Windows Software

Recently, Power Downloader received an e-mail at the Powerlair from his niece, Kitty Kilobyte. Kitty explained she was stressed out about a project for school. Her assignment was to make a Web site about a specific subject which would include writing out a lot of information along with pictures to illustrate the content. Though she had all the writing done, Kitty was having problems choosing from her high-res photographs and couldn't get them to fit in with the content. She was particularly frustrated that her folder full of images all had unrecognizable file names and she didn't want … Read more

Whenever a big project is at hand, making sure that you follow through with important details takes planning. Whether it's as mundane as cleaning out the garage, confusing as organizing your daughter's soccer team, or complex as reworking the goals for a team at your company, an outline, a list, or a strategy can help you focus on the over-arching goal. It might be because it's easier to have visuals of bulleted lists or linear strategies to easily convey the steps necessary to complete a project. Think of it this way: Not having a plan of action is kind of like going to the grocery store without a list; sure, you'll remember a lot of stuff you need, but once you get home you're bound to smack yourself in the forehead saying, "Butter! How did I forget butter?"

I recently came across a great program for both Mac and PC that helps make the planning phases of a project much easier. MindManager helps you map out your thoughts and ideas using an intuitive graphical interface. You can start your own mind map with a central idea to work outwards from, or you can choose from several premade templates that focus on a specific task.… Read more

Wuala is a new company with a compelling story for Web users: If you want to share files--music, videos, anything--with your friends and family, it will let you do it for free, with no file-size or bandwidth limits.

The catch: You get 1GB of storage for free. Beyond that, you get access to free storage in proportion to the amount of storage from your own hard drive that you share with the Wuala community.

Wuala uses a "mesh" of hard drives from all its users. Everything you share gets sliced into 500 or so pieces and the distributed in tiny bits, and redundancy, to thousands of other users. When you, or someone you're sharing the file with, wants to load or play a file, it's pulled in from users, BitTorrent-like.

It's not easy to build a reliable storage network based on end-user PCs, which tend to be online only sporadically, and with poor upstream bandwidth. Wuala rewards its users that stay online: The amount of storage users have access to is equal to the amount of storage from their own drives that they've set aside for the Wuala network, multiplied by the average percentage of time that their machine is online. In other words, if you're sharing 20GB of your hard disk, and your PC is on 50 percent of the time, you'll be able to use 10GB of space on the Wuala network. PCs that are network-connected less than 20 percent of the time cannot share their space at all.

All files you put up on the network are replicated extensively, so you'll always be able to get the data that you've uploaded. CEO Dominik Grolimund assured me. We had a nice talk about the mechanics of his network's security, redundancy, and reliability that I won't replay here, other than to say that if Wuala doesn't work as reliably as traditional centralized storage, it's going to be a very short-lived start-up.

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A great tool for when you're mucking about with reinstalling an operating system or just want to have several fail safes going is DriverMax, which backs up your drivers one at a time, a few at a time, or all at once. From registration to implementation, DriverMax works fast, runs smooth, and even does more than mere safe-checking.

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IrfanView arguably has the worst name in all of freewaredom, but that doesn't stop it from being a top-notch lightweight image editor. Oh, and it just got better.

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Anybody who downloads software knows that the size of the file is going to effect the time it takes to download. The bigger the file the longer you wait, right? For those of you who are on a dial-up connection (I know you're still out there), the size of the file can be the difference between downloading and moving on to something else. Even with a fast connection, some of the popular game demos and larger software apps can mean an all-night download party for your computer--particularly when that download is in high demand.… Read more

When Digg first came out with its labs section, almost immediately people threw together unofficial screensavers for each of the visualizations. Since the visualizations run in Adobe Flash, the user creations often just loaded up the pages in a full-screen Flash viewer. Today, Digg has launched official versions of the screensavers for all four of their labs visualizations, which were originally put together by Stamen Design.

Just like the Web versions, you can sit back and watch the current activity on Digg as it's happening, and interact with any of the content. The screensavers are cross platform, and run … Read more

One of the most frequent questions I get from CNET Download.com users is "What free software can I use to edit video?" If I didn't respond to you personally, it's likely because there's not an easy answer. It depends on what type of video you have, and what you want to do with it.

Let's start with the basics. If you didn't know, you likely already have Windows Movie Maker, which was included with Windows XP Service Pack 2 and recently beefed up for Windows Vista.

The XP version of Movie Maker is adequate for putting together clips into larger videos, adding simple transitions, and making basic edits, but I can't recommend the experience. The review on CNET Download.com is overly harsh, but it encapsulates several problems you may encounter.… Read more

For many of us, empty directory folders are a cause for little concern. Sure it's annoying when you open a folder, not able to remember its contents, and discover it emptier than your fridge on a midnight munchies run. That annoyance--the empty folders, not the empty fridge--has spurned one programmer to action. Remove Empty Directories is the result, and it's not hard to guess what it does.

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