Winrar
WinRAR is an archiving utility that completely supports RAR
and ZIP archives and is able to unpack CAB, ARJ, LZH, TAR, GZ, ACE, UUE, BZ2,
JAR, ISO, 7Z, Z archives. It consistently makes smaller archives than the
competition, saving disk space and transmission costs.
WinRAR offers a graphic interactive interface utilizing
mouse and menus as well as the command line interface. WinRAR is easier to use
than many other archivers with the inclusion of a special "Wizard"
mode which allows instant access to the basic archiving functions through a
simple question and answer procedure.
WinRAR offers you the benefit of industry strength
archive encryption using AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a key of 128
bits. It supports files and archives up to 8,589 billion gigabytes in size. It
also offers the ability to create selfextracting and multivolume archives. With
recovery record and recovery volumes, you can reconstruct even physically
damaged archives.
Download : Win 32bit
: Win 64bit
Download : Youtube Downloader
Download : Teracopy
Youtube
Downloader
YouTube Downloader is a popular, free
program that enables you to download and convert online videos (legal content,
to which you have the rights) for later viewing on your desktop or mobile
device. It can convert files to MOV, MP4, 3GP, WMV, AVI, or MP3.
The name "YouTube Downloader" is
terribly misleading because the program, in fact, downloads a whole lot more
than just YouTube videos. On the developer's site, you can find an extensive
list of additional supported sites including Facebook and Vimeo. This wide net
of support easily pushes YouTube Downloader to the top of its category.
When you find a video you'd like to
download, copy the URL of the video page and open YouTube Downloader. From
there, you'll notice that the program automatically pastes the URL into the
appropriate field. Choose your desired Download quality (Best Available is a
nice option) and your destination folder, then hit Download. Once your download
is finished, hit the Play tab to watch. The Convert tab lets you export to a
different file format for playing elsewhere, and gives you a convenient mini
editor for making minor alterations before your export. You can change video
volume (or remove audio altogether) and splice footage by setting specific
start and end times.
One thing that disappointed us was the
absence of a one-step download-and-convert function in the free version. If you
want the one-step convenience, you'll have to upgrade to Pro ($19.90), which
also gives you the capability of downloading multiple videos at once. Also, it
would've been nice to be able to name files before downloading them, but that's
certainly not a deal-breaker.
For online video enthusiasts looking to
download non-copyrighted or personally owned videos, YouTube Downloader appears
to be a near-perfect tool. Sure it's missing a few minor conveniences, but its
simplicity and the fact that it casts such a wide net of support for online
video sites make it virtually unbeatable.
Download : Youtube Downloader
Photoscape
Add another name to the roster of
feature-rich freeware image editors: PhotoScape. Although it eats and leaks
about as much memory as Firefox, this editor is perfect for those making the
jump between JPEG and am-pro dSLR work.
It supports RAW, as well as all other major
image formats from JPEG and PNG to animated GIFs. It comes with prebuilt
templates for users to create photo collages, fumetti, and Web comics, and has
a standard set of red-eye removal, light/shadow, and contrast-editing features.
One warning about the RAW processing: although it looks like you can drag and
drop, the converter doesn't change RAW to JPEG unless you load the RAW file
from within the native file navigator. It's a minor bug, but one that can lead
you to believe that there's no RAW support at all. You can also batch edit
images, combine them, and print them out one at a time or several at once.
The program loads fast and possesses an
interface completely different from those familiar with Adobe's
industry-leading tools. Users are greeted by circular navigator complemented by
a tabbed nav on the top of the main screen. Most but not all main features are
accessible from either nav. It might take some people time to get used to the
unusual layout, but it's only unusual for an image editor; otherwise it's
intuitive, fast, and lacks only the most advanced of image editing features.
Download : Photoscape
Picasa
Picasa Web Albums is Google's Web
photo-hosting service. Users get 1GB of free hosting, and images can be
uploaded and manipulated using Picasa, Google's free desktop photo management application.
Users who want additional storage can shell out up to $500 a year to bump up
the hosted space to 400 times the size of the free hosting service.
Much like everything else Google, Picasa is
exceptionally straightforward to use, with a tabbed interface offering three
options--My Photos, Favorites, and Explore--the last of which lets you browse
the public photo library. Next to the tabs, you'll find a prominent Upload
button for adding photos to your albums, which you can set to various levels of
privacy. Within your albums, you have the option to view a slideshow, share via
e-mail, make a collage or movie, order prints, and edit various aspects.
We really like the integration between the
desktop and Web application. Similar to .Mac and iPhoto, Picasa makes it really
simple to take photos from your desktop and publish them online for others to
see. We're also fans of the built-in geotagging that lets you set where photos
were taken either by single photo, or by entire albums. It's a great way to browse
photos if you feel like exploring.
Teracopy
TeraCopy from Code Sector is a free
file-copying utility that offers more speed and security than Windows. It's a
compact tool that can quickly copy or move single files or batches of files to
any directory you select, but it does much more, such as automatically
calculating CRC checksum values to speed up the validation process. It also
skips bad files during the copying process, displaying them at the end of
transfers so you can see just which ones need replacing or other attention.
TeraCopy's user interface is a pair of
efficient dialogs, one an icon-based control panel that you use to add, copy,
move, test, and delete files, and a second interface that pops up to do the
work. After we installed TeraCopy, it opened with this second interface in
minimized mode, a tiny dialog with twin file directory fields--one for source
files, the other for the target folder--that double as progress bars for file
transfers. Clicking More expands the interface to a multifile view for batch
operations and accesses the Clean Up, Verify, and Delete controls as well as a
file menu button that includes Options; you can also access this interface from
the Start Menu. A drop-down menu lists recent operations with time stamps for
quick retrieval. Selecting TeraCopy on a file's properties menu calls up a
different, icon-based navigation and control panel. We opened this interface
and used the browsing tool to add a file to copy and create a destination
folder, and then clicked Copy. The operation was successful but concluded so
quickly that we had to open the target folder and check the file's properties
to verify that anything happened at all. We also tried the Test feature in this
view, which verified an ubuntu ISO disk image in about 2 seconds. You can even
associate TeraCopy with .sfv and .md5 files in its options dialog or during
installation.
TeraCopy is a nifty piece of freeware that
improves the copy/move function in Windows and adds useful extras like checksum
calculation and permanent delete. We tried it in both Windows 7 and XP, and
recommend it for all
Download : Teracopy
Movie Maker
Windows Movie Maker is a useful tool that is a video editor and creator all in one.
If you think that creating a video with your photos is
too complicated, think again and take a look at Windows Movie
Maker.
Download : Movie Maker
