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

One of most common reasons for your PC slowing down is processes that are hogging your system and taking all your CPU.

Process Lasso aims to solve this problem by reducing the priority of those processes that are not important and returned to a responsive level. It also works with multiple processes that are causing a problem so it can deal with more than one program at once. If you think that the program is prioritising the wrong processes, then you can define default processes that you want to be controlled or kept an eye on. Process Lasso also displays graphs and other graphical represeantations to show you which processes are requiring the most CPU usage. You can blacklist those processes that are showing rather high graph readings or that are clearly taking up more CPU usage than they deserve. Although the program requires no experience, it does offer advanced settings and twesking options to make sure that it only blocks those processes that are specified or targeted by yourself. Fortunately, the program itself is very low on resources so it will not add to your CPU hogging problems.

A very useful process monitor than will ensure your CPU only dedicates itself to those programs that really need it.

Download Process Lasso 3.14 in Softonic

Wallpaper Master offers a number of options to renew your desktop background image. Create categories to organize your wallpapers and order your different images in a list on the interface. Individual Overrides, like style, alignment or border can be modified directly from the program window. Images can also be set up on multiple monitors in one click.

Despite a good deal of options, we were slightly disappointed with Wallpaper Master. There's no drag and drop, which means you have to browse and select all the pictures you want to use as wallpapers. The effects you can add to them, mirror, black and white and mosaic, are fairly limited and do not add much to your images.

Once you chosen the image you'll use as wallpapers and set up the rotation you can let Wallpaper Master take care of the rest. The program could be a bit more intuitive and offer more effects, but on the whole is a good piece of software to manage your wallpapers.

Download Wallpaper Master Pro 2.16 in Softonic

SUMo, short for Software Update Monitor, scans your system and finds out whether there are newer versions for all the applications installed on your PC. The whole process is fully automated and doesn't hardly require any user intervention. A couple of clicks is all you'll need to always enjoy the latest versions of your favorite software tools.

SUMo is, therefore, very easy to use. Both the system scanning and version checking are also quite fast. Once finished, you'll see a list with all the apps installed on your PC and the ones that need updating marked with a special icon.

However, the actual update process isn't that easy. The program displays a "Get update" button but instead of downloading the file or at least taking you to the developer's website, it only links to SUMo's website and a Google link to find the update by yourself.

Have your software always up to date with SUMo.

Download SUMo 2.3.4.60 in Softonic

If you think Process Monitor is just a more complete alternative to the standard Windows task manager, you're wrong. This is a exhaustive control tool, mainly intended for system administrators, which tracks all the activity in Windows file system and Registry in real time.

So when you run it (no installation required, but it does ask for administrator rights) you'll get a constantly increasing list with all the processes taken place in your computer in real time. In fact, there's so much information to absorb that it makes you feel a bit lost.

Process Monitor includes many tools to manage this list: filters, a nice search tool, extended information about each process and many more. As I said, it's definitely a tool for advanced users.

Download Process Monitor 2.0 in Softonic

The torrent phenomenon is one of the most hyped about in the world of technology among Peer to Peer (P2P) users. It consists of sharing large files, like movies, software, or games anonymously and quickly with other peers. The file you want to download is cut up into small segments shared by users, creating what is called a swarm, and does not go through a central server, significantly reducing the bulk of file transfers, The Bittorrent client is actually the first P2P application to use this technology and became immensely popular when it was released. Torrents are considered by online users as a great way to download recently released movies or tv shows.

Thanks to a straightforward, uncluttered interface Bittorrent appears as a friendly torrent client that beginners will feel comfortable with. We particularly appreciated the integrated search box to look for files on the bittorrent website. Once you’ve found the torrent you want, download it to your PC, open it up inside Bittorrent and let the client do its job. The speed at which you download will depend on the number of seeds, that is people who have the complete file and are sharing it. The more seeds there are the quicker files will download.

You can set multiple torrent downloads and the downloading speed is fairly quick. It’s easy to configure the client and we suggest choosing the right port and setting upload and download rate limits to avoid hogging your bandwidth. It’s also good to set your downloads by priority to monitor more precisely how your torrents are doing.

Compared to the exhaustive Azureus, Bittorrent is very simplistic. It doesn’t provide half as many statistics and doesn’t let you customize the interface. Integrating a search box is a great idea, but it limits searches to the bittorrent website, not considered the most thorough source by torrent aficionados.

If you’re a newbie to the torrent world, Bittorrent is a good bet. It’s safe, stable and sharp. Associated with the huge database of legal torrents that is the bittorrent website, it makes for a very rich P2P experience. Advanced users will probably frown upon its lack of options but others should give it a try.

Download BitTorrent 6.1.1 in Softonic

If you're a massive user of both Rapidshare and Megaupload it's a pain to use two separate administrators to manage your upload and downloads.

In the case of Rapidshare the most annoying thing is that you have to wait before you can click on a file to download it. FreeRapid Downloader offers a more holistic way to manage your downloads and uploads in one convenient application. It lets you download files hosted on Megaupload, Rapidshare, Netload or FileFactory without needing to click a single thing.

FreeRapid Downloader basically works by allowing you to add several links at the same time until they're queued up waiting to go. It can even monitor your clipboard for links that are cut to it and automatically add them to your queue. While this definitely makes managing your downloads easier, it still only downloads files one by one meaning if you've got several files from several file sharing sites, it can be painfully slow.

FreeRapìd Downloader will make your file sharing site downloads easier to manage although not speed them up in any significant way.

Download FreeRapid Downloader 0.61 in Softonic

UltraMon is a utility for multi-monitor systems, designed to increase productivity and unlock the full potential of multiple monitors.

Features:

• Efficiently move windows and maximize windows across the desktop
• Manage more applications with the Smart Taskbar
• Control application positioning with UltraMon Shortcuts
• Multi-monitor support for desktop wallpapers and screen savers
• Mirror your main monitor to secondary monitors for a presentation

Download UltraMon 3.0.3 Beta in Softonic

How many times have you tried to save streaming media locally but realised you don't have the appropriate tool? Net Transport (NetXfer) can do just that for you. Net Transport downloads MMS and RTSP streaming in multiple threads with perfect video & audio quality.

There are some other great features, like "Site Manager" which allows you to keep the active connection with the remote servers. In addition, the support for both SSL and SSH is hardly found in other upload/download tools.

Main Features:

• Simple but powerful "File Manager" to categorize and manage downloaded files
• Simple multi-user management
• Inbuilt "Site Explorer" lists the directory structure of the remote server
• FTP reuse mechanism uses one connection to get different files from the same site
• Assign every working thread a different proxy to break certain site restrictions
• Proxies with NTLM authentication can penetrate local firewall, like Microsoft ISA 2000
• Adjust the bandwidth usage of Net Transport
• Monitor browser click
• Can automatically shutdown the system or hang up the modem
• NTLM authentication is supported for both MMS and RTSP
• Use multi-threads for both MMS and RTSP to significantly reduce the time of downloads
• Automatically parse streaming script such as .asx, .smi to acquire real URLs
• Support SSH encryption for both HTTP and FTP
• Flexible "Scheduler Manager"

Download Net Transport (NetXfer) 2.64.423 in Softonic

Copying DVDs (for your own use, of course) is becoming increasingly difficult as manufacturers improve the security encoding on DVDs. AnyDVD however claims to be able to crack any DVD encryption code and judging by the number of downloads, Softonic users are certainly endorsing it too.

The beauty of AnyDVD is that it simply works in the background to automatically remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive. In this way, it can decrypt data without actually saving it to your hard-disk. You can watch the DVD at the same time or just insert a disk and let AnyDVD do its stuff. When you insert a disk, you are automatically prompted whether you want to decrypt it. When it has finished inspecting the disk, the program prompts you to backup the DVD using your preferred backup tool such as CloneDVD or Power DVD Copy.

The programme goes much further than this though. A handy bonus is that you can also remove the RPC region code, thereby making the movie region free and viewable on any DVD player. This is especially useful for those who buy many of their disks abroad or travel a lot. If you want to create a stripped-down version of a DVD, it can also remove unwanted movie features, including subtitles and extras for example. The programme also moves beyond decryption and allows you to control the speed of your DVD drive. This is useful if you’re having trouble playing a DVD properly or if the noise of your drive is causing annoyance. Finally, there’s also an option to display the frequency of your monitor for both NTSC and PAL displays although you probably won’t use this unless you’re having serious display issues.

The only drawback of AnyDVD is the number of daily updates that are released. Whilst this is obviously a good thing in terms of keeping it up-to-date with the latest encryption methods, the update alerts can be rather annoying and are prone to slowing your computer down.

However, this is a small price to pay for a programme that seems able to crack all but the toughest disks and for anyone who likes to create backups of their favourite DVDs, it’s an essential addition to your software collection.

Download AnyDVD HD 6.4.6.9 in Softonic

If you want to know how much load is being put on your CPU or RAM, then you can always use Windows Task Manager.

However, this involves pressing ALT-Ctrl-Del and it doesn't exactly look great or give you much info. All CPU Meter on the other hand is a handy little gadget that shows on your desktop in graphical form, exactly how much work your CPU and RAM are doing. It's designed especially for Windows Vista and those PCs equipped with Quad Core or Dual Core processors.

All CPU Meter uses numerical values, percentages and status bars to display the memory consumption, processor load, along with a historical graph to show how your components are performing. There aren't many customization options although you can change the mode of presentation to bar graph format and change the background color.

All CPU Meter is a useful tool to monitor how your RAM and CPU are performing or to diagnose memory leaks and system slow downs.

Download All CPU Meter 1.0 in Softonic

In these days of global economic meltdown, keeping tabs on the stock market is more important than ever before.

Stock Spy does exactly that by monitoring the latest business news with the latest stock market fluctuations which, in theory, should give you an accurate readout of the latest stock trends. In reality of course, not all news affects the stock markets and not all news is even necessarily true so the results can be quite erratic.

Stock Spy monitors several stock market RSS feeds and combines them with the latest stock values. It can suggest possible share purchase targets or when to sell, according to the latest market movements. The application can deliver results to your computer via a ticker, which organizes information through symbols and signs according to whether it's stocks or shares that it's reporting on.

Stock Spy isn't going to save you from the credit crunch and some of it's features seem a little exaggerated by the developers but in these times you need all the help you can get on the stockmarket.

Download Stock Spy 1.54 in Softonic

The Google Desktop application allows users to search their desktop content quickly and easily. Praised for its ingenuity and criticised for its intrusiveness, Google Desktop brings the power of Google’s search engine technology to your PC.

After installing the application, you’ll have to give it some time to index the files on your PC, including emails, photos, chats, contacts and calendar events. Google Desktop will index the first 10,000 words in the first 100,000 documents on your PC. The application supports the majority of file types and you can decide which ones to index, or omit protected files, using the preferences menu.

In its latest version, which is compatible with Windows Vista, Google Desktop has been given a new transparent look, providing a pretty sleek feel to your PC. Your search results will appear in your browser (in the familiar Google web page format) and a small preview button allows you to view results without actually clicking on the corresponding link. Results are as precise as we’ve come to expect from Google searches, however we were slightly disappointed to learn that the application doesn’t offer logical 'OR' support or substring search. On another note, Google Desktop is not limited to your PC as you can cross index content from multiple machines and share some panel items with your friends.

Google Desktop is not only about search, though. Joining a marketplace already occupied by Apple’s Dashboard Widgets and Yahoo! Widgets, Google Desktop can be fitted with any number of little gadgets. These mini apps perform all kinds of functions, from fetching your mail to jotting down notes or checking up on your local weather. There are hundreds of gadgets to choose from to customize your desktop bar. Our personal favorites are: Google Translate, the Skype plug-in to check your credit and call your contacts, “Am I Blocked” to find out who’s blocked you on IM, Workspace to quickly move between tasks, System Stats to monitor your PC and Games, a selection of Flash games like Tetris and Moonlander.

When running, we found Google Desktop to use up around 30 MBs, but that can quickly increase if you add more gadgets to it. The application is also constantly re-indexing your files to incorporate your modifications and new elements. However you should rarely feel your PC slowing due to indexing.

When you’re dealing with Google, however, you know the main criticism will be about security. Because Google Desktop indexes all your documents, you’re basically opening up your PC and all your personal files to the Moutain View company. What some users fear is that Google could one day take advantage of that access or that a bug in the application would allow malicious users to infiltrate your PC and steal information.

While the intrusiveness of Google Desktop will give some users pause for thought on installing the app, Google Desktop is highly effective and simple to use. The gadgets you can add to its sidebar may not all be essential, but many of them are quite fun and original and let’s face it, the sidebar looks good. Give it a go if you think your PC is a mess and you need quick access to anything.

Download Google Desktop 5.8.809.8522 in Softonic

Establishing the amount of connections made to your computer is one way to find out whether your PC is being hacked into or use as a bot.

Whenever you open a website or establish any kind of connection with an outside entity, you open up what's known as a TCP/UDP connection. But getting a list of all the TCP/UDP connections on your computer is not always easy, especially when some of them may have been connected remotely without your knowledge.

NetStat Agent offers a comprehensive way to monitor all incoming and outgoing connections to and from your PC. NetStat Agent offers a range of tools including NetStat, Ping, Traceroute, IPconfig, ARP and Whois in a user-friendly graphical interface.

It's an excellent tool for anyone that's involved in network administration or those that may suspect their browser has been hijacked. While many of the connections will appear a little mysterious, you can easily see which ones relate to internet, networks and those that are erroneous or unrecognized and could be suspicious.

NetStat agent features a whole host of tools to do a pretty simply job - find out who is connected to your PC. For network administrators, it's a very useful resource.

Download NetStat Agent 2.0 in Softonic

REAPER (Rapid Environment for Audio Prototyping and Efficient Recording) is a powerful but sensible Windows application that lets you record, arrange, edit, and render multi-track waveform audio. REAPER provides an extensive set of features, but is a very small and lightweight application as the installer is less than 1 megabyte, and includes many effects and a sample project.

Basic features:

• Supports ASIO, Kernel Streaming, WaveOut, DirectSound for playback and recording
• Reads WAV, OGG, and MP3 files, records WAV files
• Lets you arrange any number of items in any number of tracks
• Supports audio processing plug-ins (DirectX and Jesusonic)
• Volume, pan controls and envelopes per track
• Multi-layer undo/redo support
• User creatable color themes

Advanced features:

• Unlimited bus support with collapsable bus views
• Item grouping
• Selection length granularity to ease in loop cutting
• An architecture that allows you to easily cut loops of many tracks simultaneously
• Support for plug-in generated media
• 64-bit floating point sample pipeline for high quality
• Advanced recording and monitoring options
• Options to build peaks for recorded files on the fly
• Controls for the user to specify where recorded files go
• Template support to make it easy to load a project template
• Input channel name aliasing

Download REAPER 2.55 in Softonic

Chameleon Startup Manager helps you to control which applications are being started each time you log in Windows. By checking this list periodically and deleting any entries that are not really necessary, you can improve your system's performance and start up speed.

The program features two working modes, Easy and Expert, for each type of user. The Expert mode shows information about the Registry and gives the user more options to choose from. In any case the interface looks quite cluttered with data and symbols of all kinds.

In all, Chameleon Startup Manager can be useful for a quick system optimization. Besides controlling start up applications, it also includes a task schedules and a task manger, although these seem secondary tools.

Download Chameleon Startup Manager 2.64 in Softonic

If you need to keep an eye on the usage of your CPU then PerfMonitor allows you to see what's happening at all times.

PerfMonitor is basically a processor performance monitoring tool which allows you to track the frequency of up to four processes. It can be used to identify performance bottlenecks or to monitor a program that may be hogging your CPU.

There are no fancy touches to this app and it could do with a few more tips as to what the various parameters are. It displays in graphical format - a bit like a graphic equalizer - the activity of your CPU at any one time.

PerfMonitor is a great tool for system administrators or those that need to get to the bottom of a CPU hogging issue.

Download PerfMonitor 1.0.0.8 in Softonic

Angry IP scanner is a very fast IP scanner for Windows. It can scan IPs in any range. Its binary file size is very small compared to other IP scanners. Angry IP scanner simply pings each IP address to check if it's alive, then optionally it can resolve hostname, scan ports, etc. This program is mostly useful for network administrators to monitor and manage their networks.

It also has additional features, like NetBIOS information (computer name, workgroup name, currently logged in user and MAC address), results saving to CSV, TXT, HTML, XML or IP-Port list file, can be used as a command-line utility in a batch file, etc. With help of plugins, Angry IP Scanner can gather any information about scanned IPs. Anybody who can write code is able to write plugins and extend functionality of Angry IP Scanner. It is using separate threads for each scanned address to increase scanning speed.

Download Angry IP Scanner 3.0 Beta in Softonic

EarthView is a dynamic desktop wallpaper and screensaver, which displays beautiful views of the earth with daylight and night shadows. It produces colorful, high quality, high resolution images for every screen resolution - even beyond 1600x1200. The program supports map and globe views, urban areas, city lights, atmospheric effects, clouds, local time display and much more.

EarthView supports different maps that show our planet earth in different ways, like photographic or artistic. Many options allow total customization of all view parameters. EarthView has won many awards for its absolutely breathtaking images.

Main features:

• High detail view of the earth
• Day and night view
• Atmospheric effects
• Urban areas and city lights
• Clouds (internet download possible)
• Map and globe projection
• Several beautiful maps to choose from
• Location and local time of more than 3000 cities worldwide
• Wallpaper and screen saver support
• Multiple monitor support
• Many options for full customization

Download EarthView 3.9.2 in Softonic

If you work with two monitors you probably have some trouble with finding the right wallpapers for them and also with managing both of them properly.

With DisplayFusion these problems will be over. This neat tool makes double monitor handling much easier by providing you with a single interface where you can select new background images for your two screens, adjust the way they appear on the monitor and even look for more wallpapers on the web thanks to its Flickr integration.

DisplayFusion is very easy to use because it displays the wallpapers just as they'll appear on the actual monitors. Also, there's a wide array of options to adjust the photo size, position and aspect ratio. The program features a wallpaper timer as well, with which you can schedule an automatic wallpaper rotation – but unfortunately this only works in the Pro version.

One last tip: if you'd like to have more dual wallpapers to use in your two-monitor installation, have a look at Dual Screen Wallpapers, a wallpaper website specializing in widescreen images for two – or even more - monitors.

With DisplayFusion you can easily manage and customize wallpapers in two or more monitors, but if you want more extended functionality you'll have to switch to the Pro version.

Download DisplayFusion 2.1.1 in Softonic