Opera 9.5 beta

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Opera
Size 4.98MB
Free Download

Since the release of Opera 9 earlier this year, Opera have been working hard fixing little bugs, making minor improvements and turning Opera in to a serious rival to Internet Explorer. Now at 9.5, albeit a second early preview, it's worth downloading if you've not used this browser before.

The new speed dial feature is a new view in new tabs. It shows live thumbnails of up to nine websites. Click on one to open the site, or enter a new address as normal. It's certainly more useful than a blank tab.

Opera also supports BitTorrent downloads. These type of downloads make best use of available bandwidth by splitting files up and downloading the different bits from several locations at the same time.

The principle of the system is that files downloaded onto your computer should be accessible to others but Opera can turn this off to conserve bandwidth quotas.

An improved content blocker allows individual elements of a webpage to be blocked to avoid adverts. The pop up blocker has also been improved.

Widgets are a small programs for showing news feeds or other information, some of which can be taken from the web. They are accessed with a single keypress and are written by the Opera community rather than the company itself.

The tabbed browsing has also been improved with a small preview of the webpages.

This is the first beta release of the forthcoming Opera 9.5 and it's worth downloading if you're an Opera user. It's much faster, the user-interface has been updated and the search bar includes immediate feedback.

Auslogics Disk Defrag 1.4.10.249

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Auslogics Pty Ltd
Size 1.5MB
Free Download

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

The latest version includes support for defragmenting removable drives, such as a USB stick and other devices. Other improvements for Vista and general program stability.

IObit SmartDefrag beta 4

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer IObit.com
Size 1.61MB
Free Download

Obit SmartDefrag is a free defragging tool and worth investigating. It’s also rather fast. However, remember that when you defragment your drive that it’s advisable not to be running applications at the same time.

Note that SmartDefrag is still in beta so should be used with an element of caution. Also displays Google Ads (adware) within the application. This new version includes support for Windows Vista.

Defraggler 1.00.031

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Piriform Ltd
Size 400Kb
Free Download

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.

Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.8

Platform Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Mozilla Corporation
Size 5.55MB
Free Download

Mozilla Firefox, the popular web browser, caused a stir with the original release, but apart from minor changes, visual improvements and security fixes, there haven’t been a wide range of new features since the original 1.x release. This is all about to change, with the release of Firefox 2.0. Windows version available to download from this page.

Current new 2.0 features include anti-phishing support, useful for acknowledging the difference between a legitimate website and a fake site set up for the purposes of obtaining your personal information.

Other new features include enhanced tabbed browsing, the ability to open tabs closed accidentally, spell checking within web forms, a search plugin manager, combined and enhanced Add-Ons manager and much more, including support for new web standards.

You can download other language editions of the Windows Firefox 2.0, as well as Linux and Mac OS X versions from the Mozilla website.

Opera 9.5 Preview (build 9594)

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Opera
Size 5MB
Free download

Since the release of Opera 9 earlier this year, Opera have been working hard fixing little bugs, making minor improvements and turning Opera in to a serious rival to Internet Explorer. Now at 9.5, albeit a second early preview, it's worth downloading if you've not used this browser before.

The new speed dial feature is a new view in new tabs. It shows live thumbnails of up to nine websites. Click on one to open the site, or enter a new address as normal. It's certainly more useful than a blank tab.

Opera also supports BitTorrent downloads. These type of downloads make best use of available bandwidth by splitting files up and downloading the different bits from several locations at the same time.

The principle of the system is that files downloaded onto your computer should be accessible to others but Opera can turn this off to conserve bandwidth quotas.

An improved content blocker allows individual elements of a webpage to be blocked to avoid adverts. The pop up blocker has also been improved.

Widgets are a small programs for showing news feeds or other information, some of which can be taken from the web. They are accessed with a single keypress and are written by the Opera community rather than the company itself.

The tabbed browsing has also been improved with a small preview of the webpages.

DownThemAll 1.0 Beta 2

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP
Type freeware
Manufacturer Federico Parodi and Stefano Verna
Size 425Kb
Free Download

With the rise of online photo album storage sites and media portals such as YouTube, we’re now able to browse the web and view other people’s home movies and digital photos. However, downloading more than one of these files isn’t easy. For instance, head over to your favourite digital photo site or simply a photo album of one of your friends and you might be presented with hundreds of photos to download. Do you spend hours surfing for your favourites or simply download them all and choose later? Worse, the photos on the web page are only thumbnails, so you’d have to preview every photo before you can download.

DownThemAll 1.0 Beta 2 is a Firefox extension that enables you to download everything from a web site with one click. You can choose to download links on a web page, automatically. You could simply select the pages you want to download from and then DownTheAll 1.0 will go through the links and download the files.

Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool 1.34

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Microsoft
Size 8.30MB
Free Download

Security must be becoming an important issue for Microsoft, as this is the second release in almost as many days, coming hot on the heels of its AntiSpyware software.

Download this small tool and your PC will be scanned and checked for malicious software. Should any be found it is automatically removed, and a full report displayed on-screen at the end of the scan.

A new version of this tool will be released every second Tuesday of the month, and the download link above takes you to the Microsoft download page to ensure you get the most up-to-date version.

You must have administrator access in order to run this software on your PC.

MediaCoder 0.6.0.3905

Platform Windows XP
Type freeware
Manufacturer Stanley Huang
Size 16.92MB
Free Download

Working with video and audio codecs can be a real pain, for the professional media designer and for the home user who wants to playback old video they’ve downloaded from the Internet. For the professional media designer, if they’ve been given video and audio to create a DVD, the media isn’t always presented in the format required to produce the DVD – the media needs to be decoded before it can be encoded to the correct format.

There are plenty of open-source codecs available. For instance the K-Lite Codec Pack collates a number of old and new codecs within one package which you can use to encode/decode and play your media. However, some of these codecs require you to use multiple media encoders/decoders and who wants to install these packages on one computer?

MediaCoder is a tool that collates the use of these codecs in to one interface. From the single interface, you can import your audio and video, quickly see the codecs used to encode them and then convert them to another format, where required. MediaCoder goes much further than simple conversion though. You can take DVD-quality video and then reduce this to a format that will be playable on a portable media device.

KeePass 2.03

Platform Windows 98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Dominik Reichl
Size 1.43MB
Free Download

Today you need to remember many passwords. You need a password for the Windows network logon, your email account, your homepage's ftp password, online passwords (like CodeProject member account) etc. The list is endless.

Often people keep the same password for multiple accounts but this could prove a serious problem. If someone else finds this password they then have access to your various online accounts. It's like giving someone your PIN for your credit card.

KeePass is a password manager, or safe, which will enable you to manage your passwords in a secure way. You can put all your passwords in one database, which is locked with one master key or a key-disk. You only have to remember one single master password or insert the key-disk to unlock the whole database.

The databases are encrypted using the best and most secure encryption algorithms currently known (AES and Twofish).

Internet Explorer 7.0.5

Platform Windows XP
Type freeware
Manufacturer Microsoft
Size 14.8MB
Free Download

The brand new version of Internet Explorer ships with a new and enhanced user-interface, supporting tabbed browser amongst other features. Security has been enhanced so that it protects against malicious software, the theft of personal data (through online phishing sites). Other improvements include better and more modern support for CSS and general web design.

Many people were worried about using Internet Explorer 6 for secure web browsing. Tons of additional security features are to be found in the latest release. You can opt out of ActiveX controls, you're presented with an extensive security status bar so you can see exactly if the web site is secure, you now have the facility to quickly delete your surfing history (so other people can't see what sites you've previously visited) and parental controls to stop access to particular websites.

The latest version does not require windows genuine advantage, the menu bar is now visable by default and it includes a number of minor bug fixes.

DivX for Windows 6.7.0.18

Platform Windows 2000, Windows XP
Type freeware
Manufacturer DivX
Size 22.67MB
Free Download

This bundle includes the DivX Player and DivX codec. Both are free and no adware is included in the package. The DivX codec can be used within other media players, such as Apple's QuickTime.

The DivX Player plays all AVI and .divx files that contain DivX video and MP3 audio (including DivX 3, 4, 5 and 6 video formats), and enables access to DivX Video-on-Demand services.

The DivX codec extends DivX playback support to all popular media players. This package supports English, French, German, and Japanese languages.

DivX Player is optimised to play DivX media files with full support for all the advanced features of the DivX Media Format including scene selection menus, chapters, subtitles, video tags and alternate audio tracks.

In addition, DivX Player is enhanced to give you the full value of DivX HD video through new features such as performance adaptive quality enhancement and the latest DivX.

NoteTab Light 5.5

Platform Windows 98/ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista
Type freeware
Manufacturer Fookes Software
Size 2.33MB
Free Download

oteTab Light is the ultimate free Notepad replacement and a capable HTML editor. A slimmer version of the award-winning NoteTab Pro, this slick application makes text editing a breeze. Move quickly around a stack of large files with a simple tabbed interface. Format your text to your heart's content. Write with the font of your choice, fixed-width or proportional.
Key Features

• Open and edit many documents at once
• Capable of editing huge text files
• Text drag-and-drop editing
• AutoCorrect/Auto-replace mode
• Clip tool for quick and easy text insertion
• Capture text sent to Clipboard