Month: December 2007

If you didn’t have enough with Nick’s post about how to have your own Christmas themed interactive desktop, here’s another software app that can help you show your eagerness to celebrate the upcoming holidays. Free Christmas Tree is a desktop companion, that is, a small piece of software that sits right on your desktop and acts as some kind of virtual decoration for your PC. And, as you can tell by its name, this time the decoration comes in the shape of a Christmas tree.

This little digital tree can be customized with different skins, including several trees in various sizes and also an array of Christmas balls. Plus, it displays a countdown clock that you can set to calculate the time left for Christmas Day, New Year’s Day or Julian Christmas (January 7th). Free Christmas Tree can also play Jingle Bells every hour, but we strictly recommend to enable this feature only if you’re a real Christmas fan. Otherwise it may get too cheesy.

You would be surprised at how many useless files might be laying around on your hard disks and sorting them by size can be a good way of teasing out the ones you don’t need. WhatSize is a simple tool that allows the user to quickly measure the size in bytes of a given folder and all subfolders and files within it. The files and folders are automatically sorted by size, with the biggest sizes first.

Photoshop is great at all, but it’s price puts many people off. Paint Shop Pro has always been one of the most popular alternatives, offering a wide range of photo manipulation tools for all levels of expertise. The new version of the software, X2, adds and Express Lab for faster editing, Layer Styles, HDR Photo Merge, and lots more.

Dear Softonic users,

Nowadays, more and more people are using their computers to watch video. Sites like YouTube have become incredibly popular in the last couple of years, but people are also much more likely to watch full-length TV shows and movies than they were just a year ago. So with all this high-resolution content being watched on PCs around the world, we thought we’d give you our best tips when it comes to working with video on your computer.

Kicking things off, Cyril wrote an interesting post this week detailing the best DVD playing programs for Windows. If you thought that DVD playback should consist of sticking the disk in your PC and letting Windows Media Player handle everything, you should definitely have a look at this post – you may be missing out.

One of my favourite formats for video has got to be DivX. This revolutionary codec has completely change the way we watch TV on the net, offering very high quality image and sound but with small file-sizes. Nick’s got the low-down on the five best programs to use in conjunction with DivX… personally, I recommend the VLC Player (our pick of the week), which is arguably the best media player available.

James and Nick are both into gadgets, and they’ve both come up with interesting ways to take your video content with you wherever you go. James has prepared a guide to converting video files for your mobile phone, while Nick covered portable video on your iPod. Now you can watch Heroes everywhere you go!

Finally, if you still haven’t tried watching TV on your computer, it’s really simple and, free and legal. Well, it’s legal if you use authorised TV programs. Our favourites are Zattoo (for local TV in your country of residence) and Joost (for on-demand video including comedy, animation, news and more). Give them a go and let us know which is your favourite!

Until next week…

No time to bother with Christmas trees this year? Or simply too Scrooge to splash out on some festive decorations? There is nothing like your own Christmas tree and lights to get you in the Christmas mood and since we spend half of our life behind a computer, it only seems fair that your PC gets involved too. Christmas Tree Interactive Desktop is a great little program that installs a tree on your desktop, along with other assorted Christmas goodies, and then allows you to decorate it as you want – and it doesn’t cost a cent.

You can decorate the tree with lights, ornaments, place presents underneath it, choose a few festive tunes to play in the background and even change the outdoor scenery. And if like me, you’re worried about electrocuting yourself on cheap Christmas lights from the convenience store, you’ll take a lot of pleasure in adjusting the tempo, design and colours of the lights without risking life and limb. The only problem is that the tree and scenery is so full of ornaments and decorations that it makes seeing things difficult on your desktop but you can always shift your most important icons to a clearer part of the screen.

Whether you like it or not, at some stage everyone who has their own internet connection has to configure their router. If you use several different routers in different locations, you’ll also know that no two routers have the same admin system and it can sometimes be a pain trying to work out how they work. A handy solution I’ve used is Alejandria Open&Play that manages to provide a one-admin-tool-fits-all solution to router admin.

It’s designed and updated regularly to work with hundreds of different routers and so chances are that yours is compatible. The main beauty of this program is that it can help you manage your all important ports to obtain maximum upload and download speeds. If your ports are not opened or configured correctly, you may be losing valuable bandwidth especially on P2P apps e.g. the common “low ID” problem with eMule. So if you simply having problems setting up a router or want to optimise it without worrying about the technicalities, Alejandria Plug&Play is definitely worth a try.

I’ve now got so many bookmarks, I often feel like I’m floundering in them all. It’s almost taking me longer to scroll through them than to simply google the sites I’m looking for. That’s why I’ve been looking at a few bookmark managers to help me organise them in a more effective way. Although Firefox has a pretty decent bookmarks manager, it’s still pretty limited in many respects. I’ve found that these tools can help considerably in bookmark management, especially integrating with online activities in a more effective way.

• del.icio.us Bookmarks – Integrates Firefox with the del.icio.us bookmakrking site

• Bookmark Buddy – Cross browser bookmark manager

• SV Bookmark Manager – Add detailed descriptions and even images to bookmarks

• Bookmark Base – Portable bookmark manager for USB sticks

• Foxmarks – Synchronises your bookmarks across Firefox on different machines

I recently read an interesting article on MSNBC about a non-profit organisation that has released software designed to monitor whether your ISP is giving you a bum deal on your connection. Virtually everyone I talk to has had problems with their internet connection at some stage. Whether it’s fluctuating speeds, dropped or blocked connections, wherever you go, it seems you never get the service you were sold.

I’ve always found it incredibly annoying that my own ISP advertises speeds of “up to” 20MB per second when in actual fact, most of the time (like now) I’m lucky to be getting more than 5MB per second. Of course, there’s nothing you can do about this. The ISP’s customer service drones simply tell you that “the advertised speed is a maximum and the average can vary depending on the amount of traffic at any one time.” They’ll also blame any problems on everything else including your equipment, the number of people on your connection, the setup of your router and generally you as a person for being so technologically inept. Anyway, with this in mind, here’s a collection of tools to help you monitor the state and speed of your ISP – not they’ll give a damn if you show them the results.

• SoftPerfect Bandwidth Manager – Deatailed breakdown of your connection stats

• BitMeter II – Simple tool to see how your connection is being used

• Aldo’s Net Monitor – Intermediate monitor to verify your connection activity

• MZL & Novatech Traffic Statistics – Advanced monitoring tool for broadband users

• BWMeter – Analyse the activity and performance of data packets sent and received