Norton has been always considered to be a synonym of security. Some of their products have been in the market for years and are used by millions of computer users around the world on a daily basis. And Norton Internet Security is one of them.

This complete security suite has just released its latest version with a noticeably improved performance that makes the program install in a snap and run much lighter on resources. Also, Norton Internet Security features now a special "Silent Mode" option that allows you to work with the computer or browse the web without being interrupted every now and then.

The suite includes the powerful Norton antivirus and antispyware tools, along with two new features which I personally find very interesting: a network security monitor and an identity protection tool. The first one is especially good for wireless connections, as it enables you to prevent unauthorized accesses, while the second one protects you from phishing attacks and online identity theft - though you'll have to put up with an unattractive toolbar on your web browser if you want it to work.

Just like the new Norton Antivirus, Norton Internet Security has also gone under a complete graphical overhaul with unequal results: on the one hand this new interface design is certainly very eye-appealing; on the other hand, it displays a very limited amount of data and leaves power users longing for more information about the current security status of their computers.

Despite some minor flaws, Norton Internet Security is an excellent security suite that provides you with all the tools you need to fully protect your system against online threats.

Download Norton Internet Security 2009 in Softonic

Norton has been always considered to be a synonym of security. Some of their products have been in the market for years and are used by millions of computer users around the world on a daily basis.

The new Norton Antivirus 2009 promises a faster, easier installation and a better updating technology that protects your computer without interrupting your work. And I must say it really meets the expectations. I'm always afraid of anti-virus tools being too heavy on memory or displaying too many annoying messages, but Norton Antivirus does its job in an excellent way. Besides a really quick installation in just three steps, the program doesn't hog system resources at all and doesn't disrupt your workflow either. What's more, it now includes a "Silent Mode" that temporarily disables alerts and other background activity, perfect for those moments in which you need to really concentrate on work.

The new Norton Antivirus 2009 displays a completely redesigned interface and includes some configuration settings which you can tweak to fine tune the program's behavior, including the elements that should be monitored (e-mail, messenger chats, etc.) and the possibility to schedule automatic scans.

On the downside, I found that the new interface in Norton Antivirus 2009 design lacks information. In their attempt to create a simpler, easier design I think they've gone too far and now the main interface doesn't show as many interesting data as Norton Antirivirus used to. Also, bear in mind that you'll have to set up a free Norton account even if you only want to test this product during the 15-day trial.

Norton Antivirus is a powerful yet light security application with which you'll keep viruses, worms and other online threats away from your system without hassle.

Download Norton AntiVirus 2009 in Softonic

You probably don't notice, but as you use your computer your hard drive fills up with cache files, cookies, temporary files, logs and other similar useless elements that can end up taking up a heck of a lot of space.

How can you get rid of them? Easy: install KCleaner and you’ll be able to erase all these temporary junk files in the blink of an eye. All you have to do is run the program and select the elements you'd like to erase from the list in the program's options. Then click on the "Analyse" button and KCleaner will search your system in search of the file types you just selected. Finally click on "Clean" and you're done!

KCleaner has two interface modes, the Basic and the Expert. The first one is a smaller window with less information – so as not to confuse or scare beginners away - while the second one displays a list with all found elements where you can select which files should be deleted and which should stay.

Besides the standard manual cleaning method, KCleaner also includes an automatic mode that can be set to run according to the time interval selected by the user. Unfortunately this time interval is not very flexible, as it only includes hours and it doesn't work if the program is closed.

KCleaner is a simple, quick tool with which you can easily get rid of all junk files on your system.

Download KCleaner 0.10.0.18 in Softonic

VideoInspector is a tool designed to provide you with as much information as possible about your video files. With VideoInspector you'll know why your video file has no sound or refuses to play correctly.

VideoInspector will help you install the required codec (coder/decoder software) for optimal performance. VideoInspector can also inspect your system to find which codecs are available, and it can also process multiple video files and export its result in HTML or plain text files.

Download VideoInspector 2.0.1.114 in Softonic

Everest Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning Everest technology.

During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings.

CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes Everest Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

Download Everest Ultimate Edition 4.60 in Softonic

EVEREST Ultimate Edition is an industry leading system diagnostics and benchmarking solution for enthusiasts PC users, based on the award-winning EVEREST Technology. During system optimizations and tweaking it provides essential system and overclock information, advanced hardware monitoring and diagnostics capabilities to check the effects of the applied settings.

CPU, FPU and memory benchmarks are available to measure the actual system performance and compare it to previous states or other systems. Furthermore, complete software, operating system and security information makes EVEREST Ultimate Edition a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.

Download Everest Corporate Edition 4.60 in Softonic

As the hard drives and Flash memory cards of the world’s burgeoning photography community continue to fill up, there is increasing demand for low-cost methods of keeping their images in some kind of order. With some snap-happy enthusiasts taking hundreds of pictures a week, there’s a danger that the fun of photography will be replaced by the mundane task of finding the shots you once they’re on your PC. While programs such as Photoshop Album and PaintShop Album are pretty good at helping you sort images, StudioLine aims to take things one stage further – by not charging you for the privilege.

You might expect that by not demanding a fee for a photo organizing program, you’d have to settle for a largely scaled-down version of its costly equivalents. We were pleasantly surprised to see this wasn’t the case, and the application is brimming with features that not only make it easier to sort and search for photos, but which can instantly improve the appearance of your images.

The main premise of the program is to help you whip your photo collection into some sort of order, and it does this admirably. You start with an Image Archive, which is basically a database where you can load in all of your images. From here, you can create a hierarchical tree system of folders based through an Explorer-style interface, making it a painless process. Sorting through your images is aided by the capacity for adding information about a photo using the ‘Descriptors’ data, photos, allowing you to categorize by image topic, date, location or person. You can even enter a star rating for each image to help you later in the sorting process. Another nice inclusion is the ability to change the size of thumbnail previews using a slider when viewing all the images within a folder.

As if the slick sorting facilities weren’t impressive enough, the program boasts a range of editing tools that rival many priced image editors. There’s a diverse variety of tools ranging from preprocessing, through photo correction, to special effects, all of which can be previewed and applied with ease. The fact that you can apply changes you’ve made to one photograph to hundreds of other images in one click is another major boon, and is ideal if you want to turn a batch of images into black and white, or apply an auto-colour correction to an entire album of photos, for instance.

The user interface is generally a joy to use, with lots of customizable options, and draggable palettes like those you see in professional editing suites. There are a couple of bothersome aspects of the interface which could do with changing though, such as the fact that an image loads in a new pop-up menu when its thumbnail is clicked on, rather than in the main window (as a tab perhaps). The tips boxes that spring up a little too frequently can also get a tad irritating, especially as there seems to be no way to permanently disable them.

Apart from these minor niggles, this is a fantastic program which, is arguably the cheapest way of effectively managing your image collection. The addition of features for creating slide shows, web galleries and emails only serves to raise its status as a serious contender to its big budget rivals.

Download StudioLine Photo Basic 3.50.54 in Softonic

While Windows already features a task manager that enables you to kill any active process in the system, it's always good to have other alternatives like KillProcess. This simple, intuitive application also allows you to kill active processes but has certain advantages over the Windows standard tool.

Some of these advantages are the ability to kill processes right away (no waiting times), the possibility to kill several of them simultaneously by using the so called kill lists and a small info window that displays extended information about the selected process, although we must say this wasn't really that helpful at all.

One last tip: disable the program's sounds if you don't want to be startled by an annoying gun shot every time you kill a process.

Download KillProcess 2.43 in Softonic

ContactKeeper is a free personal information manager to store contact information about your friends, family, and colleges in one database file. You will never forget a birthday any more thanks to the integrated birthday reminder!

The pick of the bunch is the possibility to let ContactKeeper generate a birthday calender based on the dates of birth of the persons in the database!ContactKeeper is consciously very flexible, for example, only first name or last name is required, but not both, ContactKeeper is also consciously equipped with only a few basic fields, you can put extra information in the Note field.

You have also the freedom under wich format you want to save phone numbers of an address, for that reason the address is stored in one field only and the street name for example isn't seperated from the postal code and city name. ContactKeeper can be very usefull in case you lose your gsm with all the numbers of your friends for example, so you still have a back-up.

Download ContactKeeper 1.4.1 in Softonic

My Drivers enables easy and fast detection, backup and restoration of all hardware device drivers currently on your system. Also, you can even find the latest drivers for your hardware and install them onto your computer. With just one or two mouse button clicks, you will have all your hardware devices extracted and backed-up to any folder you want.

When you reinstall or upgrade your system, you can restore all drivers with a click of the button. You may also choose to backup a particular driver or all the drivers with an EXE automatic installer. If you have a particular item of hardware that is troublesome, just remove the driver with this software.

It is especially useful to those who have lost their Driver Disk or Driver CD. My Drivers is able to clone the original driver installation. It is also capable of serving those people to find and install the appropriate and latest drivers for their hardware devices. My Drivers identifies almost all hardware devices, reported information includes device model, device manufacturer, chip/chipset manufacturer etc.

Download My Drivers 3.31 in Softonic

There’s a plethora of music players to choose from, among which iTunes and Winamp usually have the upper hand. However, if you are curious enough, you might find that lesser known alternatives like MediaMonkey offer a reasonable amount of features and tools to organize and equally enjoy your music library.

MediaMonkey automatically scans your PC for all types of music formats. If you have playlists from other programs, it’s good to know that the application also adds m3u files, sparing you the pain of having to recreate them. The file explorer view on the left lets you easily navigate your music collection by categories like artist, genre or rating. You can convert tracks into any format you wish, depending on what size or quality of sound you’re looking for. MediaMonkey also lets you analyze and adjust the volume of tracks to increase your listening experience.

MediaMonkey has made its reputation on its advanced tagging management feature. Every time a track is added, the program will verify its tags. You can automatically fill in missing details with info from Amazon or Filename. The program can clean up your tags, move information into the correct categories and synchronize tags for selected tracks. You can also rename and move multiple files thanks to the auto-organize function. MediaMonkey also supports Winamp plugins and visualizations plus skins can be applied to spice up the interface.

If you want to make your own mix CDs, you’ll be happy to know that MediaMonkey rips and burns CDs and DVDs. Create a virtual CD of your favorite tracks and let MediaMonkey do its job. Budding DJs will enjoy the auto-DJ mode, which mixes tracks for you and the Party Mode, which blocks your configuration but lets anybody play their favorite tune. MediaMonkey’s versatility doesn’t stop there. The music manager also lets you synchronize with your portable music devices like your iPod or iRiver.

If you feel like completing your library with a couple of fresh albums you can browse sites like Amazon, Barnes and Noble or AllPosters and purchase tracks. However, unlike Songbird, where you can type in a URL, browse and save your favorite music blogs and sites, MediaMonkey only allows you to browse their selection of online stores.

We were disappointed with the web radio selection, which only features Shoutcast and Icecast, and were surprised to see no sign of podcasts anywhere in the application. However version 3.0 is planning on incorporating this to the application.

Despite these drawbacks, we recommend MediaMonkey to anybody looking for a solid alternative to iTunes or Winamp. This original music manager is more than capable of organizing a very large music library and offers advanced tagging management rarely seen in other music applications. While the browser and web radio are fairly limited, MediaMonkey allows you to rip your custom CDs and connects to most portable music devices. If you really take a liking to MediaMonkey, cough up a few bucks and upgrade to the Gold version, which will open up all of the program’s functionalities like finding missing tracks or creating auto (smart) playlists.

Download MediaMonkey 3.0.5.1187 in Softonic

If you run a web business and collect information about your users through online forms then you'll know how annoying the problem of faked or invalid email addresses can be.

Atomic Mail Verifier is designed to provide a fast and reliable way of checking that all addresses in a database or email repository actually lead somewhere. This can save you a lot of hassle in when you come to send mail-outs, because it means that you don't keep getting bounced messages and you can be sure that all of your lcorrespondance actually reaches someone the other end.

Though not the most elegant of applications I've tried, Atomic Mail Verifier is certainly highly functional. Just import the mail file to load all of the addresses into the main window. Now, you can verify the addresses by choosing one of the three verification models from the 'Verify' tab: by syntax, domain, or email address. The program will quickly ping the addresses to find out if they exist or not, and highlight them in red or green depending on the outcome.

There are a few connection settings you can play around with too, but I found them pretty unaccessible and you don't really get any explanations of what the all do. Likewise, some of the other aspects of the interface are a little clunky. for instance, I was unable to find a way of deleting multiple addresses from the main window simultaneously.

Despite its rather awkward GUI, Atomic Mail Verifier does offer a pretty reliable way to validate email addresses in a database.

Download Atomic Mail Verifier 5.20 in Softonic

Today's professionals need to have access to their e-mail any time, no matter where they are, and Syncing.net can be very useful in these cases.

With Syncing.net you can synchronize all your Outlook data (that is, folders, contacts, tasks and calendar) on your PC with other computers, in a totally safe network you can create by yourself in just a few easy steps.

Syncing.net is therefore a perfect alternative to Exchange for synchronizing Outlook between computers, and it's especially helpful if you usually work with a desktop and laptop computers.

Syncing.net works not only with Outlook, but also with regular files. Simply select the folders you want to share in your own private network and then choose who you want to share this information with. It's as easy as sending them a message from within the program, though the invitation email can't be customized and their recipients will have to install Syncing.net as well before being able to access your network.

If you need to have your files and Outlook data permanently synchronized between different computers then this app is for you.

Download Syncing.net 2.3 Professional Edition 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 9.60 in Softonic

Clean Space 9 is not a one function program, but rather it is a toolbox for the protection and removal of personal information, spyware, anonymous surfing service, file anti-recovery tool, computer lock and many others. Competitors of Clean Space 9 prefer to distribute these programs separately, TeoSoft includes them all in one, very powerful, easy to use package.

Clean Space 9 prevents unauthorized access to your computer history from anyone - friends, family and even coworkers. In other words, nobody will be able to view web sites you’ve visited, images or videos you've viewed, programs you've started, letters you've written, and much more which you would like to keep a lid on. By your command or at a scheduled time, Clean Space 9 starts deleting activity history in over two hundred sensitive areas such as Internet Browser history, Windows Explorer history, temporary internet files, cookie files, index.dat files, swap file, and many others. Once it accomplishes its work, Clean Space 9 leaves no chance to learn your computer session details.

Download Clean Space 14.07 in Softonic

Numerador Fusión is intended to make our printing tasks lighter and easier, by providing us with an almost fully automatic method to print out incremental documents such as bills, invoices, member cards and so on.

Despite the terrible English translation, the program itself is easy to use thanks to a wizard-style interface that guides you step by step through the whole process. But if at any given moment you need to take a look at the program's Help, be aware that it's in Spanish.

This wouldn't be much of an issue because the program is pretty simple, but we did receive some error messages when trying to save the template and we would have appreciated it if we could have searched the Help file for some advice.

Download Numerador Fusión 1.0.13 MAX! in Softonic

uTorrent has quickly become a favorite among torrent users worldwide thanks to an innovative interface, minute CPU usage and extensive download details.

The program is undoubtedly one of the most reliable torrent clients on the market, thanks to an ultra quick installation process and a minimal use of PC resources. You can have a good number of torrents downloading and still be able to use your PC without suffering any lags.

The interface is simple to use and is divided into the list of torrents and extensive details like peer data, download and upload speeds, file pieces and blocks, or a graph of your current speeds. In an attempt to help you structure all your torrents, the application allows you to set labels to your individual downloads. You can also view the torrents according to whether they are downloading, completed, active or inactive. If you download a good deal of torrents at a time this is a good way of keeping track of the progress of them all. Furthermore, you can easily set up the web interface for uTorrent, which allows you to check your torrents from any PC connected to the internet. All you need is to have one PC taking care of the downloads and set up access to the interface of your uTorrent session.

uTorrent makes it easy for you to look for new downloads without opening up your browser. You can search the main torrent sites by typing the name of the file you are looking for in the box on the top right corner of the interface. uTorrent also includes an RSS downloader to receive feeds of your favourite torrent sites. This little feature is great to check out all new torrents in one click.

The first time you launch uTorrent it lets you check your connection settings online and verify whether your ports are functioning properly. The preferences menu is also replete with tweaking possibilities. You can customize queuing, scheduling and downloading. Setting the location of downloaded files is the only bit that could confuse users as uTorrent makes a difference between new downloads and completed downloads.

You might have guessed it, here at Softonic we have a soft spot for uTorrent. Not only does the mini torrent client use up very little memory, it also comes with loads of information and customization features to make your downloading experience as simple and automated as possible. If you’re tired of the bandwidth hogging Azureus or bored of the basic Bittorrent client, check out uTorrent.

Download uTorrent (µTorrent) 1.8.1 in Softonic

Revo Uninstaller is not just a replacement for the standard Add/Remove applet of the Windows operating system. It also includes other tools that will help you to clean your Windows based computer system.

With its unique "Hunter mode" it offers you some simple, easy to use but effective and powerful approaches to manage (uninstall, stop, delete, disable from autostarting) and to get information about your installed and/or running applications.

Many additional tools are included in Revo Uninstaller including: Auto Start Manager, Windows tools manager, Junk Files Cleaner, Browsers history cleaner, Office history cleaner, Windows history cleaner, Unrecoverable delete tool and Evidence remover.

Download Revo Uninstaller 1.75 in Softonic

CurrPorts displays the list of all currently opened TCP/IP and UDP ports on your local computer. For each port in the list, information about the process that opened the port is also displayed, including the process name, full path of the process, version information of the process (product name, file description, and so on), the time that the process was created, and the user that created it.

In addition, CurrPorts allows you to close unwanted TCP connections, kill the process that opened the ports, and save the TCP/UDP ports information to HTML file , XML file, or to tab-delimited text file. CurrPorts also automatically mark with pink color suspicious TCP/UDP ports owned by unidentified applications (Applications without version information and icons).

Download CurrPorts 1.51 in Softonic

The default Windows Task Manager has often been criticized for offering very scarce information about the currently active processes and apps on your system. This is why Task Manager Extension comes in very handy, chiefly for the most tech-savvy users.

Task Manager Extension is a standalone application – no installation required – that adds a bunch of new data to the Task Manager window, you know, the one you open by pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del. As soon as you launch it, you'll notice some slight differences when comparing to the default task manager.

To begin with, each process is identified with the program's icon, which makes the list easy to browse. If you right click on any entry, a context menu opens up with a wide variety of commands: from a Properties window with highly detailed information about the selected process to the possibility to see associated threads, loaded drivers and other data.

Like I said before, while Task Manager Extension is certainly a very useful add-on for power users, it may be a bit too technical for more computer-challenged people. A good way to solve this gap would be to have two modes or interface types in the program: one for beginners, one for advanced users.

With Task Manager Extension you can power up the Windows default Task Manager, adding more functionality and information to it.

Download Task Manager Extension 2.1 in Softonic