Adobe’s powerful image editing software, Photoshop, has become the industry standard. It’s wide ranging suite of features and plugin library makes it a very popular tool used in every profession where image manipulation is required. The downside is the cost is in the hundreds of dollars and most of those fancy features will never be needed by most users. Enter Paint (dot) NET. Paint (dot) NET is perhaps the best no-cost software that allows you to perform all the common functions you’d normally need to accomplish using Photoshop. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have children in the house, then you’ve had your share of damaged, broken or missing DVD discs. You have two options; 1) buy a new copy of the movie or, 2) backup the DVD on your PC, store the original in your closet, and then burn a copy for your young ones to enjoy. If you prefer option 2, this great little utility from DVDFab is exactly the tool for the job. Read the rest of this entry »

Every once in a while, a piece of software comes along that establishes a new watermark on how things should be done and what others will soon be copying. You are about to read about one such program. Seaching for images on the web is pretty clunky and time consuming. But once you install Cooliris, a browser add-on, your image searches will become magical. Read the rest of this entry »

Many utilities have come through our labs, each claiming to clean and optimize the PC, fix registry problems and a host of other claims. But none provide the satisfying results of CCleaner, a freeware utility that removes unwanted temp files, detects and fixes registry problems, removes unwanted cookies and similar Internet tracing files, and helps remove software that may difficult to remove using the Control Panels Add/Remove applet. CCleaner even gives you full control over what kinds cleaning activity you want performed. Read the rest of this entry »

Capturing screenshots under Windows is fairly easy. Hit the PrintScreen button to capture your entire desktop or Alt-PrintScreen to capture the currently selected Window to the clipboard, and then Ctrl V to paste the captured image while using your favorite image editing program.

But if you’ve ever needed to capture screenshots or video from a 3D application (like a game), nothing Windows offers can reliably do the trick. Taksi is perhaps the best open-source tool to meet all your screen and video capture needs. And it does so using any CODEC installed on your computer. Read the rest of this entry »