Microsoft Security Essentials

Installation

It takes very little effort to get going with MSE. Microsoft politely does not opt you in to the program's customer experience improvement program; you must choose to opt in or stay out of it before you can finish the installation. It also lets you choose whether to run the Windows Defender firewall, and whether to run a scan once installation is complete, although both of those are opt-out.

Overall, the installation time ran around 4 minutes on our test computer. That's not as blazing fast as some of the paid suites, which can complete installation in less than 60 seconds, but it is respectable for a free program.

Interface
MSE 2's interface adopts a different color scheme than the previous version, going for various shades of gray to replace the vibrant blue and white look. It doesn't pop as much, but it also looks far less like a Windows XP relic.

For those unfamiliar with the design, MSE has four tabs across the top. The Home tab contains your security status and scan options, and you can run a Quick Scan, Full Scan, or Custom Scan. A link at the bottom of the pane lets you change the scheduled scan.

The second version of Microsoft Security Essentials changes its plumage to gray, and adds better heuristic detections and deeper hooks into the Windows firewall.

Update is where you manually get new virus definition files and program upgrades, History logs only detected threats, and Settings is where you go for advanced tweaking. The program looks simple, but don't be deceived: there are quite a few advanced options in Settings--just not as many as many competitors offer. Security Essentials uses labels imported from OneCare: green for all good, yellow for warning, and red for an at-risk situation.

Features and support
Under the clean and uncluttered interface, Security Essentials wraps up antivirus and antispyware engines, rootkit protection, and real-time detection courtesy of Microsoft SpyNet, the unfortunately named cloud-based service that anonymously compares file behavior across computers running various Microsoft operating systems.

When you install MSE 2, it will automatically run a scan unless you opt out. Note that it will not consider your computer secure until that first quick scan has completed.

Microsoft Security Essentials 2 uses both definition-file and real-time defenses against viruses and spyware, and also offers rootkit protection. Along with the quick scan and the full scan, there's a Custom scan option that lets users select specific folders or drives to scan. It doesn't allow for customizing the type of scan used. For example, you're not going to be able to choose to scan only for rootkits or heuristics, as you can with other security programs. However, you can set USB keys and other external devices to automatically get scanned. The program installs a context-menu option for on-the-fly scanning in Windows Explorer, too.

The Update pane manages the definition file updates, with a large action button, and History provides access to a spreadsheet-style list of All detection items, your Quarantine, and items you've Allowed to run. Although it's a basic layout, this no-frills approach to security has proven appealing to people who are overwhelmed by more detailed security choices.

New in version 2 is integration with Internet Explorer so that downloads get scanned, and Windows firewall hooks so that your personal security net is tighter. For Windows 7 and Vista users, the Windows Filtering Platform that those two operating systems come with gets a boost from a new network inspection feature.

The Settings window allows you to further customize the program by scheduling scans, toggling default actions to take against threats, adjusting real-time protection settings, creating whitelists of excluded files, file types, and processes, and choosing from the aforementioned SpyNet options. There's also an Advanced option that is still fairly basic: here you can set Security Essentials to scan archives and removable drives, create a system restore point, and expand user rights to allow all users to view the History tab.

A nice feature in the scheduler forces MSE 2 to be respectful of your computer's processor usage.

Security Essentials comes preconfigured to run a scan weekly at 2 a.m., when Microsoft thinks your system is likely to be idle. New malware signatures are downloaded once per day by default, although you can manually instigate a definition file update through the update tab. Attachments and downloaded files will be automatically scanned by Security Essentials.

Help is only available in the form of the standard offline Help manual that comes with all Microsoft programs. There's nothing fancy here.

MSE abandons the additional heft of a firewall, performance tuning, and backup and restore options to focus on core security. However, the new version does include a system restore option, to back up your computer before you remove any detected malware. Most of the changes in MSE 2 are under the hood, but it's still a worthwhile program in terms of features, especially on lower-powered Netbooks.

Conclusion
Microsoft Security Essentials 2 will protect you, and it will generally do it well. However, its impact on system performance could be improved, and it's still a bit light in the tool belt.

Download Microsoft Security Essentials

Handwritten Message

• 
  

• 
• 
• 
• 

Price: NA

Rating: Good

3.5/5

Features:

Performance:

Value:

Design:

PROS

• Variety of permutations and combinations to make the notes look cute
• Easy to create and send
• Once a paid app, but now its free

CONS

• Limited space to type the message
• You cannot save your creations

Summary

All in all, the app is a nice one to own. Sure, there a lot of apps that recognize you handwriting and can send it across as a message, but the customizable options of Handwritten Message app gives it a personal touch. Add to the fact that the app is now free instead of $0.99 and there is more incentive to give it a try!

Review

Leaving personalized hand written notes has been lost as a cute gesture thanks to the digital age of SMS, MMS, BBM, iMessage, What’s App and the plethora of other ways that people choose to stay in touch. Gone are the days when you’d find a posted note on the fridge telling you that your loved one has left the house or that message for the kids, “there’s food in the fridge”, So on and so forth.

Today we have with us an iOS app, Handwritten Message, that lets you send personalized messages that you can write on the screen using your finger. Is it the modern day version of showing cute gestures or are you better off sending the good old text?

Features: 

The app is really simple. There is a message box. You use your one finger to type and two fingers to swipe/move and pinch to zoom. The notes have a defined space, which cannot be expanded upon.

In terms of customization, there are 48 solid colour backgrounds and 30 textured backgrounds to choose from. These backgrounds are really nice and enhance the personal touch of the message. You can also change the colour of the text in the message.

For that extra personal touch, there are 60 shapes including smiley faces, roses and love hearts to choose from. To add to the finishing touches, there are 48 custom borders to choose from. With the permutations and combinations, you can really make each message look unique.

Click to enlarge

Performance:

Straight out of the box, the beauty of the message you create in the Handwritten Message app depends on how good your handwriting is. No matter how many of the available effects you apply, if your writing looks like crawling ants, your message will look bad.

One downside is that the place to write the message feels a bit cramped. But the developers have said that in the next update to the app, users will get a larger area to type in.

It is easy to type a message on the device especially since the gestures of typing with one finger and scrolling with two starts to feel natural after a bit. Beautifying the messages is also a lot of fun as you can add borders and colour the text. The only downside is that you cannot choose the location you want to put the smiley face or the heart images. Their location is fixed.

Also, you cannot erase specific text. You can undo your last typed word but if you want to erase the 1st word, you will have to undo the whole thing or clear the slate completely. You cannot save your creations either.

Once you’ve “written” your message it is very simple to send it. Hit “done” and then hit “send” and the message gets copied to the clipboard. You can then “paste” the note in iMessage, send it as an MMS or even e-mail. The message will not go via a regular SMS, as it is an image and requires to be sent as an MMS, so you may want to keep the cost of sending an MMS in mind before sending cute posted style messages to the entire world.

Specifications:

iOS only. Compatible with iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, iPod touch (3rd generation), iPod touch (4th generation) and iPad. Requires iOS 4.3 or later. 

Verdict:

All in all, the app is a nice one to own. Sure, there a lot of apps that recognize you handwriting and can send it across as a message, but the customizable options of Handwritten Message app gives it a personal touch. Add to the fact that the app is now free instead of $0.99 and there is more incentive to give it a try!

This article has been taken from Digit Magazine http://www.thinkdigit.com/ 

MediaInfo

MediaInfo supplies technical and tag information about a video or audio file. It provides general information for multimedia files like: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration, etc. It also provides more specific information for audio files such as: codec, aspect, fps, bitrate and more, and information for video files such as: codec, sample rate, channels, language, bitrate and more. This information can be exported as text, CSV or HTML.

The program's interface is plain and easy to navigate, with menus across the top and buttons down the left side. You can select either an individual file or a whole folder of files to view. There are eight different views to choose from--Basic, Sheet, Tree, Text, HTML, XML, MPEG-7, and PBCore 1.2--each of which provides a variety of different information, such as file size, duration, bit rate, compression mode, and color space. You can export metadata information in a CSV, sheet, text, or HTML file. MediaInfo doesn't have much in the way of documentation aside from an FAQ on the publisher's Web site, but the program is really pretty self-explanatory, at least for users who already know what all of this metadata means. MediaInfo is definitely a program that's meant for people who already have substantial experience working with audio and video files, not because it's hard to use, but because what it does will be of little use to amateurs. But if you need a simple tool that can quickly give you the lowdown on your media files, MediaInfo is definitely worth checking out.

Quick Specs

• Version:0.7.53
• File size:2.38MB
• Date added:January 25, 2012
• Price:Free
• Operating system:Windows 95/98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista/7

Songbird: The iTunes alternative

Songbird is an advanced media player that offers both audio and video playback, a built-in browser, tons of features and a vibrant developer community that contributes to the program constantly. There are lots of add-ons, skins and other customization options available for Songbird, everything is kept up to date and of course, with no cost.

Songbird - Main

Installation & Requirements

Songbird is a freeware media player that comes with no adware or useless features. It’s very easy to install and  you can run the program without having to worry about paying for a license or having to deal with any ads.
Songbird is very flexible at its core, making it available on both Windows and Mac. There is also a different version that can be downloaded and used on some of the latest Android devices on the market.

The system requirements for Windows are: Windows XP SP3/Vista/7, 1.5 GHz Pentium 4 or equivalent, a minimum of 512 MB of RAM and at least 150 MB of free HDD space.

The system requirements for Mac are: Mac OS X 10.5 or newer, a Macintosh machine with an Intel x86 CPU, a minimum of 512 MB of RAM and 100 MB available space on your HDD.

Interface

The Songbird user interface is self-explanatory, easy to use and the best part about it is that it’s highly customizable, not only through the use of skins (which come in huge numbers) but also via add-ons.

The internet browser is one of the key features of Songbird, allowing the user to easily browse for music or watch videos on streaming sites like YouTube,  search for skins or buy concert tickets. Some add-ons give you the ability to listen to radio-stations, watch podcasts and buy music from online stores. It’s also vital to mention that the built-in browser supports tabbed browsing, something that clearly separates Songbird from iTunes.

Managing your playlists, media library, song metadata and album artwork cam be easily accomplished and it shows how user friendly the interface can be. Songbird offers great multi-language support and also benefits from a helpful setup Assistant which will make it easier for you to get started.

Pros

- Very stable
- The program receives constant improvements thanks to its supportive community
- Highly customizable in both looks and features via skins and add-ons
- Great support
- Easy to use and self-explanatory user interface
- Available on multiple platforms
- Tabbed browsing

Cons

- If you are expecting to be able to play a great deal of video formats from your computer then you will be disappointed

Songbird Alternatives

There are quite a few well known Songbird alternatives out there, one of which is iTunes, offering pretty much the same thing as Songbird but with some differences. For one, although the interface is not ugly in the least, some users might find it a bit old and boring. On the other hand, iTunes is well known for its great, powerful playlist that comes with a few extra features compared to the one found on Songbird. One of these loved and well-known features is of course the automated song assigner that will automatically keep your playlist very well organized.
If both Songbird and iTunes are not what you’re looking for then you might give Winamp a try. Winamp has been around for years and it has grown in popularity due to the fact that it’s a powerful and easy to use media player. Although playing movies or browsing the internet on Winamp is not the best experience, Winamp is a friendly and customizable music player, with tons of skins and a decent support from the developers.

Conclusion

Songbird is a great media player and it offers so many advantages that makes its flaws are almost invisible. It’s very customizable, it has a great developer community and it’s constantly updated mainly because it’s supported by the giant Mozilla. The huge number of add-ons allow users to personalize Songbird to a great extent and the built-in Mozilla browser might deliver the best experience in media player browsing yet.

DAEMON Tools Lite: Essential disc image emulator

Inserting CDs and DVDs in and out of your optical drive can be a tiresome process, especially if you find yourself doing that a lot. Considering that modern hard drives have increased storage capacity, it’s hardly a problem to keep the contents of your disks in your computer, instead of using them repeatedly and as a result causing a great amount of wear and tear. DAEMON Tools Lite, is one of the utilities that allows you to do all of the above, in the form of creating and emulating disk images plus some extra features that might also come in handy, at no cost whatsoever.

Installation & Requirements

Sadly, we can’t state that the installation process of DAEMON Tools Lite is clean as it comes bundled with some adware features (toolbar, home page and search) and even if you could easily opt out of having them installed, this type of behavior could bother a lot of potential customers. Except for the issue stated above, the installation is uneventful and fast with the sole mention that a system reboot is required to complete the process (the reboot is only needed when using the installer bundled with SPTD).

The minimum hardware requirements are rather hilarious for a modern-day computer, only 500MHz CPU, 256MB of RAM and 30MB hard drive space for installation, so anyone can use this program with no worries.

Concerning system requirements, DAEMON Tools Lite was designed for Microsoft Windows operating systems and works on the following versions: 64-bit version of  Windows  XP, Vista and 7.

Interface

The interface is just as the program’s name states, as “Lite” as is can get. DAEMON Tools Lite resides in the system tray providing a small menu, accessible through a simple right-click, from where you can open the GUI or the built-in features: Disc Imaging (with which you can create image files from your CD/DVD/Blu-ray disks), Burn Image to Disk (using a 3rd party program named Astroburn), Virtual Devices (displays a list of all the virtual devices and mounted image files, if any are present with an option to add more virtual drives and images) and Recently Used Images ( from where you can quickly mount the last used image files).

The graphical interface contains the same tools as the right-click menu, except it displays them as medium-sized illustrative icons, right under the main content area that supplies a list with all virtual drives and their mounted images. Regrettably the adware Burn Image with Astroburn option is present here also, but the issue becomes minor if you can simply ignore this feature. The only useful menu item that is not present within the right-click menu is the Preferences button, from where you can perform a variety of adjustments, such as the useful “File Associations” that will allow you to define the image types you wish to be recognized as DAEMON Tools files, giving the possibility to mount them straight from Windows Explorer. For power users the “Advanced” tab from the Preferences menu holds check-boxes for all the copy protection types that DAEMON Tools Lite can override.

As a whole, the interface of DAEMON Tools Lite has a “Spartan” look and feel, but that only makes it more intuitive and easy to use as it supplies us with three different ways to mount images: from the right-click menu, from the “regular” interface and from Windows Explorer with the help of file associations.

Pros

- Small and highly stable program.

- Low resource requirements.

- Simple and functional interface.

- Multilingual support.

- Extended technical support via FAQ, Help Manual, Forum and contact form.

- Free to use for non-commercial purposes.

Cons

- Adware is present not only during the installation, but also within the program’s interface.

- Just 4 virtual images can be mounted at the same time.

- Only for the Windows platform.

Alternatives

DAEMON Tools Lite is a reliable CD/DVD emulator, but the related software industry has a few other similar products that are also highly capable applications.

A dangerous competitor of DAEMON Tools Lite is the popular Magic ISO Virtual CD/DVD-ROM, also known as MagicDisc, a free program that offers pretty much the same features as DT Lite, but can also burn ISO files. However the interface is a bit more complicated than the one of DAEMON Tools so it’s not the best choice if you want to keep things simple.

Another free image emulator that’s worth mentioning is Virtual Clone Drive, a powerful utility characterized by its ease of use and might suit your taste if you don’t need to create virtual images, as the program lacks this option.

If none of the free image emulating programs manage to satisfy you than maybe you should check the paid versions of DAEMON Tools, Pro Standard and Pro Advanced, that deliver far more complex capabilities than DT Lite. There is a range of other commercial alternatives that are highly appreciated, for example Alcohol 52% (which also has a basic free version) and PowerISO.

Sadly, the above mentioned programs only work on Windows operating systems, so if you are a Linux user then you should try Furius ISO Mount, a trustworthy and free program with native support for this platform. Mac users are a bit more fortunate as Mac OS X has built-in support for image files so most of the time, the default system capabilities will deliver all the tools needed for disk image emulation.

Conclusion

There are so many disc image emulators to choose from, that you will have to rely on your personal needs when it comes down to making a decision. Bottom line, if you require mounting virtual disk images at a moderate level, DAEMON Tools Lite is a highly qualified solution that can make all related tasks a child’s play.

Tutorual

So people if you ask me its sometimes difficult for some of us to understand some softwares so if one of you have a problem using this software, then you can refer to the YouTube video link given below, this tutorial is based on easy to follow steps that would make it all clear for you!!

BitComet 1.31 Review

BitComet is a BitTorrent/HTTP/FTP download management software, which is powerful, fast, very easy-to-use, and completely FREE. The advanced features it contains can accelerate your downloading speed up to 5 - 10 times faster, or even more.

Right from the start we have to say BitComet is a top p2p client for downloading torrents, and offers an embedded browser to make finding torrents easier.

In terms of features BitComet is quite generous: UPNP auto-configuration with your router, custom categories to organize your files, simultaneous downloads, DHT networks (trackerless), a download queue, selected downloads in the Torrent package, fast-resume, disk caching, speed limits, auto port mapping, proxies, and IP filtering. The program packs in lots of features though you can’t improve its functionality through plug-ins. BitComet presents you with a default list of torrent index sites, (however, sometimes there are script errors) which you can change by removing sites you don’t want or adding sites that are missing.

The program also allows you to set a limit on your upload speed, so it won’t choke your connection and prevent other web use while running.

For some of you BitComet might look a bit dense at first, coming with a rather non-simplistic design as compared with some of its competitors. This is due to the amount of info it offers but it shouldn’t take you much to easily find your way with it.

Probably the coolest feature of the latest version of BitComet is the possibility to download any video from any video site such as YouTube, Google Video, Dailymotion, Metacafe, etc.

Strong Points: 

• highly versatile
• very powerful
• able to download any video/mp3/flash files from ANY website
• comes in 64-bit version too
• supports VIP account systems

Weak Points:  

• a bit complicated

Conclusion: deserves a place in your p2p clients’ toolbox.

Download The Latest BitComet Version

Screenshots of BitComet: