Have you ever wanted to search for and download your favourite videos without using your browser? Free FLV Converter lets you automatically access sites such as YouTube, DailyMotion, Google and Metacafé without opening anything else.

You can search by keyword and preview each video found in the rather basic interface and also download them in FLV format. After that, you can convert the files to AVI, IPod, IPhone, 3GP or PSP format. It also works vice versa and if the files in question are already in FLV format, it can convert to DivX, Xvid, MPEG, DVD and AVI with automatic HTML embed links. This means you can paste them into your website or blog to share instantly with the world. If you don't require these functions, the program interface still provides a convenient search platform because you can browse and watch videos at the same time. With just one click, you can download the video you are previewing. For ease of use, it allows you to create a download list of videos you want to save. Once it's complete, you can just leave the program to download the videos whilst you get on with something else although unfortunately, it still doesn't support batch downloading.

A very useful application for those who are not content with only having videos on the Internet but also want them on their hard drive but don't want to visit each video content site seperately.

Download Free FLV Converter 5.5 in Softonic

There are literally hundreds of utilities out there designed to download videos from the Net, mainly aimed at YouTube.

By it's name alone, DownUtube doesn't pretend to do anything else (although it does work with a few other sites too) but at least it does the job well. DownUtube allows you to download embedded videos and multimedia from Google Video, YouTube, Apple.com Movie Trailers and IMDB.

Like most good video downloaders, DownUtube features an integrated search facility to help you find videos on the various sites which means you don't even have to open a browser. It can also follow RSS feeds for your favourite users on YouTube. If you can't wait for your clip to download, then you can also play them because they download thanks to an integrated player called MPlayer. There are various bugs that need ironing out however - sometimes downloads will stop for no apprent reason even if your connection is fine and some videos can cause DownUtube to simply crash.

As a simple solution to your video downloading needs, DownUtube is a great search utility and downloader that eliminates the need for a browser.

Download DownUtube 3.0 Beta 3 in Softonic

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

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

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

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

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

Download 7-Zip 4.60 in Softonic

Getting a video out has always been one of the best ways to while away an evening at home. However, these days few people choose to trudge down to the video store, preferring to download a movie, or plunder the near-infinite archives on popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and Google Video. Until recently it's been impossible to obtain movies from these sites without having to stream them online. However, Vdownloader is one of a number of programs changing that, allowing you to download these videos to your computer in AVI or MPEG format.

Essentially what this means is that you don't need to wait an age for popular videos to start streaming and can keep your favourites on your hard drive to watch at any time. This application does the job as simply as you could wish for. The executable makes a very small footprint and although the interface is very barren, it makes it easy to grab videos from YouTube, Google Video, Grinvi or DailyMotion very quickly. Basically all you need to do is copy and paste the link to the video into the box provided and hit ‘download'. Alternatively, you can browse the sites themselves by selecting the portal of your choice from the drop-down menu.

In one sense, the sparseness of the interface is an advantage, as it keeps things as clean and simple as possible. In another respect we were left wanting for extra features and options to help us peruse and download the videos we want. Practically the only setting you can tweak is the via the format dialog, allowing you to specify the format of the saved video (AVI or MPEG), the size of the video and the audio bitrate. We feel that the addition of a built-in video search tool or some video compression utilities would have lifted the program from being a good program to a great one.

Add to the fact that you can't download embedded movies like the ones you find on the front page of Google Video and you can't help feel frustrated that VDownloader doesn't do quite as much as it perhaps could. Having said this, the app is still in the early stages of development and the fact that it is so lightweight makes it prefect for those who want to grab video content with the minimum of fuss.

Download VDownloader 0.73 in Softonic

Are you forever forgetting appointments, birthdays, things to do, to walk the dog, your dentists appointments, exams, etc.?

Well, you'll know that using post-it notes is often a very disorganized affair - they get torn, lost and, before long, your desk looks like a sea of yellow sticky paper. PNotes basically allows you to write virtual post-it notes on your desktop rather than plastering them around your working environment.

PNotes is a beautifully designed and presented program which gives you an authentic sticky note feel. PNotes not only act as a visual reminder but can also be set to alert you when an appointment is near, at a time you configure.

Another really useful feature of PNotes is the ability to join groups by choice, which allows you to create, modify, delete and relocate groups by simple clicking or dragging-and-drop. You can change the group for each note written simply by dragging it to the group of your choice. Whatsmore, you can even customise the look with some pretty cool skins and even create your own with PNSkinCreator (although this has to be installed separately) so sticky yellow post it notes will never look the same again.

PNotes has recently been updated to add a much needed search and replace tool which helps you find those notes that have expired or you'd like to change using keywords. You can set the notes to appear randomly in a different colors each time you post them and you can also select whether you want your most recently created post it note to appear on top or not.

PNotes is a clever and highly useful program that will have sticky note fans reaching for their wastepaper bin and converting to this far more organized method instead.

Download PNotes 4.01 in Softonic

Archivarius 3000 is a full-featured application to search documents and email on the desktop computer, your local network and removable drives (CD, DVD). The documents can then be searched by keyword or using a query language.

Due to full Unicode support, Archivarius 3000 allows correct search in multilingual documents. For instance, a Greek-German bilingual document can only be handled in Unicode, otherwise Greek symbols and German diacritics would be lost.

File names are also in Unicode, which enable correct handling of Asian documents (Japanese, Chinese, Korean). Archivarius 3000 searches not only e-mail messages, but also attachments, including compressed ones. The following formats are supported: Outlook, Outlook Express, The Bat!, PocoMail, Netscape, Mozilla, Firefox, and those that are compatible.

Server mode allows you to search remotely and have remote access to your documents through any web browser (i.e. Internet Explorer). This mode can be switched on with a single mouse click.

Download Archivarius 3000 4.09 in Softonic

The ALShow codecs included movie player lets your watch all your videos, movies, and DVDs without searching for video codecs or audio codecs. From AVI to XviD, playing movies is first-click easy with codecs for all popular video, audio, and movie formats. ALShow also recognizes codecs that you do not have and automatically helps instantly install the right codecs. ALShow loads movies fast and plays movies smoothly.

No more video playback stuttering. Audio, video, and screen captures let you save portions of movies to share with friends. You can also import them to your favorite audio or video editor. Video looping lets you repeat parts of a movie. Captions and subtitles are supported for monitor and TV output. The ESC key hides ALShow when you are supposed to do homework. Click the tray icon to resume playing your DVD movie or video.

Download ALShow 1.62 Beta 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

Have you ever seen those movie computers that could be controlled with single command
lines? Now you can make those fictional images come true with Ubiquity.

Ubiquity is an awesome Firefox add-on that opens a semi-transparent bar on top of your
screen every time you press its associated keyboard shortcut. From there you can run a
wide array of commands, from searching a selected text fragment in Wikipedia to checking
the weather on any city in the world.

The good thing about Ubiquity is that besides supporting quite a good amount of built-in
commands perfectly integrated with the browser, it also allows you to create new ones.
The command creation process though may be a little too difficult for non-techie users, as
it involves coding.

Ubiquity surprised us for its quick response, smart suggestions and nice interface. Taking
into account that this is only a prototype version, things can only get better.

Ubiquity lets you control a wide selection of commands and web tools with just a
single text of line.

Download Ubiquity 0.1.1 in Softonic

You'd be surprised to see how much disk space you're wasting with duplicate files. In fact, you can actually check it with this tool. Duplicate File Detector scans your system and finds all duplicate files, no matter how hidden they are.

You can analyze the whole drive or set several specific folders, but beware of the filters the program uses as default, as they may sort out folders that you want to include in the scan. The process takes a while, but in exchange for your patience the program delivers a complete list of all duplicate files in your system. This list also offers a preview of each file, so you're sure of what you're going to delete before marking them.

Duplicate File Detector works with a wide range of file formats and can detect duplicates based on a large variety of criteria. In fact, there are so many configuration settings that it may feel a bit overwhelming at the beginning.

Download Duplicate File Detector 4.5 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 in Softonic

RegToy is a small application that enables you to tweak a variety of hidden settings in Windows XP, customize your system and improve its performance.

The tweaks offered in the program are conveniently organized into categories. You can also search for an specific tweak by using keywords in RegToy's built-in search tool. Besides tweaking, you'll be able to remove invalid registry keys, change your wallpaper according to a scheduled period of time and clean your hard drive, amongst other utilities.

Download RegToy 0.7.2.1 in Softonic

K-Meleon is an extremely fast, customizable, lightweight web browser for the win32 (Windows) platform based on the Gecko layout engine (the rendering engine of Mozilla). K-Meleon is free, open source software released under the GNU General Public License.

Features:

• Choose your desired bookmarking system
• "Tabbed" browsing
• Mouse gestures
• Complete toolbar, menu, context menu, & keyboard shortcut customization
• Block popup windows
• Fast load time
• Easy web searching
• Themes & skins
• Macros

Download K-Meleon 1.5.0 in Softonic

Boasting the ability to improve the speed of your downloads by an incredible 300 percent, Download Accelerator Plus features multi-server connections to let you squeeze the best possible performance from your Net connection.

The beauty of the software lies in its simplicity, you just choose the file you want to download, tell the program where you want it to be filed away then forget about as DAP does all the donkey work for you. What’s more, if you get booted offline for any reason the software will automatically resume the download from the place it had already reached.

DAP even searches for “mirror sites” for you and this serves to make downloading a pretty painless process, with the app sucking up files fairly quickly. DAP is a veritable feature-fest making the whole process much easier by including functions like automatic hang-up on completion of a download, download scheduling, and dial-up configuration – a handy tool for anyone not yet blessed with broadband.

The only slight niggle for some people may be the fact that it is nigh-on impossible to turn the thing off, unlike most of its peers, where you can choose to manually download something fairly easily. Having said this, because the program is so easy to use and integrates beautifully with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera browsers, there really is little reason why you wouldn’t want this great utility keeping watch of your downloads all the time.

Download Download Accelerator Plus 8.7 in Softonic

Are you a real Softonic fan? If so, this toolbar has been especially developed for you.

The Softonic Toolbar brings the latest reviews, updates, blog posts and software apps published on Softonic right to your web browser. You'll be able to read all the new content published on the site with a single click and you'll always be up to date with the latest program versions and software news.

What's more, this toolbar also features a series of online services, such as local weather forecast, an embedded search engine, an email notifier, a translation service powered by Babylon and a radio player with support for streaming radio stations, although you may need to download a separate plug-in to make it work properly. I found the email notifier particularly useful, as it supports multiple Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo and POP3 accounts.

The Softonic Toolbar also includes a configuration menu where you can customize it by choosing the elements you want to be displayed.

A web browser toolbar that brings you all the best from the web: a variety of online services and all the latest news on Softonic and insideTonic.

Download Softonic Toolbar in Softonic

Don’t be put off by the name: 'sub' doesn't stand for an inferior program, but actually a very useful one (the 'sub' stands for sub-titles). The idea is simple but great: to watch films on your computer with subtitles in the language of your choice. The program is easy to use but there is still room for improvement.

The good thing about having this software is that you will not have to pass through the frustrating process of looking for subtitles on the Internet and find a reader which combines them with your film. With this application all you have to do is to upload the film you want to see. If you are lucky, the program will automatically recognise its name and will show you the subtitles available. If not, you can simply type the title in the appropriate field and press the search button.

We have tried with the English IMDB.com top ten list of the 90s and found subtitles for each entry in the list. Unfortunately, for non-English films the selection is limited to only popular classics.

On the whole, Sublight is really useful both for film-lovers and for foreign language students. We just hope the database of subtitles will increase, particularly for foreign films as it makes more sense for an English-speaking audience to watch foreign-language films with English or original subtitles.

A very useful application as long as the list of non-English films increases.

Download SubLight 0.9.1 in Softonic

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

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

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

Download Find Desktop Standard 1.84 in Softonic

XYplorer is a simple to use file manager which replaces Windows Explorer with several enhanced functions and interface improvements.

Whatsmore, it's completely portable so you can put it on a USB stick and use it wherever you want and whenever you need it. The biggest advantage this program has over Windows Explorer is undoubtabley the Move and Copy dialogues. XYplorer allows you to configure hotkeys to carry out the most common copying and moving operations that you require meaning less mouse movements and faster management of your files and folders. XYplorer also removes the need for multiple folder windows along your taskbar because it employs the use of tabbed file management much in the same way as Firefox does with internet browsing. These tabs are fully customizable too - you can drag them around, rename them, hide them, lock them and much much more. This tabbed feature does give XYplorer a distinct browser style feel especially the featuring of an address bar which accepts not just folders, but also files, URLs, and search terms. This latter function can save hours of time searching through files by allowing you to search directly in XYplorer - without any need to use Windows search tool - simply by placing a "?" between the location and search pattern.

A truly impressive replacement for Windows Explorer - once you've used it you may never go back.

Download XYplorer 7.50.0000 in Softonic

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

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

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

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

Download Shiki Video Downloader 1.0.0.49 in Softonic

ScrapBook Plug-in for Firefox is a Firefox extension which helps you to save web pages and manage them in any any easy to administer way.

With ScrapBook Plug-in for Firefox, you can save web pages, save snippets of Web page and even save whole websites. You can organize saved pages just in the same way as you would with Bookmarks and you can also highlight and annotate pages with an inbuilt highlighter and eraser.

ScrapBook Plug-in for Firefox also allows you to search text within web pages that you've saved although if you've got something like Google Desktop installed, this is not that necessary but still, it's useful. The problem is that if certain pages contain unknown elements, the page won't save properly or at least, when you open it, it doesn't look like the original you saved.

However, if you do need to save a webpage such as a flight ticket or proof of purchase, ScrapBook Plug-in for Firefox is a convenient and easy way to do so.

Download ScrapBook Plug-in for Firefox 1.3.3.7 in Softonic