10 Most Useful Opera Widgets

Opera widgets are free and small web programs that run outside the browser and make the desktop experience more fun. They can also be useful providing easy and quick access to information or services. There are about 1300 widgets of many kinds. Examples include news feeds, different games, pixel rulers, world web cams, search tools and many others.
Installing widgets in Opera is very easy. To do this, use the Widgets panel or menu and select "Add widget". This will open a web page where you can choose and download widgets that Opera will install automatically.
The most of widgets are very funny but only some of them are actually useful in a real life situation.
This is my list of 10 the most useful Opera widgets that work well for me.

Scientific calculator
The Scientific Calculator Opera Widget provides the look and feel of a real calculator. It allows you to perform mathematical calculations with advanced scientific functions.



TouchtheSky
This very useful and nice widget provides you with international weather reports, in detailed, compact and mini modes. With the help of touchtheSky widget you can find out such information as temperature, wind speed, air quality (including humidity, pollen levels, and UV levels), weather forecast for five days and so on.



Google Translator
Google Translator allows you to translate text directly in the widget or translate a specified web page.
Of course, this widget will translate only the languages that can be translated by Google's own translation service.



Time and Date
A customizable calendar widget with events and reminders.




Torrent PowerSearch
This widget is excellent tool for searching for torrents across multiple sites.
It will display search results in tabs simultaneously for all sites you have selected. Displays all the key information: name, download link, size, seeders, and leechers.



GoogleToolBar
This nice widget provides you quick and easy access to google services.



Flash Video Downloader
With the help of Flash Video Downloader you can download embedded flash video from video sharing websites like YouTube. Just put the link to the video you want to download to the appropriate field and click "Download!"
You also can use this widget to download flash games from such sites as gamesvine.com, gamespot.com, armorgames.com etc.



ImageGrep
The ImageGrep Opera widget shows search results from image-search websites such as Google, Flickr and so on.



iTunes Widget
iTunes widget will show on desktop the latest music provided by iTunes. New Releases, Top Albums, Top Songs, Just Added and Featured Albums and Exclusives available on iTunes. This widget supports all store languages, genres and types.



Functions 3D
You can use this widget to built surfaces from mathematical expressions. Just enter a mathematical function and have it rendered in a 3D space.



I like all these Opera widgets and use it everyday.

Smart Defrag – Very Efficient Defragger

Fragmentation of hard disk drive space is generally main cause of slow and unstable computer performance. Smart Defrag is one of the most efficient disk defragmenters. With the help of this program you can keep your hard disc drive space from becoming excessively defragemented.
Smart Defrag is very easy to use and maintain. You can just install it and forget it. The program works automatically and quietly in the background while your computer is idle and doesn't need additional user manual intervention for basic maintenance. While working in the background, the program only uses up 14MB of RAM, so it's feasible to run it smoothly on aged machines.
The program also includes a manual defrag option where you are able to set up to defrag whenever you want and schedule defragmentations. Smart Defrag can shutdown your computer after defragmentation.



Smart Defrag has the world’s quickest defragmenting engine. It has been specially designed for present-day, large disc drives, so it eliminates long waiting times.
So, Smart Defrag is a convenient defragger with options for scheduling and more, this is a great choice for both beginners and more skilled users.
You can download the latest version of this Smart Defrag on this page.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is available

The new version 3.0 of OpenOffice.org has been released recently. OpenOffice.org is absolutely free alternative to the Microsoft Office software with a Word compatible word processor, Power Point like presentation manager, Excel compatible spreadsheet software and drawing program. It includes features similar to other office suites.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 offers a lot of new features and enhancements, that have been made across the board to its various components. Let 's take a look at some noteworthy features of OpenOffice.org.
The most immediately noticeable modification is the splash screen named the Start Center. It appears when OpenOffice.org 3 starts without a document and without a module. From the Start Center, you can choose which component of OpenOffice.org you want to use.



OpenOffice.org's word processor called Writer can be used for anything from writing a fast letter to creating an entire book with embedded illustrations, tables of contents, cross-references and indexes. Now working in Writer, you are able to see multiple pages. Notice the two new controls in the status bar (bottom-right-hand corner). The first one is the "View Layout" mode selection, that allows user to switch between a single page, several pages side by side, and book layout. The second control is the zoom slider.



Another interesting improvement of the Writer is so called Notes. It displays notes or comments in a sidebar. Auto-complete, auto-format, and real-time spelling check make easy work of the hardest task.



OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet processor called Calc offers all the tools you need to summarize, calculate, analyze, and present your data in numerical reports or red-hot graphics.
The spreadsheet has been extended to 1024 columns of data compared with the 256 available in previous version of OpenOffice.org software.



You also get such improvements as impacting charts, spreadsheet collaboration and new Solver component that makes calculating dependent spreadsheet cells much easier.



Impress is the powerful tool for creation effective multimedia presentations. Now it has native tables. The new Table Design panel makes it easy to apply colors.



OpenOffice.org 3.0 provides enhanced support for PDF files, letting you better control over security, printing, and editing options. It also works with formats like .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx.
Additionally, OpenOffice.org provides enhanced printing capabilities and options for direct connection with external email programs as well as form-letter management to mail letters to addresses from a database.
OpenOffice.org is available in 27 languages and runs stably and natively on Solaris, Linux, Mac OS and Windows.
Open Office is one of the best alternatives to the MS Office software. Maybe it is not as powerful as Microsoft Office, but it is free. So if you are looking for free alternative to Microsoft Office software, I recommend you to try the latest version of OpenOffice.org, that is available for download here.

ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 – The Best Digital Imaging Software

ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 is now available. The new version of these powerful digital imaging software designed for digital photographers, crafters and scrapbookers. ACDSee Photo Manager is a comprehensive application ideal for viewing, acquiring, enhancing, organizing and sharing your images. Improved features make ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 the quickest, most flexible and affordably priced organization software available for at-home use.
The new user interface is wholly customizable, and offers fast access to tools and features. You can customize the screen layout, the order of pictures, toolbar display, and many other options to suit your preferences. ACDSee Photo Manager is very easy to use image management software that everyone from novices to professionals can use and enjoy.



The latest version of ACDSee Photo Manager adds many features designed to help users handle their digital images, stay organized and share memories with friends. Here are some of them.
ACDSee lets you organize your entire collection the way that works best for you. The new PhotoDisc feature puts its power into the hands of users, who can now organize images stored on CDs, DVDs, and external hard drives without copying them to your computer. With new tools from ACDSee you can rename, categorize, back up, add ratings and keywords to images on any storage device connected to your computer.
The program allows you to assign images to as many categories as you like without taking up more space on your computer.
ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 is the fastest viewing software around. With it you’ll never wait for an image to open. Fill your screen with images, quickly browse through your thumbnails and view photos at full size. Plus you can use ACDSee's Quick View feature to instantly preview e-mail attachments or files on your desktop.
ACDSee supports over 100 image and multimedia file formats including BMP, IFF, JPG, PNG, RAS, RSB, GIF, PSD, and TIFF.
ACDSee Photo Manager allows you to supplement camera metadata (IPTC and EXIF) with their own custom metadata, including categories and ratings. So you can now protect and share this custom information with other ACDSee users by embedding it into their images. Program lets users to include custom information even with such file formats as GIF, PNG and PDF. ACDSee's Database Backup feature also helps you backup your images to CD or DVD so you don’t lose them if your computer fails.
With this software you can share your photos by e-mail without worrying about file sizes. ACDSee also simplify online photo sharing with integrated uploading to such sites as Smugmug and Flickr.
Another new feature of ACDSee Photo Manager is ability to create PowerPoint presentations. So you can create your own stunning slide shows with transition effects, notes, captions and sound.
Also, ACDSee includes a lot of image editing tools you can use to edit, enhance and correct your digital photos. ACDSee allows you to add a custom border, aply various effects like crop, sharpen, saturation, blur, shadow or edge effect. Use advanced red-eye tool to get natural-looking results with custom eye colors to replace red areas.



The program automatically saves and keeps the original image when it is first opened for editing. So you can restore to the original at any time after editing.
ACDSee’s print layout tools help you print multiple prints on a single page, fill an entire page, or create custom print sizes.



I think that ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 is for the real digital photographer who requires almost endless ways to categorize, rank, and document digital images, while having abundant ways to enhance those images. This software system lets the photographer's originative side to show itself through the various effects.
ACDSee Photo Manager 2009 is available for a free 30-day trial and for purchase for $49.99 (USD) at http://www.acdsee.com

Cobian Backup 9.1.1.193 – Good and free backup software

The new version of Cobian Backup software has been released recently. Cobian Backup is a multi-threaded application that allows to schedule and backup your files and directories from some place in your computer to other directories or drives in the same computer or to a shared drive in another machine. There is also full support for the protocol FTP. So the program lets you ability to back up your files to your FTP server.
Cobian Backup exists in two versions: software and service. Cobian Backup software uses very few resources and can be running on the background on your system, checking your backup schedule and executing your backups when it necessary.
The application supports several methods of strong encryption and compression. So it can be used not only for making backups of your file and folders but for creating security copies of them.
Cobian Backup has very simple and easy to use interface with extra-large icons that even your grandmother can read without her glasses on. Maybe the program lacks some features of more powerful backup software products but it allows you to create and schedule an automated backup of all your important files in a few minutes.

Like any good backup utility, Cobian Backup allows you to choose what type of backup full or incremental you want to create. Full backup allows you to create a copy of all your data every time. Incremental backup makes a copy only of those files that have changed.
Here some others key features of Cobian Backup software:

• automatic removing of old backups
• remote backup
• displaying of backup history
• an open plugin architecture to allow the program's enhancement
• backup to multiple destinations.

The latest version 9.1.1.193 of Cobian Backup has a lot of changes. Here is the list of the most important of them:

• Start a backup when autostart
  
• Autostart the interface can now be set for all users or the current user
  
• Now you can pause the backup in any place
  
• Proxy SMTP can now use SOCKS
  
• SMTP can now use SSL
  
• FTP operations use now UNICODE for local operations
  
• FTP operations can now use UTF transfers if the server support it
  
• Support for 7zip compression
  
• Zip files can now store file names in UNICODE
  
• A brand new, improved help file and tutorial
  
• And more.

You can download the latest version of Cobian Backup here.

Adobe Acrobat Reader 9.0 - The Best PDF Viewer

The new version of Adobe Acrobat Reader has been released recently. This free program is designed for viewing and printing PDF files. Acrobat Reader also allows you to fill in and submit PDF forms online.



The new release is almost identical to Adobe Reader 8 though it does load slightly faster and has some new important features such as built-in multimedia support, a quite nice integration with Acrobat.com for enhanced web-based collaboration, improved security, support for searching all PDFs on a hard drive, and more.
The release of Adobe Acrobat 9 brings new Web relevance to PDF documents by enabling embedded video and animation. In turn, every user of new version of Acrobat Reader can watch movies and play interactive games without opening a third-party media player.
Acrobat Reader 9 has a completely redesigned interface that increases the efficiency of the viewing experience.
The program is integrated with Acrobat.com, an exciting new set of online services from Adobe.



That means you can now upload and share PDF files and other types of documents or even create and coauthor documents with others using the PDF writing engine of Acrobat.com



Another interesting feature is so called PDF Portfolios that provide easy navigation when you work with multiple PDF documents and other document types. They also allows you to work with a collection of materials such as drawings, e-mail messages, spreadsheets, and videos as a single file, which makes distribution, storage, retrieval, and collaboration easy for end users.
Acrobat Reader 9 adds more security to your documents by using new digital signature functionality and 256-bit AES encryption.
The program supports many languages and has multilingual user interface.
I think Acrobat Reader has always been the best software for viewing and printing PDF files and now it has become even better.
You can download the latest version of Acrobat Reader here.

Opera — The Fastest Browser In The World

Opera browser is a very good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with great number of powerful and useful features.
Opera has clean interface that is very easy to use and understand. It has everything you need to browse the internet and even more.
Opera allows you to open several Web pages in different tabs within a single window. This is called tabbed browsing. You can easily drag tabs, duplicate them and even restore closed tabs. In Opera, you can resize pages and tile them next to each other on the same workspace to compare or work with several pages. The browser has very useful preview tab feature. Just place the mouse arrow over the tab and you will see a thumbnail preview.
The behavior of tabs can be easily configured to satisfy your needs.



Standard toolbar includes six basic buttons used to navigate within a document, address field, the search field for quick searching on the Web and the «View» button to toggle the view bar.
The search bar offers you several search engines to choose from. You also can add your favorite search engines to the search bar.



The view bar allows you to find a specified word in the active Web page, and provides you quick access to voice management (if available) and features that affect the display of the page, such as shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images, zoom and so on.
Zooming in Opera applies to the entire page at once, instead of just the text. I found this very useful.



Another great feature of Opera is the sidebar which is placed on the left of the screen space. You can toggle it by pressing F4 key or clicking on the left side of the Opera window.
This sidebar gives you quick access to different panels such as bookmarks, widgets, history, notes, transfers, links and some others. These panels make the work with Opera even easier. You can configure sidebar by adding and removing panels of your own.



Opera has highly customizable interface that allows you to personalize it by using beautiful skins, removing and adding panels and buttons.



Opera is designed to be the fastest, smallest, and most full-featured browser available. It is really very fast in loading pages. It is definitely faster than Internet Explorer and smaller than Firefox.
The advanced fraud protection of Opera and its anti-phishing detection keeps your browsing safe and secure.
The very interesting feature of Opera is mouse gestures that allow you to do frequently performed browse operations with small, quick mouse movements.



Speed Dial is the new and unique feature of Opera that assigns bookmarks and tabs any digit from one through nine. When you enter one of those numbers into the URL bar, the corresponding site loads when you hit enter.



Opera includes support for BitTorrent so you don't need to download and install a separate BitTorrent program to download large files. Just click on torrent link and start the download.
There are many others features in Opera such as widgets, notes, Wand utility, simple integration with your favorite e-mail and chat clients, RSS feed reader and sessions management. The Opera browser supports many languages and operating systems.
Overall, I think Opera is one of the best browsers for power users who keep many pages open at once and perform frequent downloads. I like it.
You can download the latest version of Opera here.

Diskeeper Professional 2008 - Powerful Defragmentation Software

Over time your HDD becomes fragmented. As you delete and create files, you create new regions of free space. Your free space is not in one big chunk at the end, but instead just a number of small holes all over your disk. And sometimes it is impossible to allocate new files contiguously, and your operating system has to break them into fragments, putting a small piece here and a small piece there.
File system fragmentation on your HDD can bring unforeseen problems, such as complete slowdown of system performance, slow startup and shutdown, PC crashes and sometimes even to drive failures.
Fortunately for all of us there are a number of programs that are designed to eliminate fragmentation. One of the best programs of this kind is Diskeeper 2008.
Diskeeper 2008 has one of the most powerful defragmentation engines ever developed. Even if your system only has a 1% of free space it can be defragged by this great program.
Diskeeper runs in the background and in real time and automatically defrags your disk when your machine is idle. Thus it can handle fragmentation as it occurs, eliminating the need for manual defragmentation.



Diskeeper 2008 also allows you manually defrag your system. Boot-Time Defragmentation option allows you to defrag your hard drive at boot time, moving files that couldn’t be moved while Windows was in use.
The program can configure the MFTs (Master File Tables - the place where information about every file and directory on an NTFS hard drive is stored) and paging files (a hidden file on your HDD that Windows uses as if it were RAM), preventing them from fragmentation and thus increasing overall system performance.
Diskeeper 2008 includes many others options and features for advanced users.
If you abuse your harddrive with lots of new/updated/deleted files, I would definitely recommend that you try Diskeeper.
You can download the latest version of Diskeeper here.

SPAMfighter – The Easy Way to Fight Spam

If you are tired of getting spam and looking for an Outlook, Outlook Express, or Windows Mail spam filter to block spam from entering your inbox, Spamfighter is the application you are looking for.
SPAMfighter is a pretty popular anti-spam and anti-phishing addon for Microsoft Outlook, Outlook Express, and Windows Mail.
SPAMfighter is very easy to use. Once the program has been installed, you can just forget about it and simply use your email application as before with the significant difference that on around 95% of your spam is gone.
After installation of SPAMfighter, Outlook or Outlook Express gets a toolbar with four new control buttons and a new mail folder for dumping your spam into, called SPAMfighter. Using this toolbar, you can manually block and unblock an email messages. It also gives you access to advanced options of this application.



Program defines unsolicited email by using the power of a very large community of people who instantly report if they receive a spam mail. When several people designate the same letters as a spam, this letters is automatically blocked for the rest of the community in seconds.
If by chance you receive a spam mail in your Inbox, you can report it to the SPAMfighter server and remove it for all other community members with a single click on Block button in the SPAMfighter toolbar.
In addition, SPAMfighter uses special algorithm that filters large amount of spam before it ever hits the community.
SPAMfighter can block incoming mails from specific addresses and domains. To do this, you simply need to create a blacklist. You also can create a Whitelist and add there all your contacts to ensure that they are not filtered.



One of the great features of SPAMfighter is Language Recognition. It allows you to receive or reject only the emails written in the language(s) that you specify.
SPAMfighter is available in many languages, including English, German, Spanish, Chinese, French, Italian, Russian, and many others.
For your first 30 days you get the full Pro version, which keeps your emails free of adverts and offers some advanced features. When the trial period ends, you can either buy SPAMfighter Pro, or be downgraded to the free SPAMfighter Standard.
You can download the latest version of SPAMfighter here.

Google Earth 4.3 is available

Google Earth the 3D global mapping program that combines satellite imagery, aerial photography and the power of Google Search to put the world’s geographic information at your fingertips, has been updated a several days ago.
The new version of the program includes several new and interesting features. First of all Google Earth 4.3 has improved navigation tools, which Google hopes users will find to be more intuitively operable.
The zoom control was modified. Now, when you zoom closer to the ground, your view slowly tilts, as if you are parachuting onto the ground. When the zoom level reaches ground, you are surrounded by the 3D landscape in a view similar to that of a 3D game.



In addition, the Google Earth has received new control called “look” joystick. This special joystick lets you to look around and change your viewpoint. It is very handy tool. You can look up at the sky and down at the ground, or over the horizon.



Photorealistic 3D-structures finally appeared on Google Earth. The new version of the program, has added a lot of the 3D content. New version lets you view higher quality 3D Buildings - many of which are photo-textured.



Another addition to Google Earth application is Street View feature. It gives Google Earth users an on-the-ground 360-degree view that users may recognize from Google Maps.



Lastly, the new sunlight button will give you the ability to see the sunrise and sunset anywhere in the world.



Google Earth 4.3 is now available for download.

WinRAR 3.71 – One of the Most Popular Archiver in the World

There are many excellent compression utilities to choose from, but this software application offers the features and flexibility that could place it at the top of its category. WinRar is very easy to use and powerful archiver and archive manager. That is why it became one of the most popular archiver in the world.
WinRAR have some advantages over others programs of its kind. It can usually compress content more effectively and it is often faster than the competitors.
The good designed interface gives you quick access to all main features of the program. I like this easy to use and understand interface with its candy-coated appearance but if you don’t, you can always choose another theme at the developer’s site.



The Wizards that are included in WinRAR will help beginners compress and unpack files, while advanced users have access to lots of features like authenticity verification, programmable self-extracting archives, command line interface and importing or exporting of file settings.
WinRAR provides full support for RAR and ZIP archive formats, and it is able to process all other popular compression formats, including ACE, CAB, GZ, JAR, ISO, BZ2, and 7-Zip.
WinRAR integrates into Windows Explorer's context menu, so you can compress and extract files even without launching the application.
WinRAR has damaged archive repair feature that allows corrupt files to be accessed in order to salvage damaged data. The support of multi-volume compression gives the ability to split of a large file.



With Unicode support for international formatting, archive locking, integrated virus scan, strong AES encryption, theme support, folder tree panel, multithread support, Windows x64 shell integration and all others features WinRAR becomes one of the best programs of its kind.
Anyone looking for solid archiving solution should try this excellent program.

You can download the latest version of WinRar here.

jv16 PowerTools 2008 1.8.0.455

Macecraft Software Company has released an updated version of its jv16 PowerTools software.
jv16 PowerTools is one of the most known and certainly one of the best Windows optimization programs. This software is the suite containing 21 different tools which allow you to keep your computer running smoothly and error-free.
With jv16 PowerTools you can:

• Automatically fix many types of registry errors
  
• Automatically clean your Windows registry from unneeded and obsolete data
  
• Easily remove all traces of software you have thought you have already uninstalled ages ago
  
• Detect and remove unneeded history data and MRU (most recently used) lists that can contain your privacy information
  
• Find and remove unnecessary files, including temp files and duplicate files
  
• And much, much more!

The updated version contains the following changes.

• Fixed a bug from the Registry Finder which caused it not to properly find a certain type of registry errors.
  
• Added a safety feature to the Registry Cleaner and Registry Finder which prompts user for additional confirmation if user attempts to delete an important registry key.
  
• Added a safety feature to the File Cleaner and File Finder which makes it more difficult to delete important system files with it, if user attempts to do so the program shows an additional confirmation message.

If you want to improve the performance of your Windows system and release your hard drive from unneeded files jv16 PowerTools 2008 will be the right choice for you.
See more about jv16 PowerTools.
You can download jv16 PowerTools 2008 here. (Size: 3.7 MB; Usage limitations: 30 Day trial)

FreeRIP 3.07: compression without loss

The new version of popular ripper and converter has been released a few days ago.
FreeRip 3.07 is an easy to use program that can extract audio tracks from audio CD to files on your hard drive and convert existing audio files from one format to another.
However, not all audio formats are supported. FreeRip supports only the most popular WAV, MP3, OGG Vorbis and Flac audio formats. So you can save audio tracks as CD-quality WAV files or encode them to one of the supported audio formats. You are also able to create playlist of ripped tracks.
FreeRip lets you convert any WAV, MP3 and OGG audio file to WAV/MP3/ OGG/Flac formats and allows you to change their properties.
During ripping or converting it is possible to manually adjust track volume, or you can allow FreeRip do this work automatically using its volume control algorithm.
FreeRip supports Internet CD database freedb and can automatically search freedb database for your CD info. During the installation you can choose to install integrated browser music search bar that allows you to search the Internet for audio files.



The user interface of the program is multi language. FreeRip is translated into more than 25 languages, including English, Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian and many others.
The program is distributed in two versions, FreeRIP Basic which is totally free and commercial version called FreeRIP Pro which offers more options and features. FreeRIP Pro is able to ripping and convert files faster than free version. It also allows you to run multiple instances of FreeRIP at the same time.
The latest version of the program included integrated audio player and support for CUE sheets creation.
You can download the latest version of FreeRIP from this page.

See also: Easy CD-DA Extractor 11.1 - Universal Audio Ripper and Converter

BurnAware Free 1.2.9 – Free Burning Software

Not too long ago, the program that was most used for burning was Nero. This program long time ago turn into powerful, multifunctional software suite with numerous components. Media suites like Nero are everything we’ll ever need for producing and burning our disc media.
However, how many times you just use such media suites to simply back up files or create your audio CD? Face it, you use most often the only one burning part of any media suite. So why to pay for features you don’t need? If all you need is simple and good burning software, BurnAware Free Edition will be a right choice.
BurnAware Free Edition is designed to easily perform the most common disc burning operations, such as creating data discs, creating and burning disc images, writing multi-session discs, and writing Audio CD and DVD-video discs. The program supports all types of optical media from CD through to a Blu-ray writable disc.
The user interface of BurnAware is well designed and it is easy to use. When the program is started, it displays a window with the list of menu items.



Here you can select the relevant menu item to go to the desired screen where you can compile and work on your project.
Create data disc menu item allows you to compile and burn all types of files and folders as well as to create a disc image from the files on your hard drive.



The developers did not use the classical structure with two panels, one of which is a navigator on the local file system. Adding data is quite simple. Just click the Add files button to open the Add files and folders window where you can select files and folders you want to add.
However, I think it’s much easier to open any file manager and drag the desired objects on the window of BurnAware Free Edition.
After adding the files you can start the burning process by pressing the red button in the top right part of the screen.
Burn ISO image menu item lets you to burn a disc image. However, using BurnAware Free Edition you can burn only ISO image files.
Creating of Audio CD or DVD-video is also quite simple. But BurnAware Free Edition can create Audio CD only from WAV, MP3, or WMA files.
Like any disc burning software, BurnAware supports both options for disc erasing: quick and full. However, unlike in the case of the actual burning process, when you select for disc erasing you are given no information on the amount of time required for the completion of the task.



BurnAware Free Edition is absolutely free and has all basic functions of burning software. It’ll get the job done without investing much effort in working with it.
BurnAware is also available in Home edition that unlike the basic free edition includes some additional features like creating bootable discs, creating ISO images from discs, supporting ISO/UDF/Bridge file systems and CD-TEXT for Audio CD’s

Download BurnAware Free Edition (OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista; Freeware; Size: 4.4 MB)

Download BurnAware Home Edition (OS: Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista; Shareware; Size: 5.6 MB)

DVDFab Platinum 4.1.0.2 - Great DVD Copy Software

The new version of DVDFab Platinum has been released recently. This program combines the functionality of DVD copying, video converting and DVD burning software.
DVDFab Platinum offers you 7 DVD to DVD copy modes: Full Disc, Main Movie, Split, Customize, Clone, Merge and Write Data.
Full Disc mode allows you to copy all movies, menus and trailers to DVD with just one click. Moreover this copy mode can automatically compress DVD-9 movie to fit on a DVD-5 single layer disc. But if you want to preserve original quality of DVD-9 movie, you should use DVDFab’s Split copy mode, which copy a DVD-9 onto two DVD-5 discs with 100% quality, and preserve original menus.
Main Movie mode lets you copy the main movie only, excluding all the additional features like unwanted audio and subtitle, etc.
If you want to make a DVD with only your favorite titles, and without those annoying commercials, just use the DVDFab’s Customize copy mode.
DVDFab Platinum also allows you to make a perfect 1:1 copy of DVDs, merge several movies of several sources into one DVD and burn disc from an existing DVD folder or image on your hard disc drive.



The program has strong set of mobile device conversion options. DVDFab Platinum can convert DVDs to formats supported by mobile devices like iPod, PSP, Xbox 360, PS3, NDS, Cell Phone, ZUNE, PVP and PDA. So you can copy your DVDs to your favorite portable device.



DVDFab Platinum is also able to change the region codes, remove all DVD copy protections such as CSS, RC, CPPM, RipGuard, APS and many others.
DVDFab Platinum has very simple and clear user interface. The program also supports many languages. It is very easy to use and navigate.
The new version of program has added "Crop" feature to remove the black bar on many widescreen movies. Added feature that allow user to resize output from letterbox to pan&scan. There are also several others new features, improvements and bug fixes.
DVDFab Platinum is a powerful and very easy to use DVD copying software that takes everything you love about DVD coping and puts it in one clearly organized location.

Download DVDFab Platinum (Size: 6.0 MB; License: shareware; OS: Windows All, Linux with Wine)

IrfanView 4.10 - Full-featured Graphics Viewer

IrfanView is one of the most popular and feature packed free image viewer, editor and converter for Windows. This fast and compact program is trying to be simple for beginners and powerful for professionals.
IrfanView supports all important graphic formats, as well as multiple media formats.
In addition it includes many additional features including image editing, image adjustment, slideshow, batch conversion and editing, multipage editing, drag and drop support, TWAIN support, fast directory browsing, IPTC edit, capturing, numerous effects, multiple language support, and much more. Moreover, the functionality of IrfanView can be further extended via plug-ins that are widely available.
Lets take a closer look at this program.
The user interface of IrfanView is not streamlined, but it is simple and quite easy to use.
As I mentioned above IrfanView allows you to open image files, as well as sound and video files of multiple formats.



Thumbnails shortcut on the toolbar lets you view thumbnails of images in the specified directory.



IrfanView allows you to create slide shows. There are several options for slideshow. For example, you can set time interval for changing slides or use MP3 files (with installed plug-ins) as background music. You can also save the current slideshow as self running EXE or SCR file (standalone executable/screen saver).



IrfanView is not only the viewer, but also a converter of graphic files. In the program there is a batch processing option with the possibility of converting incoming files of different formats into a single output format. You also can apply many special operations to the images during conversion. Furthermore, IrfanView has batch rename feature that lets you rename original/input files or copy/move original files to output directory and rename the files in the output directory. For renaming, you can generate a name pattern for new names and the starting index for numbers.



Another IrfanView’s useful feature is called Copy Shop. It allows you to print an image directly from a scanner or any other TWAIN compatible device (digital camera, TV card, etc.).
Though IrfanView is not a professional graphic editor, it still allows you to do some useful image editing tasks. You can cut and crop images, paint or draw objects into an image, insert text. IrfanView also lets you to rotate, flip, resize images, create panoramas and apply different effects like sharpen, blur, emboss and others.



The program has many others useful features.
IrfanView is my favorite image viewer, because it offers really good options and features for free and because it is the fastest picture viewer I can find.

You can download IrfanView from this page or from the official web site irfanview.com.

See also: XnView 1.92 – The Universal Graphic Viewer and Converter