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 The interface feels outdated and the creators don’t seem to have put much thought in to making it easy to use.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

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

E-books are a great way to carry around a huge amount of literature that would prove impractical in physical terms.

However, the perennial question with e-book readers is which one is best for your needs? FBReader makes reading e-books that bit more comfortable by making letters more readable, allowing you to navigate contents and indexes much more easily and generally enhance your reading experience.

Probably the biggest benefit of FBReader though is the ability to search and find any phrase or subject no matter how many pages are in your book. Although this is a very common function in many applications, it's something that many e-book readers don't include for some strange reason, but FBReader does. In addition, if you should need to read a page upside down (why you would I'm not sure) you can rotate pages 270 degrees.

FBReader is a very easy to use e-book reader which improves your reading experience and makes searching texts fast and simple.

Download FBReader 0.8.17 in Softonic

Would you like to impress your friends with an impressive presentation of your last holiday pictures and are you looking for a special way to do it? What could be better than having a whole art-gallery just for you, maybe set in an ancient castle, or in a modern skyscraper or, why not, in a Chinese garden?

Photo! 3D Album is a simple free program that lets you upload your photo collection in very nice 3D settings that you can choose from a menu that pops up when you create a new project. If you don't like your original selection, don't worry as you can change the template later. It's like a first-person computer game, where you navigate through the gallery and you attach your photographs to the available canvases. Although there are many, frames are limited and this is a real problem for medium-size collections.

When you have finished navigating and uploading, you have several options in order to export your photo-collection. You can create a screen saver or a stand alone gallery which can be run with a double-click, or alternatively a web gallery in VRML or Shockwave format. For the latter format you will have to register, for free, on the developer's web site. When you launch the final video, press F1 if you want to navigate freely around the gallery.

Photo! 3D Album is great to create cool animations with the photos you want. Unfortunately the spaces available in the art gallery are limited, as they would be in a real one. It's also an interesting program to create your own personal screen savers.

Download Photo! 3D Album 1.1 in Softonic

There's plenty of DVD and CD managers out there but there are few that allow you to organise DVDs, CDs, DivX files and even cassettes in one easy to browse and search database.

Since I'd rather have my video and audio collection all under one program, I quite liked Ant Movie Catalog. First of all, it's completely free and the source code is open to modification by its users who are brought together by the program's forum. There are several reasons why this database appeals.

First of all is simplicity - it's not bloated in any way so searching and navigating through your collection either by format, genre, alphabetically or year is extremely easy and fast. Second of all, it takes a lot of the hard work out of cataloguing your collection because it imports information about your media from the internet using scripts. These include scripts for the IMDB, DVDFR (a French DVD website), Allocine /a French film site) and Culturalia (a Spanish multimedia site).

In addition, it can store all information in two formats - either binary or XML - the latter makes it possible to export your collection to Excel and other database applications. If you do add too many album and film covers to Ant Movie Catalog, it can start to slow down a bit but there is the option of linking to external pictures rather than importing them. You can also display in graphical format, stats relating to your multimedia collection - how many of a certain format you have, genre, date etc.

Lightweight, easy to use and covering just about any conceivable media you might own, Ant Movie Catalog is an easy and free way to bring your collection together.

Download Ant Movie Catalog 3.5.1.1 in Softonic

CCleaner is a small utility that will take care of a few of the important maintenance tasks that every computer user should carry out as regularly as possible to keep their systems in top shape. Fast, reliable and easy to use - CCleaner it's one of the best cleaning systems out there.

For me, the beauty of CCleaner is the speed at which it carries out the various scans and fixes. Its main purpose is to clean any unnecessary files from your hard-drive and on opening the program you see the various aspects of Windows that you can search through and clear. CCleaner will also detect your installed applications that may hold on to files which are no longer any use, such as Google Earth histories or Flash Player configurations.

The interface in CCleaner is very easy to navigate and before taking any action, you will always be asked to confirm that you are sure about what you want to do. There is a useful registry checker that will quickly check its integrity, and let you fix bad entries after making a backup. CCleaner uninstall and startup tools are handy to have and simply add to the usability of this very rounded little maintenance assistant.

The most recent release of CCleaner now works on Vista with Admin permissions where available and features various bug fixes and improvements to the translated versions.

CCleaner makes keeping your PC clean easy for beginners and experts alike. It's small, fast, comprehensive, and free to download it - get cleaning now!

Download CCleaner 2.11.636 in Softonic

AllWebMenus is a DHMTL menu/Javascript menu builder for web navigation that requires absolutely no DHTML or Javascript experience. It creates any cross-browser, pop-up or drop-down web menu that works alike in all browsers supporting DHTML held by all popular platforms (PC, MAC, Unix).

DHTML/JavaScript menus are designed with a tree-like approach. Users can tailor their menus by using the Properties Pane or by choosing from a series of predefined themes from the Theme Gallery. The menu can be either vertical or horizontal (pop-up or drop-down menu), it can be movable, stay visible while scrolling, contain static or animated images, borders, colors, and much more. Once everything is set, you can use the Link Menu to Web Page command to link the menu to your Web page in a fast and easy manner.

AllWebMenus offers:

• New ready-to-use Themes
• Optimized Style Editor
• Creation and saving of customized Themes
• Free Dreamweaver extension and NetObjects Fusion component
• Import FrontPage Navigation Structures
• Support for .JPG, .GIF and .PNG image files.
• UNDO/REDO function
• Right-to-Left language support (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.)
• Non-English font support
• Optimized menu building process with separate javascripts for different browsers
• Use menus over flash objects, form elements, applets and iframes
• Use multiple menus in the same page
• Create popup, hidden, horizontal and vertical menus
• Free Sitemap generator based on the menu structure
• Specify optional Javascript Commands

Download AllWebMenus Pro 5.1.742 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

The nightmare before Christmas? Almost. In Christmas Crisis you need to help out Santa delivering presents by guiding his sleigh and dropping presents over houses, whilst avoiding jets and airplanes. The game is certainly a good idea for the holidays and an original adaptation of the Space Invaders style, yet Christmas Crisis is on the whole rather disappointing.

First of all, and this may sound cheesy, but I quite like when there's a little introduction to the game, or at least some sort of setting. Christmas Crisis drops you right in without any explanation as to why you need to replace Santa. There's only a small window to explain the controls.

Movements in Christmas Crisis are simple. Use your arrow keys to navigate your sleigh and the space bar to shoot the presents onto houses. On the whole though, they feel a bit clunky, and there's a little delay every time you move the sleigh. Christmas Crisis is a bit difficult and I couldn't manage to hit all the houses in the first level. Getting used to it doesn't take much though, but the increase of planes flying around as you pass levels does make it challenging.

Even though the game lacks an introduction, and controls are clunky, Christmas Crisis is an OK time waster for the holidays.

Download Christmas Crisis 1.2.3 in Softonic

Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) is a multipage browser based on the Internet Explorer core. It can open multiple Web pages in just one window, and it takes only a few system resources when you're surfing with the integrated user interface. The application supports special plug-ins and IE extensions, and its features include autoscrolling, form autofilling, external tools, plug-in support, a newsgroup-browsing mode, mouse gestures, customizable skins, and an Autohide panel.

Download Maxthon Standard 1.6.4.20 build 50 in Softonic

One of the things that drew most people to Firefox in the first place was its wonderful tabs feature, which, for many, revolutionised the way they navigate the Web. Of course, most browsers these days now have this feature. Despite the convenience of a tabbed interface, it can still be a little tricky to figure out what's what in terms of the pages you have on each of your tabs. Tab Catalog gives you the power to take control of your tabs by managing them all from one screen.

With the click of a single button this neat extension allows you to view thumbnails of all the tabs you have open at once. The default shortcut key is F8, but this can be customised to your choosing. Once the tabs are in view, you can open a page simply by clicking on its thumbnail image. There are a few other nice options, such as the ability to zoom in on or close a tab with a single click.

Download Tab Catalog 1.4.2008050271 in Softonic

When browsing the Internet with Firefox, sometimes you open so many tabs that you end up not knowing where is each webpage you opened a few minutes ago. The solution is Tab Scope, a Firefox extension which enables you to preview the each tab's contents in a preview window opened just below the tab.

The preview window offers real time content with buttons you can use to actually navigate through the site, support for page scrolling with your mouse wheel and two sizes available for smaller or larger preview images that you can customize in the extension's configuration options.

Download Tab Scope 0.2.2.8 in Softonic

You could pretty much consider FileZilla an open source success story. It's popular, works well and fast, and regularly updated.

If you're looking for a solid FTP client what more could you ask more? In fact, FileZilla is not just limited to FTP, but also handles FTPS and SFTP for secure transfers of multiple files on multiple servers. The interface gives you a quick outlook of all your transfers, sites and disks and makes it easy to drag and transfer. I also quite like the QuickConnect feature to access your favorite server in seconds.

FileZilla is known to be fairly fast, and can also resume downloads and handle very big transfers, I'm talking here higher than 4 GB. You can set both local and remote filters for things like images, explorer files or CVS and SVN directories or even create your own. FileZilla also includes a tool to compare directories in terms of file size or modification time.

The application can guide you when setting up your network and lets you set speed limits in case you don't want to overload your bandwidth.

One thing really missing from FileZilla though is a scheduler to automatically set transfer times.

Despite lacking a scheduler, FileZilla is an excellent open source FTP client. It's stable, fast and very efficient. Highly recommended.

Download FileZilla 3.1.1.1 in Softonic

Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery software helps you to recover data from Ext2 & Ext3 File systems that are common to the Linux operating system.

This means that Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery works with all the major releases of Linux including Redhat Linux, Suse Linux, Mandriva Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Caldera Linux, Slackware Linux, Gentoo Linux and Kubuntu Linux. Linux systems rarely lose data but sometimes they can due to corrupted blocks or simple accidental deletion of data by those unfamiliar with the system.

Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery is attractively designed with an easy to use and navigate interface. All recovery procedures are carried out via an on-screen "wizard" which guides you through the process step by step. When you have finished, Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery will be able to tell you how much of the data is genuinely recoverable and how much of it is lost for good. Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery is extremely fast due to the "TurboScan" engine that it uses so you don't have to wait long for it to go through the motions.

For Linux users, Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery is a rare utility that allows you to salvage whatever remains of your data when you think that all is lost.

Download Disk Doctors Linux Data Recovery in Softonic

We've all had the horrible feeling of deleting an important file by mistake. But you don't have to resign yourself to losing it forever thanks to Disk Doctors Undelete.

Disk Doctors Undelete is designed to recover data from hard drives, flash drives, USB drives, ZIP, SD Cards, MMC, and Firewire drives. The disk scanning technology within Disk Doctors Undelete allows it to perform deep scans to rescue important files from both FAT and NTFS file systems.

Thanks to the wizard-based interface, you can start scanning with Disk Doctors Undelete quickly and easily. You simply select the logical drive you want to recover data from, 'Next' and the program will return a list of files that have been deleted from your PC. This is displayed in tree structure format, and you can highlight any of the files or folders to peruse them. There's also a search tool that lets you enter a filename or partial filename to search for.

Unfortunately, the files I deleted in my tests weren't picked up by Disk Doctors Undelete. This could be that I wasn't searching in the right directory, but navigation in the tree structure view can become quite confusing.

Disk Doctors Undelete is an interesting and potentially powerful app, slightly let down by the poor searching interface.

Download Disk Doctors Undelete 1.0.0 in Softonic

Create your website and have it up and running on the Internet in just 4 steps presented in this overview of TOWeb.

To create your first website you need to enter its title and select the main interests you would like to start with. You may decide to start with a couple of topics like a homepage or a blog for instance. Your website menu will automatically be created allowing your visitors to easily navigate and access to your topics.

There is no predefined graphical theme with TOWeb. With the TOWeb's random theme generator and its easy customization of graphical parts, you do not need to be a designer nor spend money and months on learning about web development and complicated graphical tools before to get a unique professional design.

In the last step of TOWeb you can quickly verify and remove the spelling mistakes of your topics before transferring your website to your host with just one click. Then notify your contacts directly from TOWeb so they can see your work on the Internet!

Download TOWeb 2.62 in Softonic

When you live and work away from your home town (or even your home country), as many people do these days, it can sometimes be difficult to stay in touch with the folks back there.

One of the best ways to keep your friends and family posted on what you're up to is to share your photos with them. This can get a little boring for them though if you're just emailing them the shots, so it's a good idea to create a web gallery to hang your pictures in a more elegant fashion.

If you don't your HTML from your elbow then PhotoOnWeb provides a good way of creating a cool online gallery with ease. All you need to do is load your photos, select a template then publish the gallery on your PC, on your FTP server or on the server provided with the software.

If you've never worked with servers before then don't worry because the program pretty much takes care of the nuts and bolts for you. Although not as powerful as using the Flash authoring tool, it's a great free tool for anyone who wants to communicate with home without actually saying anything.

Download PhotoOnWeb 0.8.6 in Softonic

Google's satellite imagery software has truly changed the way we look at the globe. The application lets you zoom in on any part of the world and for some places, observe from a few meters away.

Google Earth not only displaces satellite images but it also includes terrains and sometimes 3D reconstruction of buildings. You can look for directions and businesses, just like in Google Maps and pinpoint areas or draw on maps straight in Google Earth.

Google Earth includes a very wide, and constantly increasing library of layers, which you can add to the map to enrich your experience. You'll find all sorts of information, from historical landscapes to national parks, regions where you can find endangered species or tourist spots. Google Earth will also showcase more news related information such as forest fires or tsunamis.

If stars is what you are into, turn to the Space mode and navigate among the constellations.

Moving around in Google Earth is incredibly intuitive thanks to the multiple navigation tools. Some areas will show less information than others, and Google Earth is known to use up a substantial amount of bandwidth, but it remains a fascinating piece of software

Google Earth is as of yet an unequalled application. Browse around the world, zoom into streets or go up and gaze at the stars. Millions of possibilities.

Download Google Earth 4.3 Beta in Softonic

EasyGestures is a Firefox add-on intended to make it easier to control the browser's main functions. It displays a pie menu that can be triggered with a hotkey (the default is the mouse middle button) and which displays Firefox's main navigation buttons, so that you can go forward and back, show bookmarks or load your homepage from anywhere on your screen.

This is supposed to be a more comfortable way to use Firefox, but my feeling is that it's just too different from the menu toolbars we're used to. Besides, the pie menu buttons don't have any explanation and you have to leave your cursor on the pie menu central spot if you want some hints as what to use them for.

For those of you who overcome the initial show, EasyGestures is still a good alternative to keyboard shortcuts and can be totally customized to display different options on its menu.

Download easyGestures 4.2 in Softonic

Torrent Finder Firefox Toolbar enables all Torrent Finder search functions from your own Firefox browser, so that you can locate any torrent files you're interested in while browsing the Internet in your favorite browser.

This is what this extension has to offer:

Open sites in Firefox tabs with (previous|next) buttons for easier navigation

• Flexible popup menu width to fit screen width
• Search all Torrent Finder sites gathered or by single site
• Toggle between showing and hiding sites logos
• Navigate between sites using site's first letter
• Arrange Sites list with easy drag and drop form
• Easy show/hide option with context menu for the dockable toolbar
• Resize search area for to save more space
• Holding CRTL key searches the remembered last searched single site
• Search history for all searched keywords with optional auto-completion
• Highlight searched terms on the page button
• Search words button to find single word on the result page
• Context menu search option for the selected text on the page

Download Torrent Finder Firefox Toolbar 1.2 in Softonic