Sometimes Windows can be really frustrating, with lots of useful tweaks and tools buried away beneath layers of dialog boxes and hard-to-reach system tools. WindowMenuPlus 1.1 aims to place some really useful tweaks for your apps on to the menu that pops up when you either right-click its titlebar or taskbar button (Vista and XP only). Options include being able to keep the current window on top of other windows (and make it semi-transparent at the same time), team a program's priorities, kill its parent process, get more information about it and quickly reposition or resize the window a number of custom ways[......]
As it does on the second Tuesday of each month, Microsoft today delivered this month’s installment of security updates. June’s edition of Patch Tuesday only includes four security bulletins, which is significantly less compared to last month’s consignment of 16 security bulletins. Between them, the security bulletins released today address 22 vulnerabilities[......]
Just how fast does your hard drive appear to be filling up these days? [......]
Second in a series. Microsoft makes no assurance that Software Assurance customers will get access to new products, even though they pay 29 percent of the full desktop software price, annually, over a two- or three-year period[......]
Kiev-based developer MacPaw , best known for its CleanMyMac tool for Macintosh computers, has ventured onto the Windows platform for the first time with an equivalent cleaning application for the PC, the appropriately titled CleanMyPC . As the name implies, CleanMyPC includes a suite of cleaning tools for Windows computers. The main cleaning component promises to remove gigabytes of files from your PC, and is backed up by five further maintenance tools: Secure Erase, Complete Uninstall, Registry Maintenance, Autorun and Gadgets & Extensions Manager. [......]
Comodo Group has announced it's giving away a free one year-license of Comodo Internet Security Pro 2011 , worth $49.95. [......]
The champagne corks must be popping at Redmond today. According to stat tracking group Pingdom, Windows 7 usage just passed Windows XP in the US. Of all operating systems, XP use is still at 31.56%, but Windows 7 has vaulted to 31.71%. [......]
By Nick Peers If you want to back up a CD, DVD or Blu-ray disc, then the ISO file offers the opportunity to take advantage of all that spare capacity on your backup drive, using that as a storage medium for your backed up discs. ISO files are exact images of discs, which also comes in handy when you, or someone else, wants to distribute a CD without incurring the costs of burning a disc and posting it[......]
By Nick Peers Leading Czech antivirus vendor Avast! has updated its free antivirus tool to version 6. Avast! Free AntiVirus 6 claims to deliver even better protection against malware thanks to two new features previously only found in paid-for antivirus programs. The first feature is AutoSandbox, which automatically identifies suspicious applications and prompts the user to run them in an isolated environment, preventing them from interacting with, and potentially infecting, the computer. Second, WebRep provides reputation-based ratings for websites and search engine results, although this functionality is already available for free in standalone browser add-ons like MyWOT, it's the first time it's been made available as part of a free antivirus product[......]
By Nick Peers Acronis has released a compilation of two of its standalone products under the moniker, Acronis Backup and Security 2011 . [......]
By Joe Wilcox , Betanews Every single person I know with an iPad who has used News Corp.'s "The Daily" complains about persistent crashes and really, really, really, slow update times. Now PaidContent reports that the initial two-week free introduction promotion is going on and on and on, kind of like those wait times for news content to download. [......]
By Tim Conneally , Betanews When Symantec released its Norton 2011 products back in September , the company spoke of "engendering goodwill" among potential customers with free tools to educate and protect their vulnerable systems. Today, the company released yet another free tool to keep users aware of the ever-changing daily threat landscape. With the update of Norton 360 to version 5.0 today, Symantec also unveiled the Norton Cybercrime Index, a free service that gives a daily snapshot of the most dangerous websites and the most hijacked search terms, as well as top scams, identity theft ploys and spam[......]
By Nick Peers Rainmeter 2.0 , an open-source desktop widget tool for Windows, has been released. [......]
By Tim Conneally , Betanews Back in March, Google announced it would be bundling the Adobe Flash plug-in with future versions of the Chrome browser. Naturally, this caused a few questions to arise about how Google planned to tackle the security and stability risks inherent in Flash, and whether the plug-in would work with Chrome's secure Sandbox environment[......]
By Tim Conneally , Betanews It's been one year since Windows 7 launched to the world, and to celebrate the passing of the year, Microsoft has released some information about the milestones Windows 7 has passed. [......]
