Auslogics Disk Defrag - Fast And Easy To Use Defragmenter

If you are looking for a defragmenter to speed up your computer, I would recommend IObit Smart Defrag and Defraggle and Auslogics Disk Defrag. The first two softwares have been introduced before, and here is Auslogics Disk Defrag's review.

Auslogics Disk Defrag is a compact, safe and fast defragmenter. Easy is its advantage, just one-click to defrag, like the Windows its own defragmenter, for sure Auslogics Disk Defrag is much more powerful.

AllVideoDownloader - Download Videos From 280+ Streaming Sites

AllVideoDownloader is a free and tiny application to download clips from more than 280 videos websites. With it, you can download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Vimeo, Google Video, Yahoo Video, Myspace, etc.

This software is similar to ClipGrab，ClipGrab supports less websites, but it is cross-platform for Windows, Mac and Linux. AllVideoDownloader is only for Windows. 

Free Office Suite - LibreOffice 3.3 Final Released

LibreOffice is a productivity suite that is compatible with other major office suites, and available on a variety of platforms. The goal is to produce a vendor-independent office suite with ODF support and without any copyright assignment requirements. As free software, users are free to download, modify, use and distribute LibreOffice. 

How To： Run KDE Softwares On Windows

KDE is one of the most popular desktop environment used in Linux, its community has developed a wide variety of applications for communication, work, education and entertainment.

The KDE on Windows Initiative is an ongoing project to port the KDE applications to MS Windows. You can KDE softwares in a normal KDE environment by KDE-Installer, a graphical network-based installer.

• Download the installer http://www.winkde.org/pub/kde/ports/win32/installer/kdewin-installer-gui-latest.exe

A Free DVD Video Transcoder For Windows, Mac OS X And Linux

HandBrake is an open-source video transcoder designed to convert MPEG video (including DVD-Video) into an MPEG-4 video file (.mp4) or .mkv containers.

This software is used to convert DVDs into other forms so they can be viewed on iPods, iPhones. It is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.

•  Home page: http://handbrake.fr/

2D Free And Open-source Worms Game - Hedgewars

Worms is a series of turn-based computer games. Hedgewars is a free and open-source game and is based on the Worms series. It runs on Linux, BSD, Windows, and Mac OS X. Your job is using different weapons to kill the other team hedgehog, hedgehog will explode when life drop to 0, and fell into the water will die.

Prey - Anti-theft Software For Windows, Mac, Linux & Android Phones

Prey is a free and open-source software, it helps you keep track of your phone or laptop at all times, and will help you find it if it ever gets lost or stolen.

Latest Prey features include wifi autoconnect, an alarm system, screenshot grabbing, hardware scanning and webcam capturing, etc. All of these functions are managed as modules, which can be activated on demand by the user, and new functions can be added by adding new modules.

Xonotic 0.1 preview - Free & Open-source First Person Shooter

Xonotic is a fast paced free, open-source first person shooter licensed under GPL. It is a fork of Nexuiz, and a successor of the Nexuiz Project. Xonotic works on Microsoft Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. To find out why Nexuiz was forked into a new project, you can view my previous post <Nexuiz - a free opensource FPS game>

The latest 0.1 preview version has been released on December 23,2010. Find screenshots, Xonotic Videos at http://www.xonotic.org/

Top 10 Cross-Platform BitTorrent Clients

Here is a list of top 10 free and cross-platform BitTorrent softwares, each of them is popular and worth a try. Apart from BitTorrent and µTorrent, other clients are open source softwares.

 1. BitTorrent (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

BitTorrent was the first client written for BitTorrent protocol.
BitTorrent, Inc's software client allows you to quickly download high-quality digital content such as video, music, and games. Available in over 20 languages, it leverages our community of over 70 million users to securely deliver files to your PC faster than anything else out there. BitTorrent was written in Python. Since version 6.0 the BitTorrent client has been a rebranded version of µTorrent. And now it is no longer open source.

There's no special description needed for this old BitTorrent client.


2. µTorrent (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

µTorrent (or uTorrent) is the second most popular BitTorrent client (after the Chinese Xunlei).

µTorrent is a freeware, closed source BitTorrent client by BitTorrent, Inc. It is available for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. All versions are written in C++. Very tiny, efficient and full-featured.

 A variety of skins and languages. At the same time, µTorrent has an  App Studio.


3. Vuze (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Vuze (previously Azureus) is a BitTorrent client written in Java, and uses the Azureus Engine. In addition to downloading data linked to by .torrent files, Azureus allows users to view, publish and share original DVD and HD quality video content.

Azureus offers multiple torrent downloads, queuing/priority systems (on torrents and files), start/stop seeding options and instant access to numerous pieces of information about your torrents. Azureus now features an embedded tracker easily set up and ready to use. Azureus also offers a range of plugins.


4. Transmission (Mac OS X, Linux)

Transmission is Ubuntu's default BitTorrent manager. It features a very simple, intuitive interface on top on an efficient, cross-platform back-end.

It has native Mac, GTK+ and Qt GUI clients, and it can be remote controlled by Web and Terminal clients. It supports add-ons.

Simple interface and Low resource usage are its best features.


5. BitTornado (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

BitTornado is a bittorrent client built on the original BitTorrent
client from BitTorrent Inc. This client features a console and curses mode, and is one of the original bittorrent clients created. It is programmed using Python, the interface is very simple and even a bit ugly.

But it's rather lightweight and easy to use.



6. Miro (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Miro is an Internet television application, a wonderful video player and torrent downloader. You can search, download, and save videos from YouTube, Google Video, Blip, and more.

The program supports most known video files and offers sound and video, some in HD quality. Miro should be the most special one of these 10 softwares, it is a video player, BitTorrent manage is just one of its function.

It also supports RSS BitTorrent. When a new video is available, the program will notify and download if possible. 



7. MLDonkey (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

MLDonkey is an open source, multi-protocol, p2p file sharing application that runs as a back-end server application on many platforms. It can be controlled through a user interface provided by one of many separate front-ends, including a Web interface, telnet interface and over a dozen native client programs.

Like Miro, BitTorrent isn't its only function. It supports the following network protocols, either partially or completely:
          o Ed2k
          o Overnet
          o BitTorrent
          o Kad Network
          o Direct Connect
          o HTTP/FTP


8. Deluge (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

Deluge is a full-featured, multi-platform, multi-interface BitTorrent client.
Meantime,


Deluge is a lightweight, Free Software, cross-platform BitTorrent client. It aims to be a lightweight, secure, and feature-rich client with Plugin System.

Portable version is available at  PortableApps.



9. qBittorrent (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux)

BitTorrent client written in C++ and based on libtorrent-rasterbar with a Qt4
user interface. qBittorrent is a feature rich but lightweight client that is
very similar to uTorrent.

The qBittorrent project aims to provide a Free Software alternative to µtorrent. Additionally, qBittorrent runs and provides the same features on all major platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, OS/2, FreeBSD).


10. KTorrent (Windows, Linux)

KTorrent is a BitTorrent client written in C++ for KDE using the Qt user interface toolkit. It is maintained in the KDE Extragear.

Obviously, KTorrent supports such basic features
as downloading, uploading and seeding files on the BitTorrent network.
However, lots of other additional features and intuitive GUI should make
KTorrent a good choice for everyone. Some features are available as plugins
hence you should make sure you have the ones you need enabled. It takes very little system resources.


Personally, I'm using Transmission & MLDonkey under Ubuntu, both of them have a low resource usage, especially MLDonkey, if you control it just via web, You can hardly feel its presence. Although µTorrent is not an open-source software, I still like it and hope for the improvement of its Linux client.

Related articles

• VLC - Open-source Multimedia Player
• A List Of Commercial Software's Open Source Equivalents
• A Simple YouTube Desktop Client - Minitube
• A Free & Cross-Platform Image Viewer - XnViewMP
• Clementine: A versatile cross-platform music player

An Anti-Frustration Software - Soluto

You will find that your Windows system become more and more slowly after a few months after use, this may be caused by a variety of causes like too much junk files and startup apps, virus, disk fragmentation, etc.

For the proficient users who have access to computers for a long time, they must have some measures in response, but there is still a lot of newbies to PCs, they may get a deeply frustrating experience.

Soluto is such a simple-to-use software can convince the millions of frustrated PC users to use their software. It allows you to understand your boot, discover which applications are slowing it down, then it will give you a solution to speed up your system boot! ( Soluto is the winner of 2010 TechCruch Disrupt. )

Comodo System Cleaner

Image via WikipediaIf you have paid some attention to To Be Free ! , Comodo should be a familiar name to you, I introduced several Comodo products before. The software company's main products are security software category, best known for its firewall, but it also provides some other nice free softwares.

The software today to introduced is also from Comodo - Comodo System Cleaner. It is a suite of utilities and tools that allow you to make your computer faster, more efficient and more secure.
Now let's take a look at its functions!

The Best File Unlock Software - Unlocker

You may often have such an annoying message given by Windows like: Cannot delete file: Access is denied.

Generally speaking, it is caused by the source or destination file may be in use or the file is in use by another program. If you meet these, Unlocker is the best solution. Unlocker is an Explorer extension that allows you with a simple right-click of the mouse on a file or folder to get rid of error messages. It's a fast, simple-to-use and reliable app for processing stubborn files.

Piriform And Its Softwares

Of course, piriform means pear-shaped.  But Piriform (company) is a privately owned UK software house. They're dedicated to creating the best applications for your PC. In fact, its softwares are really great.

All Piriform's softwares have some common grounds: Free without ads, compact, lightweight, easy-to-use. In addition to the regular installation version, it's officially providing portable version, PortableU3 Edition and Silm-Installer. Currently, Piriform offers 4 excellent softwares for Windows - CCleaner, Recuva, Defraggler, and Speccy.

A List Of Commercial Software's Open Source Equivalents

You purchased licenses for all the softwares you're using? If so, you're really great!

However, let's be honest, unauthorized copying of software is very common for most windows users. For example, WinRAR is a widely used software, you could try it before you buy, but after its free trial, it still could be used. How can that be legal? And you can download the copy of Adobe Photoshop from the Internet, but do you feel relieved? You can't be sure that you won't get trouble forever. So don't take software makers for fools, they'll find more and more ways to track down illegal owners all the time.


If you start to contact with linux, you can always find a free replacement for most commercial softwares, and most of them run on Windows and Mac OS too. Some of them might lack the advanced functionality, but they'll be more than enough for most people, some of them are as good as commercial softwares. Here is a list of some common commercial softwares and their open Source Equivalents.  

Commercial	Open source	Support Windows?
3ds Max, Maya	Blender	Yes
Adobe Audition	Audacity	Yes
Adobe Dreamweaver	Bluefish	Yes
Adobe Illustrator	Inkscape	Yes
Adobe InDesign	Scribus	Yes
Adobe Photoshop	GIMP	Yes
Adobe Premiere	Kino, Cinelerra	No
Adobe Reader	Evince, Kpdf	Yes
iTunes, Winamp	Amarok, Rhythmbox, aTunes	No
Kazaa	aMule, MLDonkey	Yes
Microsoft Internet Explorer	Firefox, Chromium	Yes
Microsoft Office	OpenOffice, LibreOffice，KOffice	Yes
Microsoft Windows Mail	Thunderbird, Evolution	Yes
Microsoft Windows Media Player， QuickTime Player	Mplayer, VLC	Yes
Microsoft Windows Messenger	Pidgin, Kopete, aMSN	Yes
Nero Burning Rom	K3b, Brasero	No
Windows Movie Maker	PiTiVi, Open Movie Editor	Yes
winzip, winrar	7-zip	Yes

Related articles

• Knocking On Linux's Door
• Clementine: A versatile cross-platform music player
• Nexuiz - a free open source FPS game

Knocking On Linux's Door

I have used ubuntu linux for more than two years, it's a very nice operating system that is totally different from windows. Linux is friendly enough now, all the job could be done in it easily, there are plenty of free and open source softwares and distributions to choose from. I write this post because I want to let more people know about Linux, it is not the operating system only for hackers, but for all human beings!

Linux was created in 1991 by a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds (He is now a US citizen). At the time, it was essentially a clone of the UNIX kernel. But nowadays, thanks to a substantial amount of development effort by people all around the world, Linux runs on virtually every modern computer architecture. More description can refer to wikipedia. For me, Linux is a kernel's name, kernel of different Linux based system and the general term for all Linux distributions.

IObit Smart Defrag - Fast And Efficient defragger

As a windows user, you may feel the operating system become more and more slowly. Disk fragmentation is generally main cause of slow and unstable computer performance.. Then a defragment is need to move files in to one continuous block and rearrange the space so that it ends up located in one big block of space so that your PC could run faster than before.
 
IObit Smart Defrag is such a free light-weight defragging tool that help defrag and optimize the performance of your hard drives more efficiently. It’s also rather fast than the software in system self.

Free Light Weight Capture & Editor Software - PicPick

PicPick is a lightweight integrated graphic design tool capture software， its interface is simple, easy to operate.

PicPick including the powerful screenshot tool, image editor, color picker, color palette, pixel ruler, protractor, crosshair and even whiteboard. All these could be freely used.

PicPick is free software, still it has commercial version which is required payment for registration. For personal use, just choose the free version. It has not only everything what you need, but it loads fast, sits quietly in the system tray until needed.

MiniTool Partition Wizard: Free & Nice Partition Manager for Windows 7

MiniTool Partition Wizard is a partition manager software designed by MT Solution Ltd. In this post, I'm introducing the home edition. There're not lots of partition manager on windows 7, you may heard Acronis Disk Director Suite and EASEUS Partition Master before, the former is not free, and the free EASEUS version only supports 32-bit operating system. You will find MiniTool Partition Wizard home edition more powerful than other free partition manager, it works on 64 bit windows 7 too!

Shutdown Your PC Automatically with Poweroff

Poweroff is a small  program that your can control the power state of your PC. It's powerful and free.

It could  automatically write-off, restart, shutdown, power off, standby, hibernate, lock and even remote control your computer with the schedule you set.