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Freeware Files: Five Apps for a Windows 7 Desktop Makeover!

David Murphy — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0600

There's nothing wrong with the Windows 7 desktop per se. But for freeware developers, that's no excuse not to tweak, hack, and otherwise modify every possible piece of your screen. And it's not that difficult to add new functionality to your desktop that doesn't otherwise exist in the operating system. The hardest part is finding software that makes a substantive change to what you already have. After all, the last thing you want to do is install a ton of different freeware apps and find your desktop in even worse shape than it was before (if you do, take a quick trip to Revo Uninstaller).

The intensity of the following five free applications ranges from apps that completely revamp your desktop's look and feel to programs that add new ways for accessing common apps and folders straight off your desktop. How far you want to go with your tweaking is entirely up to you--these are just some of the more interesting tools I've come across that should go a long way toward raising your "Windows Power User" level a few notches.

Desktop Media

Here's an easy one. Desktop Media emulates one of OSX's most basic and useful features. Whenever you stick a new CD in the drive, connect a portable USB storage device to your system, or fire up a network drive (amongst other options), Desktop Media slaps a shortcut to said device right on your desktop. Remove the device (or take the CD out), and the shortcut automatically disappears. Fire this one up in front of your friends and they'll swear that you've built some crazy Mac/Windows hybrid--you'll be the life of the Windows 7 party.

Download it here!

StandaloneStack 2

I've always enjoyed how Windows 7 has managed to simultaneously de-clutter and improve the usefulness of the default Windows Vista and Windows XP taskbars. However, every icon on the bar at the little bottom of your screen still only represents one program. Sure, you can get some added contextual items to select if you click on an application's arrow icon on the Start Menu, but this isn't a universal feature for all applications--and you're still only interacting with a single program.

StandaloneStack 2 allows you to move one step beyond these features and create program "stacks," or graphical lists, based off of a single icon. When you click on this icon, you can use the ensuing menu of items to launch new programs, folders, or settings options. It's like having a number of different Start buttons that you can customize as much as you'd like.

Download it here!

7 Taskbar Tweaker

This app might be limited in its prettiness, but it more than makes up for it with its usefulness. As you might expect, 7 Taskbar Tweaker is a simple utility for adding additional functionality into your default Windows 7 taskbar. For example, you can switch between either a default jump list or standard window menu when you right-click an icon, toggle application grouping on and off, and make use of new middle-click functionality that either opens a new instance of a taskbar program, closes the window, or focuses the window. You can also disable thumbnail previews, should you so choose. It's not a weighty list of items to play around with, but 7 Taskbar Tweaker's modifications aren't normally customizable options in the Windows 7 OS.

Download it here!

MenuApp

Speaking of the Start Menu, let's suppose you have a ton of different files, programs, favorites, and shortcuts that you want to be able to access from a single location. Let's call this set of objects "work." Normally, you'd have to make a folder somewhere on your system or desktop and dump all of your pertinent files in there, as well as all of your bookmarked Web sites, shortcuts to all the programs you need to access, et cetera. To organize this folder, you'd have to use subfolders related to the items you intend to store. Fun.

MenuApp removes the ugliness from this organization by allowing you to create Start Menu-like hierarchies based off of a single icon on your desktop. Now, you can simply click on your newly created "work" icon and pull up all of your files, shortcuts, and other objects of interest via an easy-to-access system of menus without having to move a single piece of data around your PC. Just tell MenuApp where the documents you want to access are located on your computer and it'll automatically create menus based on the contents of those folders--from there, you can shuffle and create organized pathways through your data at your leisure.

Download it here!

Rainmeter

For the ultimate in desktop skinning without a ton of crazy configuration files to wade through, Rainmeter is an excellent tool for changing the look of your entire desktop without sacrificing a large amount of system resources. A recent update to the application adds a little feature called RainBrowser, which lets you run through the different skins you've installed for the application and tweak their settings or preview their look before you start changing up your desktop en masse. The Rainmeter developers do the best job of summarizing the coolness of this free app: "Every inch of a skin is completely customizable."

Or, in other words, the sky's the limit. Ha-ha!

Download it here!

David Murphy (@ Acererak) is a technology journalist and former Maximum PC editor. He writes weekly columns about the wide world of open-source as well as weekly roundups of awesome, freebie software. Befriend him on Twitter, especially if you have an awesome app or game you're dying to recommend!

Ten Interesting Facts You May Have Never Known About Google

Ryan Whitwam — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 18:00:15 -0600

Google has risen to become a behemoth in the tech world in just a bit over a decade. Even in that short time, enough weird tidbits of information resulted that it makes an entertaining read. Perusing this list of ten interesting facts about Google will make you chuckle and scratch your head.

For instance, did you know that the original name for Google’s PageRank algorithm was “BackRub"? PageRank is probably better and less creepy. Have you ever used Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button? Well, that button costs Google about $110 million per year, because it skips past the ads on the results page. Hit the story link for the full list.

Freeware Files: A Case of the Keyboard Krazies!

David Murphy — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 10:30:00 -0500

How jacked up is your keyboard? Do you have one of those super-fancy, 800+ button, LCD-screen, lit-up, wheeled contraptions that's less an input device, more a control panel at a nuclear power plant? If so, you're probably the kind of person who doesn't need the apps I'm about to list out in this week's freeware roundup. Unless, that is, you're also one of those people (including yours truly) who have a ton of buttons and options to play with, yet no resolve to actually go about mapping this to that.

And if you're just rocking a plain ol' keyboard, I hope you're sitting down because you're in for a world of difference. The applications I'm profiling today are all keyboard-focused, and they all seek to add some kind of additional, awesome functionality to (or based on) your default button layouts. Launch programs! Use your keyboard media buttons to control all of your media players! Look up every Adobe-related shortcut within the span of seconds!

All that, and more, await you in this week's freeware and open-source software roundup. Let's get started.

Media Keyboard 2 Media Player

If you've been a freeware and open-source aficionado when it comes to your media players, you might have found that a number of third-party programs just don't work with the media keys on your keyboard. You can jam play, pause, or skip track all you want--nothing happens. Although it's still in its infancy, Media Keyboard 2 Media Player allows you to get some use out of these dead keys by transforming your button-pushing into the actual hotkey combinations for your other media player apps. Unfortunately, only XMPlay, VLC, and Winamp are supported right now. Here's hoping a more universal solution will pop up in the future!

Download it here

Winlayout

The description of this one is simple. Winlayout lets you control your open windows using your number pad. The program doesn't work perfectly with Windows 7 right now, but other than that, it's a quick way to send windows flying around your desktop screen with the mash of a button. More than 30 separate actions, including window resizing, are launched by combinations of the windows key and number pad buttons

Download it here

ActiveHotkeys

So, suppose you're using a fancy program like AutoHotkey to build increased functionality into your keyboard through the use of customized hotkeys. Or, for that matter, suppose you want to change up the hotkeys of any given program? You can select whatever you want, but what happens when you pick a hotkey combination that's in use by another program or application? Short answer: Chaos. Avoid this fate by using ActiveHotkeys to check out which hotkeys on your system are in use or not. The app doesn't tell you which program has claimed the key combination, but at least you'll know that your freshly assigned ALT-T hotkey will load up a new tab rather than your favorite Mr. T application.

Download it here

Adobe Shortcut App

Design enthusiasts take note: If you're one of the lucky to afford any bits or pieces of Adobe's Creative Suite, you'll know that a wealth of functionality can be called up in these applications with but a few hits from your fingertips. And you should equally know that there's little more frustrating than your mad attempts to find the correct key combination for a feature you've previously used and since forgotten. The Adobe Shortcut App solves these problems with its easy-to-use search functionality for Adobe keyboard shortcuts. Not only can you search for and switch between PC and Mac versions of the shortcuts, but you can create your own favorites list for frequently used shortcuts that you want to keep fresh at your command.

Download it here

ControlPad

If you thought the aforementioned Winlayout was lame--the program that allows you to resize windows with your number pad--then perhaps you'll find a bit of joy in this other application that makes even better use of said number pad. In this case, ControlPad transforms your number pad into a launching station. Start by assigning a numerical identifier to a particular task, like opening up new applications or sending a particular series of keystrokes to the OS. From there, you simply have to hold the * key on the number pad for a second or so, then enter the code you just created in the window that appears. Your command then executes, opening up your favorite files or launching your favorite games in a fraction of the time it would normally take.

Download it here

Symantec Names 100 Most Malicious Websites

Pulkit Chandna — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 19:35:14 -0500

Symantec has published a list of the dirtiest 100 websites. The websites are said to contain around 18,000 threats apiece on an average. However, the average number of threats shoots up to 20,000 for the top 40 websites on the list, which has been compiled by Symantec’s Norton Safe Web service. Aladel.net, a US-based websites, alone houses 56,371 threats.

Although almost half of the websites are expectedly based around mature content, the remaining sites deal with a wide variety of subjects. Viruses dominate the list of threats found on these sites. Security risks and browser exploits are the other common threats found on them. The owners of the websites that figure on the list must be feeling a sense of elation and achievement. As for the rest of us, we now know which sites not to visit.

Image Credit: Symantec

9 Amazing Software Mashups - Killer Free Apps that Work Better Together

Alex Castle and Norman Chan — Thu, 21 May 2009 12:00:00 -0500

There are few things we like more than apps that enhance the Windows experience at no cost. In fact, we've already shown you the 32 essential programs that you must download with every clean install of Windows. But while those apps work great on their own, some killer programs and services perform even better when combined with other software. For example, Dropbox excels as a standalone application, but when used in concert with the little-known Mklink command, its potential is exponentially expanded. We call these unions "software mashups" -- the use of two apps for utility that's greater than the sum of their parts. Yes, 1 + 1 can equal 3. And the best part: every program in this feature is free.

Dropbox + Mklink = Cloud Capability for Any App

We have to warn you; there are three reasons that this first mashup is a little weird. For one, it only works on PCs running Windows Vista or 7. Sorry XP users (Although, really, you should give the Windows 7 RC a try if you haven’t yet; we love it). Second, mklink isn’t an app—at least not like the other programs on this list are—it’s a command line command. Finally, this combo isn’t complete by itself; it needs to be combined with a third program to do anything.

That said, this is probably the most powerful combination on the list. We'll explain:

Dropbox

Dropbox is a file syncing app which acts as a folder on your computer. You install the client on as many computers as you want, and any changes you make to the contents of the Dropbox folder are automatically propagated to all computers connected to the same Dropbox account. However, there's more to DropBox than just file syncing—you can also use it to synchronize other programs, sharing configuration files and databases between multiple instances of that same program on different computers.

The only problem with using Dropbox to sync programs is that it only works with apps that allow you to change where those configuration files and databases are stored—a minority of all software. That’s where Mklink comes in.

Mklink

Mklink is a command line command short for “make link.” It’s used to create symbolic or hard links, which allow you to link files and folder. It’s sort of like creating shortcuts, except that they’re handled at the operating system level, so they work with any program. You can, for instance, use mklink to fool Steam into thinking that a game on a different hard drive is actually in your Steam games folder. You can link files on a single computer, or across a local network. You cannot, however, link files across the internet.

To find out all about Mklink, and how to use it, check out our Mklink How-To.

When the two programs are combined, however, the principle drawback of each goes away. Dropbox can now sync any two programs, because with mklink you can change the location of the programs data whether it wants you to or not. With Dropbox, you can take advantage of all of mklink’s potential, even with computers on the other side of the country.

Here's an example of how you can use this combo to cloud-ify your Firefox profile.

1. Find the directory containing your Firefox profile. A default installation places this folder in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox

2. Copy that Firefox directory into your Dropbox folder.

3. Delete the original Firefox folder.

4. Use Mklink to create a hardlink between the new and original Firefox folders, If your Dropbox folder is in C:/ you can use the following command:

mklink /J %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox C:/dropbox/Firefox

Now any computer that you complete these steps on (and that has access to your dropbox account) will share the same Firefox profile. The same basic steps will work for almost any app.

To read about more programs that work great with Dropbox, check out our article on the subject.

StrokeIt + AutoHotkey = Lightning-Fast PC Interface

Anyone who’s a real expert knows that the fastest way to interact with a program is with the keyboard, with its quick inputs and near-endless possible key combinations. For an illustration of this fact, just watch a professional digital artist use photoshop, or a high-level Starcraft player. In either case, the pro is sure to use hotkeys as much as possible. So why wouldn't you want to control Windows the same way?

There are certainly a number of system-wide hotkeys for Windows, but you would be hard-pressed to fully control your PC from your keyboard using just these. There are hotkeys that do things like cut, copy, minimize windows and take screenshots, but you just don't have the capability to do more advanced things, for instance opening a new Firefox window with tabs for Gmail, Twitter and MaximumPC.com.

AutoHotKey

That's where AutoHotKey comes in. AutoHotKey is a free app which monitors keystrokes and executes user-defined scripts, allowing you incredibly robust control over your PC.

Did we mention it uses scripts? And ONLY scripts? Yeah. It's not the most user-friendly solution in the world, but it's not hard to learn how to write AutoHotkey scripts, and the payoff is worth it. It's outside the scope of this article to try and really explain how the scripting language works, but we'll provide a couple of example scripts, and explain what they do.

Here's an example of a one-line script:

^#g::Run www.gmail.com

This script simply opens the Gmail website in your default browser when someone presses Ctrl + Win + g. The first part, "^#g::" specifies that the following command be run when Control (^), Win (#), and the g key are pressed at the same time. It should be obvious what the "run www.gmail.com" part does.

But this isn't a very interesting example. To make it a little more complicated, let’s look at how to first minimize all open windows and then open a browser window with two tabs.

^#p::

WinMinimizeAll

Run C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe "http://www.gmail.com" "http://www.maximumpc.com"

return

In the above example, you see how one input can have multiple effects, such as manipulating windows and running a program with command line parameters. For an example of a more advanced script, with variables, conditional branches, subroutines and loops, look here. You can also check out this forum for a list of available scripts.

As you can see, there's a lot that can be accomplished with AutoHotkey, if you're willing to put in a little effort.

StrokeIt

StrokeIt is a sophisticated mouse gesture-recognition that can be used to control your computer. A lightweight client runs from the taskbar, which interprets your mouse gestures and binds them to commands.

You can pick from a wide variety of gestures, including standard shapes, letters and numbers, or you can train your own. To train a gesture, you simply draw the gesture as you want it, and the program will ask if you want to save that gesture, or if you were trying to draw something else.

StrokeIt has quite an arsenal of commands that you can bind to gestures, but it can't match the extreme flexibility of AutoHotkey. Fortunately, StrokeIt can be configured to pass keyboard events when mouse gestures are detected. That way, we can have all the gesture-y goodness of StrokeIt, with the no-nonsense scripting engine of AutoHotkey.

To create an action that passes a keyboard event from StrokeIt, simply open the program, then right click on Global Actions, and select New Action. Click on the new action and click Add Gesture to pick the gesture(s) you want to activate it. Then, rename the action to something descriptive, right click on it, and select New Command. Click on the command, and from the pulldown box select Keys - Send Keystrokes. In the box in the lower right corner, enter the keystrokes you want to send. To send a keystroke such as CTRL + WIN + P, you would enter [CTRL_DOWN][WIN_DOWN]p[WIN_UP][CTRL_UP].

Hamachi +UltraVNC = Ironclad Virtual Private Networking

Hamachi is a tiny app that lets you create a virtual private network between multiple computers. These direct links work over the internet, but is recognized by your computer as a local network connection. LAN emulation is useful for many reasons, including adding multiplayer gaming capability to games that either best support LAN games (classic games like Duke Nukem 3D) or modern games that for some reason or another just have poor internet support (Demigod at its launch comes to mind).

In addition to gaming and file transfers, Hamachi can also facility a secure remote network connection between two computers. To do this, we're going to combine Hamachi with another free networking app, UltraVNC.

Hamachi

Hamachi should be installed on both computers that you want to network together. Just download the installer from the link in the header above, and run the executable. In the install wizard, you'll come across a prompt that asks if you want to disable Windows File Sharing. Leave the checkbox empty.

Once Himachi has finished installing, launch the program and click the power button on the lower left hand corner. Windows will give you a prompt asking you if you want to block or unblock Hamachi from accessing Windows network services, and you should click 'unblock.' Hamachi, when powered up, assigns each computer a IP in the 5.0.0.0 range. For example, in the screenshot below, the local IP Hamachi has assigned is 5.18.250.56. Each computer should have a different IP.

Next, click the Networking menu that's the second from the right on bottom of Hamachi's interface. Select the "Create a new network..." option. It doesn't matter which of the two machines you do this on, but that machine will be the host. Follow the instructions to create a name and password for this network.

After you're done setting up a new Hamachi network, join that network on the second computer using the Networking Menu. If the machines successfully connect, the name of the system will pop up in the Hamachi window with a green star next to it.

At this point, the two machines think they're connected on a local network, and you can browse shared folders, play Starcraft LAN games, etc.

UltraVNC

The other component to this combo is UltraVNC, an open source remote networking frontend that uses Windows' VNC protocol to control the screen of networked computers.

Download and run the Ultra VNC installer. In the installation wizard, make sure to check the boxes that asks if you want to download specialized Windows drivers that lower remote control response times and optimizes CPU load.

On the machine you want to access remotely, the version of UltraVNC you should install is the UltraVNC Server, though you can install the entire package if you want. The installer will also ask if you want to run UltraVNC as a service, which means it launches as a part of the Windows startup, before any user even logs in. This is completely up to you. Since we're relying on Hamachi to provide the network connection, and that has to be launched after you log into Windows, we chose to install UltraVNC as just a plain application.

Once UltraVNC finishes its install, it'll automatically show you a Server Property Page. Leave most of the settings as their defaults, but input your own VNC password in the Authentication section (highlighted in the screenshot). Minimize UltraVNC to the taskbar notification area.

On the other machine, go through the UltraVNC install process again. If you're only going to be using this system for remote viewing and access, just install the UltraVNC viewer app.

When you launch the viewer, you'll be given a prompt to input the VNC server IP. This is where you want to type in the Hamachi IP of the PC you want to access (which should be running the UltraVNC server). Hit the big Connect button, and enter your VNC password in the prompt.

If everything goes smoothly, the viewer will pop up with a Window that shows you the Desktop of the host machine. Here, as long as the mouse is inside the viewer window, you can interact with the system as if you were sitting in front of it. Aero is turned off by default, and the VNC viewer renders in 256 colors, but you can max out the screen fidelity in the Viewer options.

UltraVNC also sports a handy File Transfer option that lets you moves selected files from the remote machine to the local one. It's better than using Public and Shared Files with Windows, since you have access to every file on the remote system, not just ones marked as shared. Feel free to mess around with UltraVNC's viewer settings, since it's a pretty powerful app.

Fraps + iPodifier = Automate Transcoding of Game Video Footage for Youtube

If there's anything Halo 3 has taught us, it's that hardcore gamers are also exhibitionists. Gamers love to show off their exploits by sharing demo files, but the easiest way showcase that 20-kill streak in Call of Duty or that rare crab-walking spy to the masses is with video sharing sites like YouTube or Vimeo. But unless you have a premium account for those services, you'll likely have to wait in a long queue while your game footage is processed into a low-res flash file. But you want to show your friends NOW to earn those e-props! We give you a way to automatically optimize your video for sharing sites.

Fraps

The first thing you'll need is Fraps, which is the de-facto screenshot and video-capture utility for PC games. Fraps requires a license to unlock all of its features, but the free version will still let you capture video with a small Fraps watermark embedded in the frame.

Download, install, and open up the Fraps tool. Navigate to the Movies tab and direct Fraps to save movie files to a staging folder. Here, we called ours "to be processed". Bind a hotkey (default is F9) for video capture, and set the framerate to 30fps or 29.97. Depending on the speed of your CPU, set Fraps to record in full or half-size video. Let Fraps detect and pick the best sound input option to also record game sounds.

The next time you want to record a game video, just load up your favorite game and hit F9 to start recording. Fraps outputs a large AVI vide file in the designated folder once you hit F9 to stop the recording session. This video is uncompressed and full-resolution, making it not only massive, but impractical to upload to Youtube.

iPodifier

Sites like Vimeo recommend that you upload videos that are already encoded in H.264 compression, with AAC audio and a resolution no higher than 1280x720 for HD and 640x480 for SD streams. Here's where a nifty program called iPoifier comes in handy.

Like some of the other apps in this feature, iPodifier monitors a specified folder and automatically processes it based on your chosen settings. In this case, we want it to process full-resolution AVIs to smaller H.264 youttube-optimized videos that can also be shared on your iPod or iPhone.

After you download and install iPodifier, run through its setup wizard. The settings here can all be changed later, so don't mind what you select.

From the main window, enter the Video source parameters settings. Create a source named Fraps and direct it to the staging folder you created before, where all your full-res AVIs are held. Let iPodifier know that you want it to look for files with the *.avi extension.

Next, select h.264 as the codec, mark quality as "best", and choose "custom" for resolution. Here, you'll need to decide the dimensions of the new video. 640x480 is recommended for standard Youtube videos, but if you're playing games on a widescreen monitor and want to upload in HD, select 1280x720 or 872x480.

Make sure you choose not to delete the source video after transcoding if you want to save the original full-res video for posterity.

Here's the cool part: you can set iPodifier to only transcode at certain times of the day, and only when your CPU is idle has under low load. This way, it won't automatically start recording as soon as your're done recording and playing a game, and can just automatically run overnight or while you're at work. Modify the Transcoding options to tweak these automation settings.

QuickPar + IMGBurn + IsoBuster = Never Worry about Scratched DVDs Again

Many of us have already converted to portable hard drives of large USB keys for storage backups, but a lot of people still chooose to burn data backups on DVDs, which offer a better cost/capacity ratio. The risk here is of course scratching one of those DVDs and losing all your data. Luckily, there's a way to create resilient DVDs that even when scratched, can still be recovered.

QuickPar

QuckPar is a free app that creates parity volumes for any number of files. Parity files can be used by data recovery apps to verity and reconstruct corrected files or groups of files. Think of them as redundant puzzle pieces that can fill in holes in an incomplete picture. With QuickPar, you can create parity files of any block size and redundancy, which is useful for filling up the empty space of a DVD backup.

Let's say you want to burn a collection of movie files that total up to 3GB. You can just burn those files on a DVD, but you would leave about 1.5GB of space that is pretty much wasted. Open up QuickPar, and drop in all of those movie files in the "Source Files" section of the window. QuickPar will display the combined size of these files, which gives you an idea of how much space would still be available on your DVD. Next, move the sliders for Block Allocation and Redundancy to the right, maxing out at when the indicated Recovery Data Size matches the leftover capacity of your DVD without going over. Click the Create button once you're done.

I MGBurn

Using our favorite ISO and file-burning application, IMGBurn, we can create a disc image using our original movie files and the newly created parity recovery files. The process couldn't be simpler!

IsoBuster

Once you've burned these files to a disc, the DVD should be recoverable from light scratches that result in data loss. As long as there are enough parity files that remain intact, you can recover all of your files with a program called IsoBuster. IsoBuster isn't free, but it's trial option has the capability to piece damaged files together with the right parity files. Keep in mind that the more parity files you create (up to 100% redundancy), the better protected your data will be. That's why it's smarter to not cram as much data on a DVD as possible, so you can leave space for these sweet headache-preventing files.

Page2RSS + XFruits = Updates for Any Site, Any Way

XFruits and Page2RSS are two services that—together—allow you to keep up to date on all your favorite websites, in whatever way is convenient for you. To understand how, let’s take a look at the two programs involved:

XFruits

XFruits is a free web service that allows you to reorganize content from RSS feeds. Normally, an RSS feed is simply a means to syndicate content—a sequential list of titles, links, images and text, easily viewed with Desktop readers and web apps. XFruits lets you go much further with your feeds.

With XFruits you can, for instance, automatically convert an RSS feed into emails, into posts on your blog, or into a webpage specifically formatted for mobile phones. You can also aggregate multiple feeds into single feed, create an RSS feed from an email account, or save data from feeds into a ready-to-print PDF files.

With XFruits, as long as a page provides an RSS feed, you can view its content in whichever way is most convenient for you.

Page2RSS

Now, if only there was some way to get around that pesky “as long as a page provides an RSS feed” qualifier… Oh, that’s right—there is!

Page2RSS is a website which watches any website you want it to, and records any changes made to that page. It then saves these changes as an RSS feed which you can view with a feed reader, or reorganize with XFruits. You’re also given the URL of a page you can check at any time to see a log of recent changes to the site. Page2RSS “crawls” all the sites a couple of times every day, meaning that changes aren’t reported in real-time, but you can still get a pretty good idea of what’s gone on recently on a website.

Confused as to exactly what sorts of changes Page2RSS reports? As an example, take a look at the Page2RSS change log for www.google.com. You’ll see that the page shows all the recent times when the main Google graphic changed, or when little bits of text were added. Note that Page2RSS preserves links too, and that clicking on the Mother’s Day Google graphic will take you to a Google search for “Mother’s Day.” To see an example of how Page2RSS handles a more content-rich page, check out its log for www.cnn.com. It’s not quite as complete as you would get with the actual CNN RSS feed, but it does manage to find all the headlines, pictures, thumbnails and links.

Rocketdock + Switcher = Steal OS X Aqua's Best Features for Windows

Despite its quirks and sometimes irritating flaws, we're unabashed PC users, and prefer the Windows OS to the "fruity" alternative. But we'll admit to having dabbled in Mac OS X on occasion, whether on MacBook Pros (in which we've installed Windows 7 already) or when we built a hackintosh for kicks. We won't deny that Apple's newest OS has some attractive features, most notably in its Aqua GUI. Here, we'll show you two free apps that capture Aqua's most well-known functions for use in Windows.

Rocketdock

While this is less applicable for Windows 7 - which has seriously overhauled the taskbar - Vista and XP's quicklaunch toolbars are pretty inadequate for launching and managing open applications. Enter Rocketdock, a taskbar complement (or replacement) that latches to any side of your Windows desktop and stores any configuration of application shortcuts and custom widgets.

Rocketdock's stock settings already give you OS X's Dock-like functionality like movable icons, mouse-over effects, and even the ability to minimize programs to its shortcut. But its real power comes when you start browsing through the vast library of Rocketdock addons, called docklets. Our favorite docket is Stacks, which emulates the "stack" feature of OS X.

Just download the docklet, double-click it, and it'll automatically be installed into Rocketdock. Enable it by right-clicking Rocketdock, and open its docklet settings to direct it to any document folder. Clicking on the docklet icon (which itself is customizable) pops open a stack that shows you its entire contents, represented by their thumbnails.

Switcher

The other half of our Mac OS emulation is a program called Switcher, which gives Vista users an Expose-like way of switching between open program windows. Just bind the app to any keyboard command or mouse activity -- we recommend hitting the top left corner of the screen -- and Switcher tiles all open windows in an graphical overlay that's easier to parse than Windows' alt-tab or even Aero Flip 3D (which seriously, have you ever used?)

Like Expose, Switcher tiles the windows while retaining their aspect ratio, and shows all windows, even if they're minimized. With the combination of Switcher and Rocketdock, you can stick it to Mac fanboys to love to gloat over OS X's intuitive GUI features.

CookiePie + Gmail Manager + Better Gmail 2 = Access and Awesomeize Multiple Gmail Accounts and Google Services

We absolutely adore Gmail and Google's other free web services, but the one thing that bothers us is how all these services are tied to one Gmail account. This becomes inconvenient when you're using a Gmail account for personal use, but also using or sharing a separate one for business. Luckily, there are a few Firefox plug-ins, that when combined, will not only let you manage multiple Gmail accounts at the same time, but also improve Gmail's overall functionality with some of the best user-made Greasemonkey scripts.

Gmail Manager

We've given praise to Gmail Manager before as a great way to monitor multiple Gmail accounts. This Firefox plug-in lets you add as many accounts to its database and alerts you when you receive new mail to any of those accounts. The number of new messages is displayed on the bottom right corner of the Firefox window, and you can click the account to log-in and check your inbox.

The problem with Gmail Manager, however, is that it doesn't let you actually use all your accounts simultaneously. While it monitors incoming mail, you have to sign out of one account to use another.

CookiePie

To tackle the issue of running multiple accounts at once, we're going to use an awesome plug-in called CookiePie, which was created by Nektra software to solve their own problems of managing multiple web services with different accounts.

CookiePie hacks and handles Firefox's cooke management to fool Firefox into letting you log into multiple accounts with the same service. This actually works for more than just Gmail -- we've had success using CookiePie with Flickr and Yahoo mail as well.

Install the plug-in, restart Firefox, and open a new browser window. Then, log into what you would consider your primary Gmail account. After you're logged in, right-click the Firefox tab and select the "Turn on/off CookiePie" option. A small cookie icon should appear next to the name of the tab. This effectively locks this tab to the existing set of Firefox cookies.

Now you can open new tabs and log into a new Gmail acocunt or Google Service, locking into that account with the same right-click tab action.

CookiePie is a bit hit and miss for some users, which is why we only enable it one one tab, and use Gmail Manager to manage our secondary accounts on "unlocked" tabs.

Better Gmail 2

The only thing better than running multiple Gmail accounts is to run multiple Gmail accounts that have been optimized with Better Gmail 2. This is a plug-in created and maintained by Lifehacker that compiles the best GreaseMonkey scripts for Gmail.

When installed, little features like Inbox row highlighting and keyboard macros are at your disposal to customize Gmail in ways that Google neglected.

For example, we use Better Gmail to hide the Chat block in Gmail's left sidebar, hide the Spam Count listing, and automatically position the cursor after quoted text in our reply-emails (saving us many mouse clicks in the long term).

Lifehacker does a great job explaining all the features of Better Gmail 2, so head over to their version changelog to get the full scoop.

The Magic Folder + uTorrent = Instant Sorting and Organization of Your Downloads

If you're like us, you probably keep all of your web downloads cluttered in one communal download folder, whether it's direct downloads with Firefox or legal downloads with Bittorrent. Eventually, your downloads folder grows to several gigabytes, and sorting through all those pictures, videos, and songs takes the better part of a day. Here's a way to automate the sorting of all your downloads and keep torrent-ed files organized with just a single click.

The Magic Folder

The Magic Folder is a widget for Windows Vista and 7 that can automatically sort files based on their extension. With the way it's meant to be used, you assign file types to any folder, and just drag files to The Magic Folder widget icon for automated sorting. This feature is enabled by clicking the check-box when you first install the widget.

But The Magic Folder also has a feature that enables it to monitor a folder and automatically sort any files that are downloaded or moved to it. Enable this ability by going to the widget's General settings tab and clicking the "Turn on the Watched Folder" option.

This "Watched Folder" is actually named "The Magic Folder" and resides next to your other document folders in your Windows User directory. Unfortunately, you can't rename or move the location of this watched folder.

What we're going to do next is set all our Firefox downloads to go to this watched folder, which would include.torrent files.

The Magic Folder has presets to recognize commonly downloaded file types, like JPEGS and MP3s, but it doesn't recognize .torrent files... yet. Hit the Folders tab in The Magic Folder settings menu and create a torrent folder location. This is where you want Magic Folder to drop all downloaded torrent files. We created a folder nested inside our default downloads folder to store these torrents.

Next, hit the Extensions tab and add a .torrent extension, directing these files to the previously created torrent folder location.

uTorrent

Here's the tricky part. We're going to use uTorrent - our preferred torrent manager - to automatically start downloading files based on torrents found in the newly created torrent storage folder. We can do this because uTorrent has its own folder monitoring feature!

Enter the uTorrent preferences, and click on the "Directories" menu. Near the bottom of the menu, enable the "Automatically load .torrents from:" feature and direct it to the torrents folder.

Next -- and this is important -- set the "Put new downloads in" option to a temporary folder anywhere on your hard drive. This is where uTorrent stores partially downloaded files.

Finally, set the "Move completed downloads to" option to The Magic Folder watched folder we mentioned earlier.

Complicated enough? Here's a breakdown of what happens when you download a file after all of this is done:

You use Firefox to download a .torrent file. It downloads to the Watched Folder.
The Magic Folder automatically moves it to your torrent storage folder, which uTorrent is monitoring.
uTorrent automatically starts the file download, setting partially downloads aside in a temporary folder and putting completed downloads back into the Watched Folder.
The Magic Folder sees the new downloaded file, whether it's an AVI, MP3, or JPEG (or anything else), and sorts it to whereever you want!

Have any great software combos or mash-ups that use can't live without? Post them in the comments below!

Time: Vista One of Decade's 10 Biggest Tech Failures

Paul Lilly — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:48:18 -0500

There's still more than seven months left in 2009 for any last minute tech flops, but barring any amendments, Time has posted its list of what it views as the 10 biggest tech failures of the last decade. Compiled in no particular order, Time kicks off the list with Microsoft Vista, pointing out the OS's "underwhelming" user satisfaction and rocky start.

Gateway comes next for its fall from being the No. 3 PC maker (in terms of market share) in the US in 2004, to being acquired by Acer in 2007 for just $710 million.

HD-DVD makes its requisite appearance on the list (we're still bitter over that one), and somewhat surprisingly, YouTube makes an appearance as well based in large part on low estimated revenues.

View the full list here, then hit the jump and tell us what you'd change.

The 50 Most Important PC Components of the Modern Computing Era

The Maximum PC Staff — Tue, 05 May 2009 11:30:00 -0500

The personal computer has a storied history, stretching all the way back to the days of the Commodore 64 and IBM PC. But for us, the most interesting PC hardware developments really started about 15 years ago. Along with the eminent arrival of Windows 95, this was when Moore's law would really kick into high gear and bring us amazingly fast PC components like Intel's front side bus-multiplying Pentium, AMD's gigahertz-breaking Athlon, and yes, the wonderful world of 3D graphics accelerators.

We take an in-depth look back at the 50 most important pieces of PC hardware in the modern computing area. From CPUs to videocards and even monitors, these components were the envy of every PC enthusiast, whether you could afford them or not. They might not have been the fastest parts at the time, but they sure were the most notable. And before you ask, many of these entries were used of our Dream Machines. Join us as we journey with the ghost of PC past, and share your own favorite PC parts in the comments section!

Intel Pentium 90

Circa: 1994

Intel's Pentium processor brought the x86 architecture to new heights, as well as brought along a new naming scheme. Unable to patent numbers, Intel avoiding dubbing its newest chip the 586. The Pentium introduced several improvements designed to address the performance bottlenecks of previous processors. Chief among them was a 64-bit wide date bus, two execution units, a much improved floating point unit (FPU), and faster clockspeeds. Intel's Pentium processor launched at 60MHz, but it didn't take long for faster chips to follow before it eventually topped out a 233MHz. The 90MHz version was the first Intel CPU to use a FSB multiplier – the FSB was clocked at 60MHz, multiplied by 1.5 to achieve the 90MHz Clock speed. From this point forward, Intel virtually dominated the CPU market until AMD’s Athlon debuted five years later.

AMD DX4-100 486

Circa: 1995

The last clone in the true Clone Wars, AMD's Am486 arrived almost a full four years after Intel's 486 came out, and one month after the Pentium. To compete with the existing 486 chip, AMD undercut the competition by selling its version for less, while clocking it higher than Intel's 486. The DX4-100 cost less than Intel’s 486DX2-66, but its 8K write-back cache provided a speed advantage of up to 50%.

Quantum Fireball ST3.2A

Circa: 1996

The Quantum Fireball ST3.2A was the first good drive to use the UltraATA/33 interface, theoretically capable of reaching transfer speeds of a whopping 33 MB/s. It was available in capacities up to 6.4 GB, which—since it was significantly higher than the 2 GB ceiling for FAT16 partitions—ushered in the superior FAT32, which is of course one of the file systems still with us today.

Diamond Monster Sound

Circa: July 1997

The Diamond Monster Sound was the first card to fully support the then-burgeoning DirectSound 3D API, offering convincing directional sound effects through a pair of headphones or a 2.1 speaker setup. Even though it was fantastic for playing games that made use of the new 3D sound technology, it was a hard sell at the time, because of its poor performance with older, DOS-based games. In fact, this weakness was enough that we (and this is back while we were still Boot) originally gave the first Diamond Monster Sound card a review score of 7, saying “Assuming that game support for DirectSound 3D materializes, the Monster should become a coveted part of the ultimate gaming system.” It did, and it was.

Canopus Pure3d

Circa: 1997

Until the Voodoo Graphics, gamers were trapped in a 2D world. Sure, there were a handful of so-called 3D accelerators from S3 and ATI that were nothing more than old 2D videocards equipped with hardware to accelerate texture filtering. The original Voodoo graphics added much more horsepower, which wasn't fully tapped until GLQuake.

When paired with GLQuake, the OpenGL-accelerated version of Quake, the first-person shooter came alive. The difference in graphics was astounding, instead of fighting to get 15fps, a Voodoo-equipped system could hammer a solid 30fps, at a higher resolution, no less. While many vendors sold Voodoo Graphics cards, the Canopus Pure3D was the Cadillac of the bunch. With double the texture memory of other Voodoo cards, the Pure3D let you crank the texture settings in all your games, for maximum visual quality.

Pentium II 400Mhz

Circa: 1997

The Deschutes version of the high-performing Pentium II marked Intel’s big jump into the triple-digit front-side bus. Klamath (the original PII), topped out at 266MHz with a 66MHz FSB, while the PII 400 (with a 100MHz FSB) was the sweet spot for high-end system builders – it performed at almost twice as fast as older Klamath parts.

Obsidian X24

Circa: February 1998

While the original 3DFX Voodoo card was the first consumer-level 3D accelerator, it's successor the Voodoo 2 showed the first hint of the potential for overkill lurking within the nascent market. You see, the Voodoo 2 allowed users to slave two cards together using SLI (Scan Line Interleave) to nearly double performance. The Obsidian X24 packed two complete Voodoo 2 chipsets on a single board, and paired them with a then-massive 24MB framebuffer. This was the only Voodoo 2 board that supported resolutions up to 1024x768, and was actually used in many 3D arcade cabinets (Cruisin' USA, anyone?)

Intel 440BX Chipset

Circa: April 1998

When old farts talk about the “good old days” of chipsets, they’re talking about Intel’s 440BX. With its 2x AGP that actually worked and a massive 1GB(!) of SDRAM support, the 440BX’s reign was literally years. Even better, plebians could buy 233MHz or 266MHz Pentium II’s running on the 66MHz front side bus and overclock them to 100MHz or higher. The 440BX was so successful, that it eclipsed its intended replacement from Intel: the ill-fated RDRAM-only 820 chipset.

AMD K6-2 series

Circa: May 1998

Continuing the success of the K6, AMD's K6-2, released in 1998, brought another MMX unit to the table as well as a new SIMD instruction set famously known as 3DNow! This gave AMD a slight head start in tearing through 3D applications before Intel fired back with its SSE instruction set. The K6-2 held appeal as a cost-conscious upgrade for Super Socket 7 motherboard owners. Later on, AMD would follow suit with the K6-2+, which added 128KB of L2 cache and a smaller manufacturing process (180nm versus 250nm).

ASUS P2B

Circa: May 1998

Built on Intel’s 440BX chipset, the legendary Asus P2B board helped build up the company’s reputation as a performance motherboard maker. Boasting three ISA slots, four 32-bit PCI slots and an AGP 2x slot, this Slot 1 Pentium II had such long legs, that some variations that were able to run Slot 1 were able to run Slot 1 Pentium III CPUs too. Sure, it didn’t have the sexy soft FSB of the also popular Abit BX6, but the jumper configuration actually supported a wider frequency range than the BX6. The P2B also had the advantage of being a rock-solid board, with many likely still seeing duty today – more than 10 years after it was introduced.

ATI Rage Pro - All-in-Wonder

Circa: 1998

While it lacked the raw 3D power of the 3DFX Voodoo 2, ATI's All-in-Wonder had a different trick up its sleeve--it came equipped with a TV tuner. The Rage Pro was a mid-rate 3D accelerator, and in lieu of the PVR software that we all expect with our TV tuner cards today it included ATI's Digital VCR software, which let you record TV shows on your PC. It even worked with WebTV for Windows 98. Pretty fancy, eh?

Intel Celeron 300A

Circa: August 1998

The difference of just one letter can sometimes be amazing. Intel’s Celeron 300A was a 300MHz part that became infamous for its overclockability. Based on the 2nd generation Mendocino design, the 300A featured 128k of on-die cache running at a full clock rate. Even at the same clock speed of the Covington Celeron 300, the 300A performed twice as fast as the cache-less counterpart, and that was without any overclocking. Coupled with a decent motherboard, you could bump the 300A to 450MHz by tweaking the FSB from 66MHz to 100MHz, making the 300A the fastest available x86 processor.

Creative Sound Blaster Live!

Circa: August 1998

The Sound Blaster Live! Was the card that first brought Creative Labs’ EAX API to bear against (and eventually doomed) the dominant A3D API. What gave the Sound Blaster and EAX an edge was the ability to apply real-time effects like reverb and echo to music and in-game sound effects. Though the effects were sometimes not as subtle as they could have been, they added a whole new layer of realism to sound in 3D games, capturing the dramatic acoustic differences between—for instance—a basketball court and a dank cave.

AMD Athlon Slot A 1GHz

Circa: June 1999

Arguably the most significant series in AMD's CPU history, and certainly the most important in the company's recent history, AMD's Athlon line hit Intel square between the eyes and was such a success, even the Intel faithful found themselves building an AMD system for the first time. Dirk Meyer, who would later rise in rank as AMD's CEO, led the design team that developed Athlon, at first a cartridge-based processor with 512KB of L2 cache. Debuting at 500MHz, AMD beat Intel to the 1GHz mark with its Athlon processor, an important (and much anticipated) milestone at the time.

56k Modem v.92

Circa: August 1999

Ah, the 56k modem. Like the little engine that could, the 56k modem got us onto the internet slowly but surely. And hey, at the time, 56k seemed pretty zippy, really, even if 56k modems could never actually reach speeds of 56 kilobits per second (the FCC mandated that no dial-up modem could achieve speeds of greater than 53.3 Kbps). It was also a relief that the v.92 and v.90 standards ended the standards war between K56flex and X2. Vendor competition is usually a good thing for consumers, but having to buy a new modem when you switched ISPs is something we don’t miss a bit.

ABIT BP-6

Circa: September 1999

Sure, overclockers may think they’re outlaws by thumbing their nose at Intel’s authority but that was like shoplifting from the candy store. Running ABIT’s BP-6 was like pulling an armed robbery and then leading the LAPD on a high-speed chase for three hours. The BP-6 was, after all, the first board to allow you to run two Socket 370 Celeron’s in SMP mode. At the time, Intel had made it strictly verboten to run Celerons in dual processor mode but the company obviously didn’t do enough with the Celery to limit its 2P functionality. That made anyone who ran the BP-6 the ultimate bad ass because he or she not only flipped the bird at Intel, but he or she also had to run a “real” OS like Windows NT, 2K or Linux to get dual processor support.

Plextor Plexwriter 8/20 SCSI

Circa: 1999

In 1999, anti-buffer underrun technologies like Sanyo’s BurnProof weren’t yet available, so SCSI drives like the Plextor PlexWriter 8/20—with their immense 4MB cache allotments – were de rigueur for coaster avoidance. In fact, in our May 1999 issue, we called the 8/20 “the flat-out best CD recorder that’s ever passed through our lab.” And we followed up that declaration with the qualifier that the drive created a 650MB data disc in an astonishing 11:14 minutes. Of course, today’s best burners churn out full 8GB dual-layer discs in under that time. But we still have a soft spot in our hearts for the Sexy Plexy.

Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro

Circa: 1999

Here was a keyboard that we would’ve happily taken with us to the grave. We adored the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro so much that we used it until our handprints were firmly imprinted onto its once-white surface – it was really that comfortable. The Natural Keyboard Pro was Microsoft’s second mass-market ergonomically-split keyboard, but one-upped the Elite model with its two USB ports, programmable shortcut keys, and familiar “inverted T” arrow key configuration (the Elite used a non-standard cross-like arrow key arrangement). We can do without modern “swiss-army” keyboards with full-color LCD screens and dozens of programmable macros keys – this Carpal Tunnel buster is all we need.

3Com 3c905 Network Interface Card

Circa: 1999

For us, the 3Com 3c905 Network Interface Card is the piece of hardware that symbolizes the dawn of the broadband era. Sure, it wasn’t the first NIC to connect your computer to a high speed network, but it was the first card that was fast, reliable and worked with nearly any OS you could throw at it. Combined with early DSL or cable internet, this was the card that, for many people, opened up the door to the internet.

FIC SD11

Circa: January 2000

Plagued by voltage issues and generally a buggy board, we note FIC’s SD11 not for being stable, well designed or even being great. But it was the first four-layer board that supported AMD’s new Athlon CPU. And FIC was, arguably, the first one to actually push an Athlon motherboard. Most board vendors, we were told, feared the wrath of Intel for supporting the K7. The support of FIC (and others such as MSI Gigabyte) helped legitimize the award winning Athlon chip. The fear of Intel may have all been imagination, but we still believe that without the support of the SD11 and other early Slot A boards, the Athlon and its offspring would not be here.

Klipsch v.2-400

Circa: Jan 2000

The release of the Klipsch v.2-400 was a turning point for computer speakers. Before that, “multimedia speaker” was a sort of euphemism for “crappy little plastic box,” and anyone looking for high fidelity sound from their computer was left without any options beyond plugging it into their stereo. With the Klipsch v2.400, all that changed. Suddenly, for $250, you could get a setup that combined high-quality satellites with a top-notch sub, providing sound quality that was simply unheard of. It’s no surprise that the Klipsch v.2-400 graced our Dream Machine in 2000, and its successors the Klipsch ProMedia 5.1 and 2.1 powered all three of our Dream Machines in 2001.

Cooler Master ATC-100

Circa: 2000

Remember the days of ugly plastic PC cases that came in an off-white eggshell color? We do, but not fondly. Cooler Master changed the PC chassis industry with its all-aluminum case that paid as much attention to look as to functionality, and started the trend in fashionable enclosures with this aluminum beauty. Countless imitators and successors have improved on the original ATC-100 design, but we laud Cooler Master as the first to prove that cases need not be boring. Would people really shell out more than $200 for a box that merely stores their PC’s innards? Two ATC-series equipped Dream Machines prove that the answer is yes.

Sony F520 21” CRT

Circa: 2000

We wouldn’t be caught dead using a CRT monitor today, but back in 2000, this 21” Sony Trinitron was one of the most coveted pieces of hardware in our lab. By the early 2000’s CRT development had basically peaked; the F520 actually sat at the top of the CRT ladder for four years, making its way into four different Dream Machine configurations. Here’s why: the F520’s .22mm grille-pitch spec had yet to be challenged by the NEC-Mitsubishi competition. The upshot is that the F520 offered the finest image detail around – games and images looked better on this than any other display.

M-Systems DiskOnKey

Circa: December 2000

It’s amazing to think that USB thumb drives have been with us for less than a decade now. In that time they’ve become a ubiquitous nerd commodity, made floppy disks obsolete, and took most of the wind out of the sails of writable optical media. And why wouldn’t they? They’re available with capacities that trump any competing media, miniscule form factors, and highly rugged construction.

But it all started with the humble IBM DiskOnKey, manufactured by Isreali company M-Systems. Released with just 8mb of storage, the DiskOnKey’s capacity left something to be desired, but it nevertheless heralded the advent of truly portable data.

Visiontek GeForce 3 Ultra

Circa: 2001

As the first card to support DirectX 8, the GeForce 3 marked the opening move of 3D accelerator technology away from the old fixed-function pixel processing pipe toward the more general, programmable hardware we use today. A later update to the original GeForce 3 series introduced the tiered pricing model to the GPU market, using the same core in multiple models. Cheaper cards featured slower or less capable GPUs as well as less memory.

Nvidia nForce 2 chipset

Circa: July 2002

It’s been said that Nvidia chipsets are like Star Trek movies – only the even ones are worth a damn.

And we heartily agree as that would make nForce 2 the Star Trek II: The Wraith of Kahn (without the great Ricardo Montalban). Equipped with a high performance dual-channel memory controller, dual Ethernet ports and hardware-based real-time Dolby Digital encoding, the nForce 2 shook up the chipset world by shoving VIA to the side and cementing AMD’s Athlon XP as the chip to have in performance computing.

Radeon 9700 Pro

Circa: December 2002

As the first DirectX 9 3D accelerator, the Radeon 9700 Pro introduced programmability into parts of the 3D pipeline that had previously offered a limited number of fixed functions. The series of GPUs that followed were all variants of the original R300 design, and managed to hold the graphics performance crown through an entire generation of Nvidia graphics cards. From the launch of the Radeon 9700 in August 2002 until the GeForce 6800-series launched in April 2004. RV300-based designs dominated the GeForce 5000 series GPUs in legacy DirectX 8 apps and the demanding new DirectX 9 games.

The Radeon 9700 series is also notable because it delivered sufficient memory bandwidth that gamers could run most games with antialiasing and anisotropic filtering enabled without dropping below playable framerates.

Intel 875P chipset

Circa: April 2003

You may not know it now, but at one time, Intel was firmly against using DDR memory and instead tried to push the entire PC industry to adopt Direct RDRAM, an incredibly fast, serialized RAM technology. Unfortunately, it also came with a price tag for RAM makers who were already faced with keeping the factories running so as not to lose even more money. The battle raged for years and only after the RAM makers rallied behind AMD and its DDR-using Athlon did Intel relent. What does this have to do with the 875P? As Intel’s first performance chipset in the post-RDRAM days, it helped allay fears that Intel would try to intentionally sandbag DDR to make RDRAM seem like it was the right direction. Instead, the 875P was a winning chipset. With AGP 8x, dual-channel DDR400 and a dedicated port in the northbridge for Gigabit Ethernet communications, the 875P went a long way toward patching things up with enthusiasts.

Western Digital 360GD Raptor

Circa: May 2003

In 2003 Western Digital released the 360GD Raptor, the first ATA drive to operate at 10,000rpm platter speeds. Sure, it cost as much as drives with 5 times the capacity, but it was still the first real chance for power users to get enterprise-class hard drives for their desktop machines, and they ate it up. Capacity was low, (only 32 GB on the first Raptor) but if you had one in your computer, you were pretty much guaranteed to be the first player on any server to load a map, and that felt good.

Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0

Circa: 2003

While it certainly wasn’t the first optical mouse to hit the market – not by a long shot – Microsoft’s IntelliMouse Explorer 3.0 was the critter that put the nail in the ball mouse’s coffin. The third iteration of the IntelliMouse Explorer brand upgraded its sensor to capture images at 6000 times per second, curing the legendary skipping problem that first-person shooter gamers suffered from with most other optical mice. Perfect button placement, an ergonomic "hump" design, and blissful responsiveness made this mouse superior to a ball mouse in every way. Gamers revolted when Microsoft pulled the 3.0 from shelves to push other models, and the 2006 comeback just didn’t have the same impact.

Sony DRU-710A

Circa: 2004

Sony was first to the market with a dual-layer DVD burning solution with their DRU-700A burner, but that model was marred by well-publicized compatibility problems stemming from the budding nature of the DVD+R DL format. It wasn’t until its successor, the DRU-710A, was released late in 2004 that enthusiasts could take advantage of practical dual-layer burning. The drive also boasted the fastest 16X burning speeds at the time, completing 4.5GB burns in less time than it takes for some of us to run a mile. Later firmware updates added support for more media formats, keeping the 710A relevant and our favorite DVD drive for quite some time.

AMD Athlon 64 FX-55

Circa: June 2004

When AMD held the CPU crown with the FX-53, they had seemingly no place to go after that: the 130nm process had hit its limit. It was a surprise, then, when they released an Athlon 64 4000+ with pretty much the same specifications as the 2.4GHz FX-53, complete with 1MB of cache. The FX line needed a new flagship chip, which came in the form of the FX-55. What made this chip special was AMD’s “strained silicon” process on the parts of the die that limited frequency growth, allowing the FX-55 to achieve 2.6GHz. Performance-wise, this top AMD part bested its rival Pentium 4 Extreme Edition in most benchmarks, making it the preferred chip for anyone with a grand to spend on their CPU.

Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe

Circa: January 2005

Oh enthusiast computing. It’s a little wonky sometimes but it’s never boring. That can be said of Asus’ AMD Athlon 64 Socket 939, A8N-SLI Deluxe board. Built on Nvidia’s nForce 4 SLI chipset, the A8N-SLI Deluxe was perhaps the first board that we saw that supported SLI (that is if you forget about the Intel Xeon-based board that Nvidia developed SLI on and then promptly pretended never existed). At the time, naysayers (some of us included) never thought multi-GPUism would succeed. And why not? To even get it to work optimally, you had to use a whacky-ass card to reconfigure the PCI-E 1.0 slots from x16 and x1 to dual x8s. Surprisingly, enthusiasts were willing to do it and multi-GPU functionality is a must have on any enthusiast motherboard today.

AMD Athlon X2 4800+

Circa: 2005

The age of mainstream dual-core computing was cemented by AMD’s Athlon 64 X2, led by the 4800+ chip. AMD's Athlon 64 X2 series consisted of two CPU cores on a single die sharing a crossbar that connects them to the integrated memory controller. These internal data links paid huge performance dividends compared to Intel's dual-core configuration, which had each core pushing communication through a shared frontside bus. SSE3 instructions were added to the X2 series, but most importantly, AMD managed to keep the new chip on Socket 939. While not all boards were compatible, many 939 mobos could handle an X2 upgrade with nothing more than a BIOS update, which meant AMD could tap into an existing install based for its new processors. True multi-tasking (meaning playing Half-Life 2 while running background apps) was finally possible!

Cooler Master Aquagate Mini

Circa: 2005

Cooler Master’s self-contained watercooling system was a cut above the crowd with its integrated waterblock and pump. The Aquagate Mini R120 was the first water-cooling system we saw targeted for entry-level users who wanted the advantages of liquid cooling without the mess and hassle that usually accompanied those configurations. The radiator, pump, block, and reservoir were all integrated into one pre-assembled two-piece unit – even the coolant came pre-filled! All you had to do was latch the block to the CPU and attach the radiator to the side of your case. No tangling with long tubes or messy distilled water was necessary. The Aquagate wasn’t necessarily the best performer when compared to other cooling solutions, but its all-in-one design was undeniably innovative.

PNY Verto GeForce 6800 GS

Circa: 2005

The introduction of the PCI-Express bus in 2004 removed the one videocard per system limitation imposed by AGP. It didn't take long for Nvidia to resurrect the SLI acronym--although this time it stood for Scalable Link Interface. By pairing two GeForce 6800-series cards, such as this PNY Verto GeForce 6800 GS, you could nearly double your performance in most games. Having the fastest videocard in your rig was no longer enough, now you needed a pair of the fastest videocards. Shortly thereafter, ATI announced Crossfire and the videocard arms race between ATI and Nvidia continued.

Dell Ultrasharp 2405FPW

Circa: 2005

We were perfectly content with computing on 20” 1600x1200 CRTs until this game-changer came along. Dell’s reasonably priced 2405FPW brought 1900x1200 gaming to the masses and made wide-screen a must for enthusiasts. Not only did this panel deliver excellent image quality (with minimal ghosting and color banding), the 24” 2405FPW sported an array of alternate video inputs so you could plug PC, consoles, and DVD player into one monitor. Not to mention that it was several hundred dollars cheaper than the [slightly smaller] Apple Cinema HD display, and included USB and memory card slots to boot.

Intel Core 2 (Conroe)

Circa: 2006

Waking out of its Netburst slumber, Intel took the CPU world by storm with its Core 2 architecture. Instead of remaining fixated on higher clockspeeds, Intel refocused its attention on being more efficient with its pipeline. This meant a return to lower clockspeeds, however it also meant a return to prominence as the performance king. After Prescott failed to live up to its hype, the media remained cautiously optimistic that Core 2 could live up to Intel's promised performance gains, but much to the chagrin of AMD, Core 2 lived up to its billing, and then some.

The first Core 2 Conroes burst out of the gates with 167 million transistors, a 65nm manufacturing process, 2MB of L2 cache, and a 1,066MHz frontside bus. Despite debuting at just 1.86GHz and 2.13GHz (E6300 and E6400, respectively), Core 2's performance made it instantly attractive, and Intel's aggressive pricing sealed the deal.

Nvidia nForce 680i

Circa: November 2006

Once it solidified its lead over ATI in graphics cards, Nvidia made its move on Intel’s performance chipsets – and for the most part succeeded. With its emphasis on overclocking, advanced southbridge features and its SLI support, the 680i SLI was the chipset to have if you wanted to build an enthusiast PC.

Sure, there were teething pains, but for most enthusiasts it was worth the sacrifice. Besides, what was the alternative? Running two Radeon X1950 cards? Feh. The 680i SLI continued to be popular until a lack of compatibility with Intel’s new 45nm quad-cores and lack of PCI-E 2.0 pushed it aside.

Intel Core 2 Duo X6800

Circa: 2006

Featured in our 2006 Dream Machine, the shockingly fast Core 2 Extreme X6800 CPU marked Intel’s return to the “brainiac” design that emphasized performance per clock rather than insanely high clock speeds (as characterized by the Pentium 4). In a nutshell, the X6800 was wider, faster, and cooler. It’s wider because its microarchitecture was designed to process four instructions per cycle. Faster describes the Core CPU’s ability to process a 128-bit SSE instruction in a single cycle instead of the two cycles its contemporaries require. And it was designed to run cooler than its smoking-hot processors. Pit against the Athlon 64 FX-62, the X6800 took every CPU-intensive benchmark by a huge margin.

Asus EN8800 GTX

Circa: January 2007

Billed as one of the first DirectX 10-capable 3D accelerators, the GeForce 8800 series of GPUs are nearly as memorable because they represented a quantum leap in performance for DirectX 9 games. Graphics cards like this overclocked ASUS EN8800 GTX first went on sale in early 2007, but there weren't any DirectX 10 titles to play. There was, however, a glut of incredibly system-intensive DirectX 9 games. Games like Oblivion and Company of Heroes crushed the mightiest of DirectX 9-era 3D accelerators; but the 8800 GTX provided enough GPU juice to run every DirectX 9 title at the highest resolutions. And, later that year when the first true DirectX 10 titles shipped, that same GPU also gave us the first taste of fully programmable graphics, although likely at a pretty low resolution.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

Circa: May 2007

The Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 was the first SATA hard drive to break the 1 TB barrier. Sure, a terabyte isn’t really that much bigger than 750 gigabytes, but there’s definitely something to be said for the psychological impact of moving up into a whole new unit of measurement. Also, the 1 TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000 was the drive that really demonstrated the capabilities of the new perpendicular magnetic recording technique, the technology that allowed for the higher-density platters needed for a 1TB drive, and birthed a series of delightfully trippy flash cartoons.

Gateway XHD3000

Circa: 2007

When consumer-targeted 30-inch desktop LCD monitors emerged in 2007, we were supremely disappointed that these monstrous widescreens lacked an internal scaler. Convention monitor-scaling technology wasn’t powerful enough to drive the 30” panels’ 2560x1600 resolution, so they were all restricted to dual-link DVI interfaces with no on-screen display options. Gateway surprised us by being the first company to release a 30” panel with a built-in scaler, in this case a Silion Optix HQV Teranex Realta processing chipset. In layman’s terms, that meant this chip allowed the XHD3000 to support numerous interface options, an onscreen calibration controls, and even picture-in-picture functionality. HDCP support let us play high-def video in its intended resolution, and gaming on this monster was a pleasure. And at launch, the XHD3000 was actually cheaper than alternatives from Apple and Dell.

Zalman CNPS 9700 LED

Circa: 2007

This blooming, copper-finned successor to the already awesome CNPS 9500 added more than enough performance to justify its 200 point model number change. Not only was this air cooler easy to install (by 2007 standards) and looked slick, its adjustable 2800rpm 110mm fan provided plenty of cooling to let us overclock our Athlon FX-60 testbed. On a full CPU load, the 9700 was 14 degrees cooler than a stock cooler, earning it a coveted 10-Kick Ass score in our February 2007 issue. Zalman’s current flagship cooler, the 9900NT, inherits most of the features of the 9700, and remains one of our favorite coolers.

Intel D5400XS “Skulltrail”

Circa: February 2008

“Who you tryin’ to get crazy with ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?” Well, actually, we didn’t. We never actually thought that when Intel said it was loco, that it really was loco. But the company showed just how insane in the membrane it could be with enthusiast Skulltrail platform. The D5400XS mobo continues possibly one of the most over the top boards ever made. Featuring two sockets for LGA771 Xeon’s (rebranded as Core 2 Extreme QX9775) chips, this Extended ATX board had four x16 PCI-E slots, supported up to 16GB of FB-DIMM RAM and even let you overclock those Xeons, err, Core 2 Extremes. The ultimate insane stunt Intel pulled, though, was swallowing its pride and integrating not one, but two nForce 100 bridge chips on it. That made the Skulltrail the only retail board capable of running CrossFire and SLI until the arrival of the X58.

Intel X-25M

Circa: September 2008

Like a lot of the items on this list, Intel’s X-25M SSD is notable for being the first piece of hardware to really deliver on the promise of a new technology. There had been a lot of buzz about SSDs right from the get-go—transfer rates that would blow your mind, they said—but when the X-25M was released, there still hadn’t been a single piece of affordable hardware that lived up to the hype. Intel ‘s SSD made believers out of us, though, landing benchmarks that blew our go-to performance drive, the WD VelociRaptor, out of the water.

Sapphire Radeon 4800 HD X2

Released: October 2008

Putting two GPUs on a single PCB, in a single PCI-Express slot wasn't anything new when ATI released the Radeon 4870 X2. The problems we'd had with similar boards from both ATI and Nvidia left us wary. But, after careful examination, we found that the X2 board came with no gotchas. It worked with multiple monitors, had moderate power requirements, made an acceptable amount of noise, and was fast as hell. Best of all, you could drop a pair of them in most any motherboard and get four GPUs worth of performance for the price of two.

Intel X58

Circa: November 2008

Paired as the launch chipset with Intel’s rocket Core i7 CPUs, the X58 is, in many ways, far less of a chipset than previous Intel chipsets. With the memory controller moved into the CPU you wouldn’t think that the X58 would get into the history books, but the X58 marked a major sea change for performance computing: the reunification of multi-GPU graphics. With no Core i7 chipset offering, Nvidia decided to license motherboard makers to run SLI, rather than have everyone build new enthusiast boxes with ATI’s reenergized Radeon HD lineup.

Intel Core i7

Circa: November 2008

Why is this CPU more significant than the 8088, Pentium, or Pentium M? As the second new chip produced after a series of embarrassing losses to archrival AMD, the Core i7 will answer for the world whether Intel is prepared to ride the momentum of its Core 2 launch with another winning chip or if it’s content to rest on its laurels, as it did with the Pentium 4. Core i7 also represents a major new direction for Intel, which has stubbornly clung to the ancient front-side-bus architecture and discrete memory controller for years. Indeed, with its triple-channel integrated DDR3 memory controller and chip-to-chip interconnect, the block map of a Core i7 looks more like an Athlon 64 than a Core 2 chip.

Intel Atom N270

Circa: 2008

Why is the Atom processor important? Because despite a global economic downturn, worldwide PC sales have remained on an uptick thanks in large part to the explosive growth of netbooks, the vast majority of which sport an Intel Atom processor inside. On the hardware front, these low-power chips only boast 47 million transistors, 512KB of L2 cache, and a top clockspeed of 1.86GHz. A dual-core variant exists for the desktop, but so far not for mobile PCs. Even though most power users would consider the Atom N270 underpowered for many computing tasks, 15 million Atom-based netbooks shipped in 2008 alone counts for something.

Think we missed something? Comment below or send us a Twitter!

The 32 Totally Essential (and Free) Apps for Every New PC

The Maximum PC Staff — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 12:00:00 -0600

You have to admit, Windows is a pretty barebones operating system, feature-wise. After a fresh install of XP or Vista (perhaps following a Clean Start), you're faced with a barren Start Menu and an empty desktop that's beaming with limitless potential. The problem is that it's up to you to hunt and download those applications that you really need in your day-to-day computing experience. And chances are, it's often difficult to find good software that's also free. That's where this guide comes in.

We've put together a list of what we think are the most essential PC apps for every Maximum PC reader. These are all free programs (except one) that should be immediately installed after a fresh build or reformat; 32 indispensable programs and utilities that we couldn't imagine computing without. From the best IM client to FTP browser and Notepad replacement, these essentials truly enhance the Windows experience (much more so than Microsoft's own Windows LIVE Essentials). We're not saying you'd use all 32 entries in our list on a daily basis, but if you are at all serious about utilizing your PC, we promise our picks will not go unused.

And at the end of the feature, we'll even show you how to install these apps in one fell swoop with a special configuration file we've created. Because if it were up to us, this is software that should be bundled with every copy of Windows.

WinDirStat

Have you ever sorted a folder by file size, hoping to track down a hard disk hog, only to be frustrated by the fact that Windows doesn’t let you see the size of nested folders’ contents? So have we, and that’s why we make sure that we’ve always got WinDirStat close at hand.

WinDirStat, short for Windows Directory Statistics, is an application which analyzes the composition of your hard drive, allowing you to identify which files are eating up your disk space. It presents this information in a size-ordered directory view, or as a colorful treemap, making it a snap to see exactly what is using up your hard drive space. Once you’ve figured out which files are taking up more than their fair share of your drive, you can get rid of them with WinDirStat’s built-in cleanup operations.

AnyDVD

For hassle free rips of DVD, Blu-ray, and even HD-DVD content, there's no simpler app to use than AnyDVD. Unlike more traditional DVD ripping tools, AnyDVD decrypts, unlocks the region code, and even removes annoying ads and that pesky FBI warning on the fly. It's not free, but it's well worth the cost for anyone who wants to exercise his fair use rights on Blu-ray or DVD discs. Your money is well spent, typically the brain trust at Slysoft manage to disable new copy protection tricks just a few short days after they go public, which is more than worth a few bucks a year. (standard version is 50EUR for 2 years, HD edition is 79EUR for 2 years)

Foxit PDF Reader

There are few things that can ruin your internet browsing groove like the painfully long wait you have to endure when opening an Adobe PDF file. Acrobat reader, as a program and browser plugin, is notoriously cumbersome and drains not only your time but gobs of memory as well. That's why we use Foxit Reader, a free lightweight application that weights in only at 3MB. The program launches with the speediness of a roadrunner, and gives you access to welcome features like text extraction and comment annotation. Just be careful when you install Foxit to uncheck the Ask.com toolbar and eBay icon options. A professional version of Foxit ($40), gives you advanced editing tools, but we're more than happy with the free offering.

VMWare Server

Virtualization isn't just one of the hot buzzwords in tech, it's a practical way to test software, patches, and operative systems. VMware is our pick for a robust and easy-to-use virtualization option, and VMWare Server is the company's free product. It runs on top of a host Windows or Linux machine to deploy multiple virtual machines by provisioning your hardware resources. The only big limitation of VMWare Server is that it doesn't currently support 3D acceleration, not is it officially compatible with Vista 64-bit. Still, it's relatively the easiest way to create and run virtual machines, even those created by Microsoft Virtual PC.

Steam

Remember when Steam first launched with Half-Life 2, and trolls all over the internet complained about the service's mandatory online connection? What fools, we were. Today, we can't imagine gaming on our PCs without Steam. Valve's app isn't just an ultra-convenient online store, it's our preferred method of staying connected to fellow online gamers. Gabe Newell recently remarked that Steam is more than just about combating illegally downloaded content, the program is Valve's way of catching up to the convenience and instant-access appeal of piracy. We think it's doing a fine job.

Dropbox

Get this: a Windows app that "just works." Yes, we're being serious. Dropbox came out of nowhere last year to stun us with its amazingly intuitive approach to online storage. The program creates a user folder that acts just like a folder on your hard drive. You can drag, drop, copy, and even save up to 2GB worth of files to the cloud ($100/year for 50GB), while the service works its magic and syncs up your documents in the background. The online interface lets you track your file transfer history and download any file remotely, as well as restore any files that may have been accidentally deleted. You can even create shared or public folders to pass files along to your friends and family. And you don't even have ot bear any online ads. Of course we're smitten.

Copernic Desktop Search

While we'll concede that both Google Desktop Search and the Windows Search 4.0 are both vast improvements over the default Windows XP search function (death to that useless dog!), we have to side with Copernic when we want a powerful desktop search client. Copernic is not only comprehensive in its indexing -- it quickly searches emails, office documents, and web pages -- it also is light on system resources and processor utilization. We like its ability to sort, group, and refine searches, which is particularly useful for navigating through densely packed network drives. Our only gripe? The newest version of Copernic Free removes realtime results as you type -- a feature reserved for the $50 professional edition.

TrueCrypt

TrueCrypt is an open source app which lets you create and mount an encrypted virtual drive. You can store whatever you want in this drive, and it will be completely inaccessible and invisible to anyone who doesn’t have the passphrase.

And even if you’re not an international man of mystery, you never know when you might want to encrypt something, like sensitive financial data, or a list of passwords. Since TrueCrypt is a tiny file (about 3 MB) that can be setup to run without installing anything, we feel very comfortable giving it a “download it, keep it on your disk, you never know when you might need it” recommendation.

Skype

Skype, like many of the apps on this list, is not here because it did something new, but because it did something better than anyone had done it before. Offering high quality, peer-to-peer VOIP with a convenient client and a bevy of features, Skype easily earns our recommendation for all your internet telephony needs. Skype also has video conferencing functionality, and allows for conference calls, a feature which we put to good use making our very own Maximum PC podcast.

Fraps

Like to play games on your PC? So do we. That's why one app we absolutely cannot live without is Fraps, a lightweight app that lets you benchmark your games to monitor graphical performance. When running, Fraps hides in your system tray, but runs a tiny numerical overlay on top of any DirectX and OpenGL game to show you your current framerate. You can also capture high quality screenshots and AVI videos (with sound) for Youtube posting. The free version has a limit on how long you can capture video, as well as watermarks your footage.

Firefox

There's not much we haven't said about Firefox, our current favorite internet browser. The sheer amount of useful plug-ins available make it a no-brainer for anyone who spends most of their day on the web. Firefox 3 amazed us with its smart search bar and it still remains the most secure browser we've ever tested. It might not be as fast as Google Chrome in rendering pages, but we'll take functionality and unobtrusive features (ahem Internet Explorer 8) over a minor speed difference any day.

CPU-Z

If you haven’t used CPU-Z, you’re not an enthusiast. This tiny CPU interrogator has become the standard tool of anyone who thinks they’re a PC expert and wants to, say, query your cousin’s PC to find out what the hell is actually installed in the machine. CPU Z will tell you the model, code name, process, core voltage, stepping and revision number as well as the core speed, FSB and multiplier the PC is running. You can also find out what speed your DRAM is running at and check the SPDs on some machines too.

GPU-Z

Sure, you know you have a GeForce 295 card, but what do you know about it? If you want something that’ll brace the card for all of its specs, GPU-Z (no relation to CPU-Z) will do the dirty work for you. Offered for free by techpowerup.com, this handy utility will tell you the clocks, the card revision, the number of transistors on the card as well as the process technology used to build the card.

Media Player Classic + ffdshow-tryouts

There are lots of different ways to play videos on your PC, but the best performing, most compatible one-two punch we've tested is ffdshow-tryouts and Media Player Classic. There are literally hundreds of different codecs and container formats that the video you want to watch can be trapped inside, and while you could install a codec pack to get support for them, ffdshow-tryouts just looks better, performs better, and causes fewer problems than traditional codec packs. And, while ffdshow-tryouts enables video playback in a wide variety of apps, our favorite is Media Player Classic. This clone of Windows Media Player 6 features support for soft subtitles, alternate audio tracks, and other power user features. The fact that it's extremely lightweight just reinforces our admiration for the app.

Filezilla

Cloud storage may be the next hot thing, but we still like using FTP to back up files to our own home servers. And we've found no better way to utilize FTP than with Filezilla, an open source FTP client. Filezilla's site manager lets us bookmark and maintain connections to multiple servers, drag and drop our files from the desktop, and deftly handles large files and large numbers of files. Both client and server versions are offered free, distributed under GNU General Public License.

SyncBack Free

Though it may be hard to believe, a surprising majority of PC users still back up their files to CD and DVD media. As experienced users, we're a little smarter than that, so we recommend using SyncBack Freeware to back up important documents to more reliable storage mediums like hard disks and network servers. The free version of SyncBack lets you automatically archive copies of your files to any destination (though it won't perform incremental backups), and then restore those files after any unforeseen disaster. A more functional SE version ($30 or 30-day trial) offers faster backup and versioning features, though the free counterpart should be more than enough for most users. And yes, it does back up to optical media as well.

IsoBurn

Burning ISO files is a native feature in the upcoming Windows 7, but XP and Vista users are forced to use third party apps if they want to mount a disc image on a CD or DVD. For this simple yet essential task, we prefer IsoBurn, a 50k (talk about lightweight) standalone executable that provides a no-nonsense interface to burning discs. You just pick the ISO file location, destination drive, and whether you want to burn as a CD or DVD. We still don't know why this feature isn't bundled in Windows.

KeePass

KeePass is a password safe—a program that maintains a list of your passwords, strongly encrypted, with a single master passphrase/keyfile. The benefit to using a password safe is that you can use a different, secure password on every site you log in to, without having to write them all down or remember them all. This helps to protect you by making it so that if one of your passwords is compromised, (through a data breach at a website you have an account with, for instance) you don’t have to worry about that same password working on other sites you log into.

OpenOffice.org

We’ve long recommended OpenOffice's suite of programs as one of the must-have open-source applications on your PC. Simply put, it’s as close to Microsoft’s Office suite as you’re going to get without plunking down a small fortune. It doesn’t contain any unpleasantries in design and functionality that the idea of a “free office suite” might conjure up. And its newest 3.0 incarnation—all of .6 somethings greater than the last full OpenOffice release—adds even more versatility to the suite.

Speedfan

Most of your PC components include hardware monitoring chips that track the varying voltages, fan speeds, and temperatures inside your rig. Speedfan gives you access to all of that information by tapping into the numerous digital temperature sensors of important parts like your CPU and GPU. This free app can also access SMART technology in hard drives to diagnose potential disk failures. And as the name implies, you can also adjust fan speeds for extra performance or reduced noise.

Handbrake

Handbrake makes ripping DVDs a lead-pipe cinch, especially when paired with AnyDVD (or DVD43, a free, less awesome program that works similarly to AnyDVD, http://www.dvd43.com/). Whether you're ripping for archival storage and streaming to your living room, or simply want to watch Enchanted on your pink iPod Nano, Handbrake's excellent preset system makes ripping easy enough that anyone can do it. Just point Handbrake to your DVD drive and it scans the disc and automatically selects the settings necessary to ensure you get the best possible playback on the device you chose. Heck, it will even help you avoid potential pitfalls, like proper subtitle rendering. The next version will even include preliminary support for Blu-ray rips, so what's not to like!

Notepad++

Windows Notepad is competent as the most basic text editor, but if you're a programmer or even casual website designer, you'll be able to appreciate the vigorous language support of Notepad ++ . From HTML to Java and over 40 other languages, Notepad++ makes parsing code easy with clear syntax highlighting and auto-completion intelligence. The program is compact, but has no-brainer features like tabbed documents and plug-in support. Think of it as the Firefox of text editors.

Digsby

First, there was instant messaging, and that was pretty cool. But before long before we started asking questions like “Why can we only talk with people using the same client?” and the first multi-platform clients (like Trillian) were born. And those were cool. But it wasn’t too long after that, we started to ask “Why can’t we use our IM client to check our email? And our Facebook account? And how come, if I log in on another computer, all my preferences don’t carry over?”

And then there was Digsby. And it is very cool.

(However! Digsby loses big points for trying to sneak a bunch of crappy search bars onto your computer when it installs. If you make sure to hit “Decline” you can get away clean, but if you want to avoid the hassle, try Pidgin instead.)

Avira AntiVir

At first glance, you might be inclined to dismiss Avira’s AntiVir as nothing more than a run-of-the-mill virus scanner with a feature set that’s as meager as its price. The sparse interface certainly won’t wow any power users, but it would be a mistake to cast AntiVir aside based solely on appearance. A tiny checkbox in the upper-left corner of the configuration screen unlocks the program’s Expert mode, and with it a heap of options previously unavailable. You’re given enough control not to feel cheated, even for software you didn’t have to pay for. AntiVir’s biggest strength lies in its detection rate. It’s the only scanner in our AntiVirus roundup to triumph with a near clean sweep during Virus Bulletin’s latest testing, and it did so without reporting any false positives. That’s impressive.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware

For even the savviest of PC users, it’s a real challenge to go very long without picking up some sort of malware. A good antivirus program and firewall are important for keeping the baddies at bay, but for when you do happen to get an infection, it’s important to have a strong anti-malware program at hand. It’s a broad field, and (as we discuss in this article) a thorough sweep needs more than a single program, but for most simple cleaning tasks Malwarebytes Anti-malware should be all you need.

uTorrent

Bittorrent may be the software pirate's preferred method of conducting illegal downloads, but the protocol also been adopted for legitimate software distribution, such as game patches and large open-source programs. When we need to tap into legal peer-to-peer downloads, we use uTorrent, a 250K application that lets you oversee bandwidth allocation, file selection, and peer/seeder connections with ease. You don't even need to install the program -- uTorrent runs right fine from its executable.

foobar2000

The days of Winamp are long past. For audiophiles with massive music libraries, foobar2000 is our chosen alternative to the memory-intensive iTunes organizer. Created by a former Winamp developer, foobar2000 has won the hearts and minds of savvy album collectors with its highly customizable interface, comprehensive audio format support (including OGG, Flac, and AAC), and gapless playback. There's even a rich SDK for third party coders to tinker with to add more functionality. Sure beats sorting through all your music in long playlist.

Picasa

With disk storage space so cheap, no wonder it's so easy to amass gigabytes upon gigabytes of photos snapped from our camera phone and DSLR. But if you're like us, you don't want to sort through photos with Windows Explorer. Google's Picasa 3 is an all-in-one monitoring service for your photo folders. It offers less overall editing functionality than alternatives like XnView, but comes packaged in a more elegant interface with additional options for Internet-related tasks. For example, you can add geotags to your photos via Google Earth and then have Picasa 3 automatically upload your shots to a Web album, FTP site, or straight to your Blogger blog. Picasa 3 also interfaces with online shops for easy photo printing, and can turn a batch of your images into collages, movies, and screensavers. Included backup functionality helps keep your precious photographic memories safe from an errant hard drive failure, provided you select an appropriate backup locale. But our favorite feature, by far, is Picasa's ability to search through your photographs by dominant color.

Secunia PSI

Every geek knows to make sure that the OS and browser is updated but what about the version of Flash, Java or QuickTime that you’re running? Not to mention the dozens of other applications that you have installed. Have no fear, Secunia.com’s Personal Software Inspector tracks a massive amount of security exploits in applications and will monitor your PC for known exploits. If one is found, it will point you to any known patch. Even among our paranoid members we have yet to find a machine that PSI didn’t find something with an exploit. And like the other apps on this list, this app is free.

Audacity

Planning on recording your own podcast (and who isn't, these days?) or creating a customized ringtone from your favorite dance song? You'll need Audacity, the best free audio editor on the internet (we use it to edit the No BS Podcast). Audacity lets you drop in audio files of any format (or record from any hardware source) to cut, copy, and add to an unlimited number of tracks to mix. Built-in effects and pitch adjustment let you manipulate your samples, and you can output your compositions at up to 96kHz. Sounds good to us.

7-Zip

Just about any operating system nowadays comes with built-in support for the ZIP archive format, which has been around since the 80s and generally does a good enough job of making things smaller and tidier. So, do we really need an archiver program on this list?

Of course we do. We’re PC users, gosh darnit, and that means that “good enough” is never good enough. We don’t just want ZIPs, we want RARs, CABs, JARs, DEBs and whatever else we can think up, and we want it all open source (as long as it’s not too inconvenient). And for all that, there’s 7-Zip: an elegant, open source file archiver that can handle just about any compressed file you throw at it.

GIMP

When it comes to image manipulation, there’s really only two options right now: Photoshop and GIMP. GIMP doesn’t quite capture the usability and polish of Adobe’s offering, but where it does beat Photoshop is in price—totally free and open source is a whole lot easier on the pocketbook than the $700 or so that a legal copy of Photoshop will run you. And even if it’s not totally perfect, GIMP is full-featured enough for almost any photo manipulation needs you might have.

Best of the Rest

Not satisfied with 32 apps? Here are 10 more programs that didn't make our "essentials" list, but are well worth your attention.

Synergy

A KVM switch (short for Keyboard, Video, Mouse) is a device that lets you control multiple computer with a single set of peripherals. And really, for the nerd elite, there’s no better way to show off than to use not just two monitors, but two whole computers at once. But KVM switches are sort of clunky, because not only do they add more clutter and cables to your setup, they require hitting some sort of switch to move between computers.

That’s where Synergy comes in. It’s a software KVM switch, allowing you to connect two or more computers over a network, and control them with a single keyboard and mouse, even if they’re running different operating systems. If you’ve got two computers running side by side (a big “if” that kept Synergy off our Essentials list), this app is an absolute must-have.

RipBot264

Ripping Blu-ray and HD-DVD discs used to be a perplexing affair, requiring multiple applications and hours upon hours of ripping, demuxing, transcoding, and remuxing before finally, often as not, you ended up with a file that was broken somehow. RipBot264 has made the high-def ripping game much, much easier. Install the application, as well as the three helper apps it requires, and you'll be up and ripping your Blu-ray collection in no time flat. While it's not as easy to use as Handbrake, we've found you typically get better results because the app uses a more recent version of the X264 codec than Handbrake does. While it's definitely not perfect (RipBot264 lacks an easy way to convert on-disc subtitles to a format that works with ripped video), but it's the easiest Blu-ray ripping app we've tested.

Google Earth

It kills us to have to put Google Earth on the “best of the rest” list, really it does. Sure, it’s not really essential—you can get all your mapping needs met at its web-based cousin maps.google.com, but that doesn’t stop it from being one of our very favorite apps. Does Google maps let you explore New York in glorious 3D? Does it let you check out what it’s like at the bottom of the Mariana Trench? Does it have maps of Mars?

We didn’t think so.

PuTTY

What is PuTTY? Like so much in life, if you have to ask, you probably don’t need it. Still, we’ll fill you in: Putty is a multi-protocol client application which is our longtime favorite choice for all our SSH needs. To many PC power-users an SSH client is absolutely vital to their everyday operations, and PuTTY’s the most popular windows client for a reason.

Still, these days most people’s “SSH needs” are pretty nonexistent, so we’ve got to let PuTTY wallow here with the best of the rest.

VLC Player

Playing media files on your computer can be tricky business. There’s a huge number of codecs and containers, which can have any number of weird interactions, making a mess of the business of playing your HD media files. Fortunately, there’s VLC, an application which will play basically any file, and doesn’t rely on any external codecs. It’s a welcome breath of fresh air in a morass of formats and players.

So why isn’t it on the list? Even though it can be a little tough, once you do manage to get your codecs set up, we think that Media Player Classic provides a better experience and better reliability than VLC.

Thunderbird

We absolutely abhor the sluggishness of Microsoft Outlook. That's why we prefer web-based email clients, like Gmail. But when we want to manage multiple email accounts, including POP and Exchange, we turn to Thunderbird. Mozilla's mail program gives us all the basic functions we want out of email, like fast searching and phishing protection. Like Firefox, Thunderbird can also be enhanced with an array of plug-ins, all including Mozilla's Lightning, which adds calendar and appointment management to the client.

Boxee

Here's one application, that just one week ago, would've made our Essentials list. Boxee (still in Alpha, with Windows version coming soon) is a slick internet video streaming frontend that taps into network feeds like CBS, ABC, and Comedy Central. It's great for watching video podcasts and youtube clips without bringing up a browser window, and features nifty social networking features so you can see what friends have been watching. Unfortunately, Boxee has just discontinued support for Hulu, their largest and most popular content provider. Until Hulu support comes back, we can't deem Boxee a must-have.

Virutaldub

Need to capture or process raw video from your digital camcorder? Virtualdub is the go-to application for converting AVI files into a large number of encoded formats and container packages. You won't be able to mix or significantly edit video files like you can with Adobe Premiere or even Windows Movie Maker, but for quick capture and encoding of your family vacation, look no further than Virtualdub.

TinySpell

Firefox already offers built-in spellcheck for text windows and forms, but what about every other Windows app? TinySpell is a free spell checker that monitors your text input in any program (including any words copied to the clipboard), and gives you replacement suggestions from its database of 110,000 words. The free version, unfortunately, doesn't give you a visual indicator of your typos (like a red underline). Instead, your mistakes are pointed out with an audio cue, which we eventually found to be a bit too annoying to keep on all the time. Maybe it's training us to be better spellers.

Recuva

Sometimes you just need someone to tell you everything will be okay, and that's what Recuva attempts to do. From start to finish, Recuva holds your hand through the process of getting your data back with a user-friendly Wizard. The first prompt asks what type of files you're looking for (pictures, music, documents, video, or all files), followed by where you want Recuva to look. If you don't know, select 'I'm not sure' and Recuva will rummage through your entire computer. Alternately, you can limit searches to the Recycle Bin, My Documents, a media card, or any other specific location you specify. Considering Piriform packs a powerful scanner wrapped up in a user friendly interface with a few useful advanced features sprinkled in, we have no trouble recommending Recuva as our favorite free file recovery app.

Now that we’ve finished our list, we’ve got one more cool app to show you. It’s called InstallPad, and it does something that’s very simple and very useful: It install applications for you. You just feed it a list of setup files available online, and it takes care of the rest. There are other programs that do essentially the same thing, such as AppSnap, but we’re sticking with InstallPad because it makes it the easiest to create custom software lists.

We covered a whole lot of apps in our Essentials list, and now we’re going to use InstallPad to make it easy for you to install them all (or just whichever ones you want) at once. Read on to download our InstallPad essential applications list, and learn how to use it.

Step 1: Get InstallPad

Even installers need to be installed, so we’ll take care of that first. The app can be found in the download section of the InstallPad website. It requires the Microsoft .NET framework 2, which you can get here if it’s not already on your system. InstallPad was written for XP, and isn’t guaranteed to work with Vista, though we were able to run it on a Vista box with no major problems.

There’s no installation necessary beyond unzipping the InstallPad .zip file somewhere on your drive. Make sure to remember the location, because we’re going to put another file there later on.

Step 2: Get the Maximum PC Essential InstallPad Application List

InstallPad comes with a default list of software, but it’s not nearly as complete as ours and is badly outdated, besides. We’ll replace it with a custom list, created from the apps on our Essential 33 list.

Unfortunately, because some companies make their setup files inaccessible to direct links, not every app on the list works with InstallPad. Still, almost all of the apps do work, and you can download the list right here. That archive contains two list files. The file called MaxPCAppList.XML is set to try and install the files in silent mode, meaning you won’t see the installer, and default setting will be used. This makes for a much faster install of multiple programs, but at the cost of some control. If you’d rather run the installers normally,use the other file, called MaxPCAppList-nosilent.XML

Extract whichever list file you choose to the directory containing the InstallPad executable.

Step 3: Run InstallPad

Now that you’ve got all the files you need, it’s time to start InstallPad. Run the executable, and a Window will pop up showing the default software list. We don’t want any of that business, so click the “Open an application list” text in the bottom left corner. In the browser that pops up, select the application list file that you downloaded (either MaxPCAppList.xml or MaxPCAppList-nosilent.xml).

That’s pretty much all there is to it. Now InstallPad should show a list of applications from our Essential 33 list. You can check whichever ones you want, and then press the “Install Checked” button in the bottom right to automatically download and install them all.