To extract and compress your files, 7-Zip is a perfectly viable alternative to the better known WinZip or WinRAR. The application works exactly like its main competitors yet manages to mix in WinZip’s selection of tools with WinRAR’s versatility.

The 7-Zip interface is similar to that of its competitors, with a main file manager and a command line to search and select files to extract or compress. The control panel is comprised of the essential buttons like extract, add and test, but also features copy, move and delete functions to allow you to manage your files. 7-Zip extracts and compresses files as fast as WinZip and WinRAR and handles the main archive formats like ZIP, TAR, RAR and ISO.

The archiving process is where 7-Zip differs most from its rivals. Where WinZip only lets you compress to ZIP and WinRAR to RAR or ZIP, 7zip offers you up to 5 different archive formats to choose from. The application lets you choose the update mode, depending on whether you want to add and replace files, refresh the archive or just synchronize files. If you don’t want somebody opening up your archive without your permission, you can set a password to protect your archive.We particularly liked the split tool because it can cut up your archive into equal parts which fit on a floppy, CD or DVD, handy if you need to distribute a particularly large archive.

Security is where 7-Zip lags behind its main rivals. There is no option to scan archives for viruses and you can’t repair damaged or corrupted files. While you can set a password to protect your archive, you can’t choose between different levels of encryption.

7-Zip might not be as secure as WinZip or WinRAR but it is definitely more versatile. It works with more archive formats and offers many useful tools like update mode or splitting. If you feel too limited by WinZip and if you don’t like WinRAR we suggest giving 7-Zip a try and taking advantage of all its possibilities.

Download 7-Zip 4.60 in Softonic

Probably one of the parts of Windows most in need of a overhaul is Windows Explorer. OK, it's simple, easy to use and functional but it could surely be made far more intuitive and useful.

That's what the developers of Explorer++ have attempted to achieve and, for the most part, they've done a really good job. Explorer++ is a free multi-tab clone of Windows Explorer, featuring several enhancements and additions that make it a more useful tool.

Probably one of the most interesting features of the application is the ability to use tabbed browsing to manage multiple folders. Instead of multiple Windows, just use one and each tab represents an open folder. It's exactly the same principle as tabbed browsing that's now common in internet browsers.

It also features some handy shortcuts for simple file transfer operations and also allows you to split and merge files, which is something notably absent from Windows Explorer.

Explorer++ brings new functionality to Windows Explorer although it could have gone a lot further in revolutionizing this archaic part of Windows.

Download Explorer++ Alpha 2 in Softonic

Apex Free 3GP Video Converter is a free converter that can convert any popular video to work on your Mobile Phone in 3GP format.

Apex Free 3GP Video Converter supports a huge number of formats. You can convert your favorite movies from AVI, DIVX, MOV, QuickTime, MPEG, VCD , DVD, WMV, ASF, RM, RMVB to 3GP. As far as converters go, Apex Free 3GP Video Converter is pretty quick and getting started is relatively easy, with a quick and clear interface.

The converter supports batch conversions so you can queue an unlimited number of files to convert and let it work through them. You can also define exactly which in and out points you want, so you can select exactly how big you want files to be. The limit is 2GB which is pretty big and you can set it to automatically shut down your PC after conversion.

Apex Free 3GP Video Converter has everything you need to convert files to 3GP format although it's shame it doesn't support just a few more file formats.

Download Apex Free 3GP Video Converter 6.49 in Softonic

PTLens is an excellent application to correct or add distortion to your pictures.

You'll be able to apply a fish eye effect, modify perspective, chromatic aberation and vignetting. PTLens also lets you correct barrel-pincushion distortion on a wide range of camera models. It doesn't seem to allow you to add new models though. Adding effects is really easy thanks to sliders and you can immediately see the changes in the preview. You can also simply disable an effect you don't want by unselecting it.

The program's interface does feel a little clunky, and you wonder why the directory is on the right, instead of next to the preview. We appreciate that a Photoshop plugin for PTLens comes in the installer though, as many photographers prefer working straight in Photoshop. The plugin will work exactly as the standalone application.

Despite the slightly unintuitive interface, PTLens is an excellent tool for correcting image distortion. Recommended for any serious photographer!

Download PTLens 8.7.4 in Softonic

Sometimes the mouse cursor can blink way too rapidly when you're trying to aim it at a particular target or area.

SlowMousion is a discreet application that slows down mouse cursor's speed when pressing and holding down a key or button. SlowMousion gives you more sensitive control over mouse movements when drawing shapes, dragging shapes and just about anything else you are doing with a mouse.

SlowMousion is extremely easy to enable and disable which is essential because it can annoyingly activate itself when you least want it to. The best option is to use the program to define a hotkey instead because this saves any confusion. With repeated taps of the key, you can define exactly how fast or slow you want the mouse cursor to move or blink.

SlowMousion is a very basic application that does a simple job but is best activated from the keyboard than mouse.

Download SlowMousion 1.1 in Softonic

It's hard to imagine eMule being made any easier but easyMule does a pretty good job of it for those that find the world's number one P2P client a bit too complicated.

easyMule offers a sleek interface that looks almost identical to eMule but has obviously been stripped down. Conveniently, you can play files while you are downloading (as long as there's enough to read), which reduces the risk of downloading fake or corrupted files. In addition, easyMule features a safety disk buffer which protects your hard drive from malicious files before they manage to damage your system.

easyMule uses exactly the same P2P principle as eMule to connect to networks although not exactly the same servers. This brings one of the major weaknesses of easyMule to light - it doesn't really offer as many hits as eMule. However, it does offer a decent hit rate and download speeds are comparable.

easyMule is definitely easier than eMule to use although I can only imagine that young kids would really benefit from this as eMule is not a complicated program.

Download easyMule 1.03 in Softonic

As far as free PDF converters go, doPDF is one of the best out there saving you tons of cash on Adobe's patented version and whatsmore, doing it in half the time.

The program is remarkably simple to use. Just open a document in Microsoft Word, WordPad, NotePad or practically any other text editing software, choose Print and select doPDF. The program asks you where to save the PDF file and when finished, the PDF file will be automatically opened in your default PDF viewer. This process takes less than a minute and you'll be amazed at how accurate the PDF is. Occasionally, it can suffer with unusually formatted text and images and so they won't come-out exactly as you want but this can be remedied.

Unfortunately, there's also no option to print large web pages (such as long news articles or forum pages) without dividing it into separate pages so you'll end up with lines dividing the article up throughout your PDF documents. The other slight downside is that it seems the PDF files it creates can be rather large although if you ZIP them up, this is not much of an issue.

An excellent PDF converter that's fast, easy to use and serves as more than an adequate replacement for Adobe's software.

Download doPDF 6.1.271 in Softonic

Find Desktop is the entry level solution for document management. The extreme simplification of all operations, allows you to drammatically decrease the time needed to find, view and elaborate documents. Find Desktop is integrated with a powerful "full-text" retrieval engine, supported by O.C.R. (optical character recognition) engine.

This allows you to search directly in the text, starting from one word or exact phrase contained in electronic or image documents. Other important functions are the mail indexing system, the enhanced scanning functions (with virtual annotation capabilities) as well as the management of the classification fields associated with documents render Find Desktop the fast and economic solution for document management.

Find Desktop is equipped of technology "Highlight" that evidences directly on the original document (image file or electronic file) the search results and supports the most common electronic document formats (Adobe Acrobat PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, etc..) with search capabilities also in ZIP file. The Automatic Web Update allows you to maintain the software always up to date.

Download Find Desktop Standard 1.84 in Softonic

There's a huge trend at the moment for programs and applications that bring together content from several sites to save you the hassle of visiting them all.

That's exactly what Shiki Video Downloader attempts to do bringing together content from sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, GoogleVideo and Metacafe. From the search results, you can then watch the videos directly on your desktop in the Shiki Player rather than, as the developers say, "a webpage full of annoying banners". However, it doesn't stop there. It also converts files into the format of your choice so for example, you can take your clips with you on the move. The number of formats you can convert to is rather limited but currently includes .mp4, .wmv, .avi, .mp3 and .aac. It also has special settings for those that want to convert content to work on iPod, Zune and iPhone.

The program interface looks very slick in black and it is nice just being able to search from such a huge amount of content. However, you'll find that search results are returned much slower than going directly to any of the video sites themselves.

Shiki Video Downloader is one hell of a package - search engine, video player and converter in one. Once the search speeds are improved, it will score much more highly.

Download Shiki Video Downloader 1.0.0.49 in Softonic

Most multimedia publishing programs only allow you to publish one type of format be it photos, video or audio - Gallery Designer allows you to publish all 3 at once and does all the HTML coding for you.

Everything is explained and taken step by step until your gallery is online with no further effort required on your part. To get going, first of all you're asked which image files you want to upload. Secondly, you're asked what title you want to give the album and the layout parameters - how big, what style etc. Then, you simply click "Build" and the software whizzes into action building a perfect HTML gallery, complete with thumbnails, for publishing on the net.

Once ready, you are given detailed control over exactly how you want the gallery to look such as by changing the thumbnails to full image size, the titles, layout gallery style, border colors etc. If you see another gallery online that you like developed using Gallery Designer, you can even borrow that template or alternatively, design your own.

With support for for a wide range of video and photo formats and even support for text files, Gallery Designer takes the pain out of coding your own online gallery.

Download Gallery Designer 1.0.9 in Softonic

Following the release of new versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox, the infamous 'browser wars' are flaring up again. Despite both Firefox 1.5 and the Beta of IE7 making significant strides, it would be be foolish to think this was a two-horse race. While gaining a good reputation with geeks and power users, Opera has long been a bit-part player among the big boys of the browser world. However, if this preview release is anything to go by, the Norwegian-built browser could finally be ready to punch with the heavyweights.

Opera has been pioneering new ways of browsing the web for some time. It has had tabbed browsing since the days before tabbed browsing was cool and developed the innovative 'mouse gestures' control system, where you navigate through the web just by holding the mouse button and flicking your wrist. The developers even dabbled with a multi-pane interface for viewing several pages within one interface.

The good news is that Opera has lost none of its appetite for innovation, and version 9 is packed with new goodies that will have the programmers at Mozilla and Microsoft choking on their doughnuts. For starters the app runs much quicker than the previous release, making it arguably the quickest browser around (except perhaps for Safari) at rendering pages. Incredibly, despite this boost in performance, the program appears to use less memory than version 8.5, making it far less draining on system resources than Firefox and IE.

In terms of features Opera is the gift that keeps on giving. New to the program comes OSX Tiger-style 'widgets', allowing you to check news, convert currency, view the weather and so on through a series of draggable pop-ups which anchor themselves in front of the browser. Although there aren’t many widgets to choose from at present, this is sure to change once the tech-minded Opera fans start developing more.

Another great addition to Opera 9 is BitTorrent support, allowing you to download torrents directly within the browser – a feature that amazingly no one had thought of before. This system works very smoothly, which makes us wonder why RSS feed reading support in Opera is still so poor.

Among the other new treats within the program is a nifty new search feature which lets you add any search engine to the search bar in the main toolbar. This means you can instantly access searches within your favorite online destinations (Softonic, for instance).

Tabbed browsing remains, although some users may be annoyed to discover that Opera has added close tab buttons to the tabs themselves rather than as a separate button. Having said this, the new web page preview thumbnails that appear when you rollover a tab are a real masterstroke. Mouse gestures are still there too, along with the addition of Total Recall-style voice commands – another example of how cutting-edge this browser is.

Opera's developers have been keen to ramp up security features too, and although they aren't highly original, the new content blocking and pop-up blocking functions serve their purpose effectively. What's more, it's refreshing to see a browser that embraces the latest web standards so freely, with the latest release boasting support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 tags.

The browser is remarkably stable and is far better behaved than Internet Explorer 7. Combined with its speed, innovative features and standards support, Opera is undoubtedly web software's best-kept secret, and the final release may prove to be even better than Firefox. Don't say anything though, or everyone will want it.

Download Opera 9.52 in Softonic

I've spent many an hour beating my brains over a beastly crossword in a newspaper and have often thought it would be nice to construct my own in order to exact revenge on some of my enemies. Well, as the name suggests, Crossword Forge gives you the power to do just that. Creating a crossword is a very easy task in the program and is simply a matter of writing the question of the clue and entering the correct answer. Of course, the tricky part is to make all the letters and words match up, but with some practice it becomes easy to juggle the words around to fit.

There are some neat ways you can customise your puzzles with Crossword Forge, such as changing the font and colours, adding foreign characters and applying a picture in the background of the crossword. What's more, the grid can be as big as you like, meaning you make the puzzle really easy or really difficult depending on the intellegence of the person you're making the crossword for (or on how much you hate them!) This makes Crossword Forge a perfect way to entertain your buddies or for use a teaching aid.

Download Crossword Forge 5.4 in Softonic

If you spend a lot of time away from your computer or need access to all your email accounts while traveling then Reach-a-Mail is a great solution.

When you're on the move, you may not always have access to your webmail or at least, access may be slow. And if you are traveling to a destination where Internet connectivity is poor then, you'll need some way of accessing your old e-mails. The only way to do this is to take them with you which is exactly what Reach-a-Mail allows you to do. In a nutshell, Reach-a-Mail is an ultra compact mail client which allows you to compress and take your mail and address book with you on a USB stick. If you're internet connection is working, you can also check new mail but if not, it can save all your e-mails for offline viewing before you set-off on your travels. This includes e-mail to multiple accounts so it's a great tool if you're running a small business or private project on a budget but have to move around a lot.

Reach-a-Mail installs easily on USB flash memory stick, allowing you to store your address book and any important correspondence you might need for day-to-day tasks. In the free version, you are plagued with ads but this Pro version is completely ad free and also includes a small RSS reader. You may be better sticking to your regular reader though as it doesn't seem to import feeds easily but it's the mail client that impresses most anyway.

Ideal for travelers and business people on the move, Reach-a-Mail is a small, portable and easy to use solution for those moments when you don't have online access to your e-mail and contacts.

Download Reach-a-Mail Pro 3.51 in Softonic

If like me you loved Evil Knievel as a kid, then you may well love Dangerous Road which is a fast action, rip roaring motorbike racing game.

Well Dangerous Road is not exactly a racing game - it's more a case of racing like mad along a busy highway that is genuinely dangerous. In your way are all kinds of obstacles from trucks to pedestrians but you can use the "Ctrl" key to scroll through a variety of weapons and shoot them off the road.

The gameplay of Dangerous Road is lightening fast but it reminds you a bit of one of those early handheld console games where the scenery never changes and it seems to be on some kind of loop so it can get rather boring after prolonged play. However, if you do persevere and your score is among the Top 10, you can upload it to the Dangerous Road website to compare yourself with hundreds of other players across the world.

Dangerous Road is not exactly a racing classic and it could do with a little more variation in scenery and challenge but bike racing enthusiasts are sure to find some appeal.

Download Dangerous Road in Softonic

Have you ever stopped to think how many button presses and mouse clicks you've made on your computer over the years? Well, you need wonder no longer thanks to WorkMeter XP.

A simple yet somewhat amusing program, WorkMeter XP measures a range of different actions performed on your PC as you work. It notes the number of keystrokes you make, the number of mouse clicks, along with the mouse trajectory in pixels and meters. You'll need to make sure you have the correct monitor size selected in the WorkMeter XP interface, otherwise the information it gives you will not be accurate.

Besides just recording the stats as you type, WorkMeter XP also keeps a history of your records, so you can compare the amount of key presses and mouse movement over time, which I thought was an interesting feature. You also get an option for auto-starting WorkMeter XP at Windows startup.

Ultimately I guess WorkMeter XP doesn't really serve any purpose other than being a brief novelty. Actually the best use I found for it was to race your pals to being the quickest to move the mouse a total of 100 meters.

If you're interested to know exactly how many buttons you press on a daily basis, WorkMeter XP provides an accurate and easy-to-read solution.

Download WorkMeter XP in Softonic

Firefox tabs are a great way to organise your surfing habits no matter how many sites or pages you want to visit at one time.

However, you can only view one page at a time and it's very easy to lose track of what you've got open and for how long for. Aging Tabs allows you to see how expired your tabs are because they change colour according to how old they are. You can define what colour you want them to change to and over which time period with Aging Tabs.

Aging Tabs also gives new colour to tabs that have just been opened or have been reopened after recently closing them. At the end of the day, Aging Tabs is not a major innovation but it does allow you to keep much better tabs on what you've got open and for how long for. However, whether you really need to do this or not is the big question - maybe it's a good way to stop Firefox hogging so much RAM by reminding you to close tabs.

Aging Tabs is an easy way to add an extra touch of organisation to Firefox and make sure that you know exactly how long tabs have been open for - should you ever need to know.

Download Aging Tabs 0.7.1 in Softonic

There's nothing more annoying than downloading or ripping a film and then reaslising you don't have th right codecs to play it.

Or worse, the codecs that you have are corrupt and don't playback properly. If you've found yourself in this situation then m5Studio Codec is a neat little package which brings together most of the most important codecs you'll need. m5Studio Codec includes all the major codecs you'll need to make sure that you'll never have problems playing a film again.

Among the codecs included in m5Studio Codec are DivX or XviD, Ogg Vorbis or Cinepak or AC3 plus some some lesser known ones such as CoreAVC and Fraunhoffer IIS. Installation is simply a matter of double clicking EXE file and you've got a few configuration controls to control exactly how you want the codecs to perform.

m5Studio Codec is a useful codec package that will be able to playback most of the major formats that you can download or rip films to.

Download m5Studio Codec 8.3a in Softonic

Zoundry Raven is our a flexible WYSIWYG blog editor that allows you to edit blogs on a wide range of platforms.

The feel of Zoundry Raven is something like that of a word processor except you can add links, tags, photos, music and video files and publish directly to major platforms such as Blogger and Wordpress. The Zoundry Raven editor is WYSIWYG meaning that you know exactly how it's going to look before anything is published.

In addition, you can use tabs in Zoundry Raven to separate multiple blogs. So for instance, you can have one tab for your Blogger blog and one for your Wordpress blog. There's also a useful indexer which links to every blog post you've ever written making it easy to manage your posts. There's no need to even install Zoundry Raven on your hard drive - you can run it from a USB stick.

Zoundry Raven is a brilliant blogging application which makes updating and managing blogs on different platforms insanely easy.

Download Zoundry Raven 0.9.360 Beta in Softonic

There is nothing that annoys me more in Firefox when a PDF document tries to open and crashes the browser. That was until I tried PDF Download.

PDF Download prevents this problem ever arising by allowing you to control exactly how and when PDF files are opened or downloaded. Instead of opening PDF files "blind" which is currently the case, PDF Download lets you know exactly how big it is with options of whether to convert it, open it, download it or convert to HTML. PDF Download stops the annoying problem of PDF files taking ages to open - especially big ones. With PDF Download, you can see instantly whether its a big file, in which case, it's advisable to download it for reading later as opening a big PDF file is like waiting for Christmas to arrive sometimes.

The PDF Download plugin usually presents you with 3 options unless you've instructed it to do the same thing by default all the time - convert the PDF to HTML, download the PDF or open the PDF in the browser. One bonus with PDF Download, that perhaps separates it from others, is that it's not just limited to Adobe Reader. PDF Download also works with Foxit Reader and other PDF readers although to be honest, if you're using Foxit, you won't find much use for PDF Download anyway as it opens PDF files much more smoothly than Adobe Reader.

PDF Download is an excellent PDF tool which will result in fewer Firefox crashes although not everytime as it still seems susceptible to crashes when opening PDF files in the browser.

Download PDF Download 2.0.0.0 in Softonic

Defragging your hard drive is one of the easiest and simplest ways to make your system run faster and reduce hard drive wear and tear.

Puran Defrag is a very simple defrag utility which defrags files and optimizes your system, which means it collect all the fragments of a file and puts them back together in a more ordered and logical form. Puran Defrag also moves frequently used files and all directories to a faster disk area which theoretically should speed up your drive.

Puran Defrag can be used while you are working although it doesn't exactly make life easy on slower machines because the reorganising of files will inevitably slow down certain applications - it's highly recommended you allow Puran Defrag to work overnight or while you are not using your PC. To help you in this respect, Puran Defrag allows you to automatically schedule the defragging of your drive every boot, once a week, on a specific day of the month or even every half hour.

Puran Defrag is an extremely simple defragger which should result in some system improvements although you may find that it's painfully slow if you hard drive requires a lot of defragging.

Download Puran Defrag 5.0 in Softonic