescue files you've accidentally erased. And files you intended to erase, which is a problem if they contain confidential or sensitive data.

O&O SafeErase solves this problem by overwriting the file multiple times, using random data. The content is destroyed, and even the most sophisticated computer forensic equipment won't be able to recover it. (Although if you really think the CIA is watching you, then maybe they've also been recording all your PC activities via concealed cameras).

Better still, there's no new interface to learn, no program to run, no extra tools to get in your way. SafeErase installs itself as an extension to Explorer, so just right-click on a file, select "SafeErase", and confirm that you really do want to destroy it forever.

Too simple? Okay, there is just one other dialog, which you can see by clicking Properties in the "Confirm File/ Folder Delete" box. Here's where you can choose the security level that best suits your needs. The options start with "Lowest", one pass, fast, but only defeats casual spys; and they end with Highest, 27 randomised passes, far slower but your files are forever dismissed to that bit bucket in the sky.

This is the brand new SafeErase v4 and now supports secure deletion of your browser data, individual system profiles, multi-core processor support and an improved user-interface.

OpenOffice Portable 3.1.1

Chris Wiles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:04:24 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 3 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Take this office suite on the road

OpenOffice is a fully fledged office application suite, complete with a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation graphics program.

OpenOffice will be more familiar to some people as Sun Microsystems' StarOffice, which until recently was a free download.

With the launch of StarOffice 6, Sun changed its policy: the full office application suite would now cost (a still very reasonable) £50, while this completely free version is available to download.

Both share the same source code, with a few differences. OpenOffice does not include the StarOffice Adabas D database, certain fonts (especially Asian language ones), some templates and certain file filters.

This is the portable edition of OpenOffice, so you can take your suite on the road.

PC Tools Firewall Plus 6.0.0.81

Chris Wiles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 20:04:24 GMT

Chris Wiles, V3.co.uk, Tuesday 3 November 2009 at 00:00:00

Comprehensive free personal firewall

This is the software publisher's description.

PC Tools Firewall Plus is a powerful personal firewall for Windows that protects your computer from intruders and controls the network traffic in and out of your PC. By monitoring applications that connect to the network Firewall Plus can stop Trojans, backdoors, keyloggers and other malware from damaging your computer and stealing your private information.

PC Tools Firewall Plus is advanced technology designed specially for people, not experts. Powerful prevention against attacks and known exploits is activated by default and advanced users can also easily create their own packet filtering rules to customize the network defenses. All you need to do is install it for immediate and automatic ongoing protection.

That’s why PC Tools Firewall Plus provides world-leading protection, backed by regular Smart Updates, OnGuard real-time protection and comprehensive network shielding to ensure your system remains safe and hacker free. PC Tools products are trusted and used by millions of people everyday to protect their home and business computers against online threats.

We recommend you use PC Tools Firewall Plus in combination with Spyware Doctor for comprehensive system protection against spyware, adware and other threats.

The latest Firewall Plus contains a number of new features including smart application rules that enable you to quickly set up how applications on your system access the Internet. The new Stealth Mode protection will hide your presence on your internal network and stop other computers from access your machine.

This is the new v5 release which contains a number of new features including the ability to password protect your firewall, reduced alerts for an improved end-user experience and a normal/expert mode.