ProgDVB is a piece of software which allows you to watch SAT-Television and listen to Radio channels directly from satellite by using DVB-PCI cards with hardware decoders on the board, SAT-dish, and personal x86-compatible computers. ProgDVB has options for working with network broadcasting and Audio/Video recording of the stream to different digital-media formats.

Download ProgDVB 5.16.1 in Softonic

Bsnes is a Super Nintendo emulator that's been around since 2004 and is known for its efforts to reproduce Super Nintendo games in pixel perfect accuracy.

The emulator also gives special focus to ensuring that your gaming experience is as bug-free as possible. However, in order to reproduce the speed and playability of SNES games, the RAM load of Bsnes is quite high and you may experience some freezes if you're working on a slower system.

It doesn't help that Bsnes heavily utilises Direct3D, OpenGL, DirectSound and DirectInput to get such good results but the payoff is probably worth if you're running a faster machine. However, even if you do have decent hardware, you'll probably experience a few bugs and crashes as it is still very much a work in progress.

If you had a Snes or loved the old console, then Bsnes is surely one of the most accurate emulators out there.

Download Bsnes 0.036 in Softonic

Keeping Windows continually optimised is an ongoing challenge and the worst problem is when software conflict with each other.

PCHeal is designed to step in when you've suffered a major software conflict or system slowdown. It makes direct changes to your system registry and files to enhance memory, screen drawings, animations, refresh rates and CPU threading speeds. According to the developers, it automatically adjusts settings and changes made based on computer specifications although it's hard to tell if anything really has been done or not after running the program There is also a deep system analyzer and diagnostic tool which attempts to find and repair any potential problems with the computer which is affecting its performance. The software also focuses on over-clocking features to enhance memory and CPU priorities and there's an easy and intuitive user interface which performs all setting changes immediately. In reality, in the case of a major software conflict, there's little you can do but this program offers some hope of at least recuperating some of your system's performance without uninstalling the guilty products.

Worth a try if you've experienced a major system failure although don't expect it to perform miracles.

Download PCHeal 1.9.29.2008 in Softonic

A system analyzer is often overlooked as the toy of PC modding fanatics, but the reality is that these applications are very effective at dissecting your PC and giving you the hard truth about its performance. PC Wizard aims to explore the insides of your system and give you the complete low down on its strengths and weaknesses.

Once you launch PC Wizard you’ll notice it takes some time to detect all the hardware installed on your PC. Use the left side of the interface to navigate through the different categories. PC Wizard reveals all the basic details of your hardware, like ports, drivers and processors, but you’ll soon realize there’s much more to it, like analyzing system files or investigating the configuration of elements such as your Internet connection or your Control Panel. Over-sized icons make it fairly obvious what you can inspect, however we would have appreciated an explorer type window to navigate through components and select exactly what to analyze.

The core of any self-respecting system analyzer is the benchmarking tool and that is where PC Wizard excels. The application lets you inspect everything from processors to cache, RAM and multimedia like DirectX, MP3 compression and video. Benchmarks provide the results as a list of information or via comprehensible graphs. These will show you straight away where you’re PC stands and the “compare with” button will let you measure your processor up against well known models. We have to warn beginners though that the information is fairly technical and will be more relevant to experienced users. Just for fun, test out the video benchmark to obtain a swarm of multicoloured balls and lines all over your screen.

That’s the only bit of excitement you’ll get with this application though. PC Wizard is not here for fun it's here to be effective. The detailed information and thorough benchmarking tests give you reliable data on all the characteristics and components of your PC. The complexity of this type of application means beginners are best kept away from it altogether, however advanced users will revel in the wealth of knowledge it will uncover on their PC’s performances.

Download PC Wizard 2008 1.86 in Softonic

There are a multitude of audio converters and rippers around but few free programs offer the simplicity and functionality of BonkEnc. As well as being able to rip music from a CD and turn it into an audio file, the program boasts a converter for changing the format of a file between a wide range of file types, including MP, Ogg, AVI and WAV.

BonkEnc queries and stores track information using the online free CDDB database, automatically adding this meta data into the file to make it much easier to search and sort your music collection. The application performs its duties quickly and reliably and although the user interface looks rather old-hat, it hides a huge number of options for ripping and converting music, which makes this one of the most powerful free rippers you'll find.

Download BonkEnc 1.0.9 in Softonic

MioNet is the first and only personal private network that makes remote access and file sharing seamless, simple and secure. It is incredibly easy to set up and use - no dedicated hardware, networking protocols or firewall reconfigurations required.

It can access anything you want on any of your computers running MioNet - documents, music, photos, and more - regardless of where they're physically located. And you can access them all immediately since each computer simply appears as another drive on your local desktop. You can also share photos, home videos, work folders, webcams, you name it.

Finally, MioNet is seamlessly integrated with your Microsoft OS, so everything you can do on one computer you can now do across all your computers - simultaneously. Desktop search, Microsoft Office applications, photo and music management, even backup.

Download MioNet 3.6 in Softonic

Fresh Diagnose is a utility designed to analyze and benchmark your computer system. It can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, hard disk performance, video system information, mainboard / motherboard information, and a lot more besides.

System Information: Scan your system and get a complete report about your computer's hardware and software, for example: motherboard information, video system information, PCI / AGP buses information, peripheral (keyboard, mouse, printer, etc.) information, network information.

System Benchmarks: Test your system performance, such as CPU, hard disk, CD/DVD ROM, and compare it with other systems.

Download Fresh Diagnose 7.90 in Softonic

Vista Manager is a powerful software tool to tweak, optimize, maintain and tune up your Windows Vista, it bundles more than 20 different utilities in one. It will help your system to be stable, fast, secure and personal.

Information

Get detailed system and all hardware information on your system; show all detailed information of running processes and threads on your machine; Vista Manager offers 1-clicking and cleans your system automatically.

Optimizer

Tweak your system to improve windows startup and shutdown speed; tweak your hardware to increase system speed and performance.

Cleaner

Find out which files or folders engross your disk space and shown with chart; Find and clean junk files to increase Hard Disk space; Duplicate Files Finder can scan your computer for files with the same size, name and modification time; Registry Cleaner can easily checks your registry and repair incorrectly linked registry entries, automatically remove invalid entries; Registry Defrag rebuilds and re-indexs your registry to reduce application response time and registry access time.

Customization

Control what is started on Windows startup; edit context menus of mouse Right-Clicking; customize system desktop, menus, toolbar and notifications settings; automatically change your desktop wallpaper on background.

Security

You can improve desktop, menus, Windows logon securities, and enable numerous hidden performance options of system, disable system updates and error reports; hide and restrict to access drives, specify which applications are not allowed to be executed on your computer; encrypt/decrypt and shred files, change the location of system folders; Privacy Protector can maintain your personal privacy by eliminating the tracks that you leave behind; create lots of randomization password once.

Network

Optimize your Internet connection speed, manage all shares items; tweak your Internet Explorer easily.

Download Vista Manager 1.5.6 in Softonic

Far from being just office workhorses, computers are also thought of as complete entertainment systems that you can use to chat with friends, play videogames or watch movies. Regarding this last option, there's a wide range of DVD players out there, but we'll focus our attention on one of them: Power DVD.

The program's installation process is very quick. It includes Google Toolbar as an add-on but you can decline its installation if you're not interested. Once launched, you gain access to its main interface which, to be honest, is not especially nice: a close-up of a girl wearing weird sunglasses is not the kind of thing you expect to see on the screen when opening a DVD player. It would look much better with some abstract design or just the program logo instead. Anyway, configuration settings allow you to customize this interface with skins but there are no skins included. At least you can change the color scheme by clicking on the display.

Power DVD is generally very easy to use. All the buttons on the player panel have tooltips to give you hints about their usage. Also, most of their functions can be performed with the mouse or the keyboard (using the hotkey displayed in the tooltip). When playing a movie in full screen mode, the panel hides automatically and shows only if you move the mouse. Still, you can access all the program's functions through a comprehensive context menu by right-clicking anywhere on the image.

As for the playing functions, the movie flows very smoothly even when you move the window around or play it in full screen mode. Sound can be configured in different ways, depending on your hardware means (from headphones to an 8-speaker surround system) in order to obtain the best possible sound quality. During our tests, we also found some interesting tools: one offers the possibility to change playing speed and therefore obtain slow or fast motion images; another one lets you take snapshots of your favourite scenes in the movie, according to the settings in Configuration – Player – Advanced - Snapshot; and finally a tool called "Say it again" with which you can repeat certain dialogues over and over again. This may be useful for foreign language students or movie fans who like to learn certain script lines by heart.

Power DVD is then a perfect solution for your all DVD playing needs. It may seem quite simple at first sight but after all, you don't need much more apart from "play" and "pause" to happily watch a movie on your PC. And in case you want to know more about the program and their developers, have a look at our interview with Dr. Jau Huang, Cyberlink's founder.

Download PowerDVD 8.0.1730 in Softonic

It's not only the world that's getting warmer - PC's, by virtue of the fact that they are becoming increasingly more powerful, are literally warming up too.

Most good PCs and laptops have a fan which automatically controls overheating and regulates temperature but this is not always 100% reliable, especially when you've got lots of external devices connected. The good thing about HWMonitor is that it gives you an instant overview of your PC's vital power and heat stats while at the same time, remaining very light and not adding to the problem. In fact, it doesn't require any installation at all and can be run simply from the .EXE file. The program does not copy any files into the directory or edit the registry in any way. The program probably shows you far more stats that it needs to in reality - I mean, who really needs to know the temperature of their graphics card? It would have been useful if the program had included some kind of basic and advanced view to prevent you getting overwhelmed with data but at least the info is there if you really need it.

If you're worried that you're fan is not doing it's job properly or your PC is getting disconcertingly hot, then HWMonitor is the ultimate monitoring tool.

Download HWMonitor 1.11 in Softonic

Give your computer a comprehensive once over. Dr. Hardware is a program of extreme detail that is not recommended for anyone who isn't into the possibility of their computer grinding to a halt during examination.

Upon installing this program, you will be presented with a telling readme file that informs you that it may evoke "Severe Exception Errors" (blue screen), "General Protection Faults", or "Program Errors". This isn’t due to the program being unstable, but rather to the fact that it pushes your computer to its limit in order to get an accurate measure of just what your system is capable of.

To begin with, you land on a general rundown of your system where you can perform the general overview test, that will outline your hardware configuration. You can then go on to explore the various tabs throughout the program, which aim to make navigating easier, but can actually get quite ambiguous since there are just so many tabs on there. The interface feels outdated and the creators don’t seem to have put much thought in to making it easy to use.

That said, the program contains a breathtakingly detailed breakdown of your computer's components and once you get used to the interface, you can find info about any hardware setting imaginable. The configuration menu will let you customize how the program performs, in accordance with the whether you are a novice or an expert computer user.

This is a powerful piece of software for checking the performance of your computer, although with such a rigorous scan, you may expect your system to crash at any moment.

Download Dr. Hardware 2008 9.0.0 in Softonic

Maintaining Windows in decent working order can be a full time job and it's a pain to have to download multiple programs to keep everything in check.

Pristy Utils 2009 is a collection of tools to maintain your PC. It features everything from a power scheme manager to a web management utility and Vista tweaker

The first Pristy Utils 2009 utility, System PowerDown serves to schedule shutdowns, restarts, suspensions and blocking sessions in the PC after a specified time. Web assistant is the second application which works as a quick shortcut for different Web related uses such as sending mails, files over the internet etc. The third tool is called PC detector. It displays all the information from your computer hardware in eight different sections: - CPU, screen, sound, memory, network, disk storage devices, and so on.

Finally, Pristy Utils 2009 has three applications for maintenance tasks - a cleaner to free RAM Memory, File Wipeout for secure deletion of files, and a desktop clock which is basically a widget for the desktop. More recently, Pristy Utils 2009 has been bolstered with a Vista booster that defrags your boot sequence. However, what this program is crying out for is a defragmentation tool - it's all very well cleaning up your hard drive but it doesn't speed them up which is where a defrag tool would come in really useful.

Pristy Utils 2009 is a great all round lightweight maintenance and web management tool although it lacks a few essentials.

Download Pristy Utils 2009 1.0.8 in Softonic

Fresh UI is a fresh solution for configuring and optimizing Windows. Loaded with hundreds of useful hidden settings in Windows XP/2000/NT/ 98/95/Me, this software covers the customizing and optimizing techniques that you'll be glad to know, such as:

• Customizing Windows User Interface (UI)
• Optimizing system settings
• Optimizing hardware settings
• Customizing Windows application settings
• Controlling user environment with policies

Fresh UI is organized by section for easy navigation and is complete with detailed descriptions for easy reference.

Download Fresh UI 8.14 in Softonic

There are so many graphics cards and chipsets nowadays that compatibility problems with software inevitably arise. PowerStrip provides advanced, multi-monitor, programmable hardware support to a wide range of graphics cards - from the Matrox Millennium I to the latest ATI X850 and NVidia SLI solutions.

The developers claim this is the only program of its type to support multiple graphics cards from multiple chipset vendors, simultaneously, under every Windows operating system from Windows 95 to the x64-bit edition of XP. A simple menu pop up from the system tray provides access to some 500 controls over your display hardware, including color correction tools, period level adjustments over screen geometry, and driver independent clock controls.

The program automatically detects when programs are launched and responds by activating specific display settings, gamma adjustments, performance switches and even clock speeds - returning everything to normal when the program closes. A quick setup wizard gets you up and running with minimal fuss and and live updates are supported to ensure you're always running the latest release.

If you've had problems with games or compatibility issues with other software, look no further than PowerStrip.

Download PowerStrip 3.82.632 in Softonic

Preventing data loss is never an easy job because there are so many things that can go wrong but Active@ Disk Monitor goes a long way to giving you peace of mind.

Active@ Disk Monitor is a disk utility that checks and monitors the status of hard drives to help prevent data loss using S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology). This program relies on your hardware supporting SMART so if it doesn't, it won't be of much use to you.

Active@ Disk Monitor monitors hard disk parameters such as Temperature, Head Flying Height and Spin-Up Time but most importantly, notifies you when a critical moment is approaching on your hard drive. Active@ Disk Monitor also displays hard disk information, current S.M.A.R.T. attributes and the overall status of the hard disk's health.

The only problem you may experience is when Active@ Disk Monitor kicks in while you are using your PC - it can seriously slow down whatever you are doing if it performs a full scan.

Active@ Disk Monitor is a useful tool to warn of impending disk failure before the worst happens.

Download Active@ Disk Monitor 1.2.648 in Softonic

If you don't trust passwords to protect your computer, you should take a look at Rohos Logon Key.

With Rohos Logon Key you can block access to your computer using any USB memory stick you have previously configured with the program as access key. So, instead of a weak, easy-to-forget password, Rohos Logon Key uses a combination of hardware (the USB device) and software (the PIN code associated to that device) to protect the computer.

Rohos Logon Key is very easy to configure and use. It features a wide variety of configuration options with which you can not only customize security settings, but also graphic settings such as the welcome message or the logon screen Rohos Logon Key will use.

Some other interesting features in Rohos Logon Key include the Emergency login option in case you lose your USB key and the restricted access based on time limitations, which I personally find very handy to control the amount of time your children spend on the PC.

Rohos Logon Key is a comfortable and powerful alternative to traditional passwords you can use to protect your PC from unauthorized access.

Download Rohos Logon Key 2.5 in Softonic

Harmony Assistant is a all-in-one software product with digital audio capabilities. Its harmonizing capabilities enable the composer to build quickly and efficiently tunes that include accompaniment, multiple instruments and drum patterns. Its full page edit and engraver modes will ease editing and page setup of your scores.

A wide range of music symbols will enable to edit scores of great quality: notation capabilities are immense. Using the page mode, you will edit the score just as it will be printed on paper. The Engraver mode will make look it nice. Score input can be performed through the mouse, computer keyboard or an external MIDI keyboard.

Harmony Assistant comes with its own embedded software synthesizer (SoftSynth), which provides high quality output on basic sound cards, even without any external MIDI device, and includes hundreds of different instruments. Harmony Assistant can load and save in many formats (MIDI, WAV, AIFF, MP3, OGG, TAB, ABC...).

With MyrScript, the embedded programming language, you can add your own features to the program

More features:

• Complete score editor, with unlimited number of staves
• Page mode editing
• Automatic harmonizer
• Accompaniments & drum patterns in a few clicks
• Tablature calculation for miscellaneous string instrument
• Tablature calculation for Harmonica, diatonic accordion, wind instruments...
• Completely scriptable application. Many open-source scripts are available.
• Embedded softsynth : does not need any hardware other than a sound card.
• Midi, Kar, MOD, S3M... import
• Digital tracks (possible to import WAV, AIFF, MP3, OGG...)
• Wav-to-note pitch tracker, noise reduction, formant-compliant pitch change, ...
• Gregorian notation
• Chord diagram library for various instruments
• Enables to build custom instruments from digital recordings
• Lute tablatures
• Street organ card printing
• Karaoke and multi-voices lyrics are actually sung.
• Enable visitors of your Web site to view, transpose, play or print your scores

Download Harmony Assistant 9.4.6 in Softonic

Problems with the Windows registry are a common cause of Windows crashes and error messages.Registry Repair allows you to fix your registry and optimize your PCs performance.With a few easy steps, you are able to find problems caused by invalid entries, references and links in the Windows registry and provides a list of the errors found, you can choose to selectively repair each item or automatically repair them all.

Registry Repair uses a high-performance detection algorithm to quickly identify missing and invalid references in your Windows registry. These problems can occur for many reasons including being left-behind after the un-installation or incorrect removal of software, by missing or corrupt hardware drivers, or orphaned startup programs.

Download Registry Repair 3.0 in Softonic

SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hard disks that support this feature and show hard disk temperatures. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature).

At the lowest level, SpeedFan is a hardware monitor software that can access temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can change fan speeds (depending on the capabilities of your sensor chip and your hardware) according to the temperatures inside your PC, thus reducing noise and power consumption.

Download SpeedFan 4.35 in Softonic

Driver Magician Lite identifies all the hardware in the system, extracts their associated drivers from the hard disk and backs them up to a location of your choice. Then when you format and reinstall/upgrade your operating system, you can restore all the "saved" drivers just as if you had the original driver diskettes in your hands.

Download Driver Magician Lite 3.41 in Softonic