Acronis True Image is a truly professional and the best backup application available for Windows. But, as you may know, one need to shell out a minimum of $49 to purchase it.
Now let’s see how can one get this application for free. As you know, Seagate and Western Digital (WD) are the two popular hard drive manufactures. Most of the PC manufactures use HDDs from one of these manufactures. If you are using a PC with a Seagate, new Maxtor or Western Digital HDD you can get the Acronis True Image for free. Yes, both Seagate and WD allows you download the Acronis True Image software for absolutely free.
While Seagate has rebranded the True Image to DiscWizard, Western Digital is offering the software without a change. So, you can download Acronis True Image for free from the below mentioned links.
Key features of Acronis True Image WD edition:
# Clone the drive to a new WD drive
# Drive migration
# Drive deployment
# Drive image backup
# Drive image recovery
# Create bootable standalone recovery manager
key features Seagate DiscWizard:
# Drive migration
# Create bootable media
# Manage image backups (explore,mount, & unmount image backup)
# Image backup and image restore
# Disc utilities
Above mentioned features are good enough for your day-to-day backup needs. So, if you are looking for a trustworthy professional backup solution for XP, Vista and Windows 7, just download the software from below mentioned links.
VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL).
Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), Solaris and OpenSolaris, and OpenBSD.
VirtualBox is being actively developed with frequent releases and has an ever growing list of features, supported guest operating systems and platforms it runs on. VirtualBox is a community effort backed by a dedicated company: everyone is encouraged to contribute while Sun ensures the product always meets professional quality criteria.
News source: Official website
Download: VirtualBox 3.1.6
View: Change log
gDoc Creator is a useful and freeware tool for creating, viewing and printing PDF and XPS documents. With gDoc Creator, you can easily convert documents from Word, Excel, and PowerPoint into PDF or XPS. With these free PDF conversion tools you can create your PDF files instantly in one click from your MS Office application toolbar (compatible with Office 2003 and 2007). It also includes batch processing, PostScript to PDF conversion, document security and the ability to re-purpose PDF files for professional print or website publishing.
For the times when you need greater control in editing or re-purposing PDF or XPS documents, gDoc Creator allows you to convert PDF and XPS files into MS Word in one simple step. PDF to Word is as simple as Word to PDF.
You can create your PDF file optimized for sending by email, on-line viewing, office printing, professional printing or archiving to the PDF/A – 1b standard.
Features;
Overall gDoc Creator is a very useful PDF and XPS creation tool.
When it comes to PDF Reader, the free Adobe Reader is one of the most popular one, but Adobe Reader occupies lot of memory when installed and in use. Free PDF Reader and Converter for Windows 7 is a useful PDF reader with good feature and also light weight. You can open, read, view, review and print Adobe PDF files, and convert PDF to TXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, EPS with the full-featured free PDF viewer.
The software supports zoom in and zoom out, page rotation, and PDF slide show, and it can be added to Windows 7 and it supports both 32 bit and 64 bit versions.
With the save as option, you can convert PDF files to TXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, WMF, EMF, EPS. With the features available in this freeware, it is worth downloading as yourPDF reader.
If you want control over when your PC shuts down, Dshutdown is for you. This program will give you complete control over triggers that make your computer shut down. This can be useful if you are energy conscious and want your PC to shut down after use. I realize many of this site’s readers never let their computer even hibernate — because they use it so much! However, I hope this program may help some of you.
Features from DShutdown Site:
"Resource Hacker" is one of our favorite software which is used to edit various system files like dll, exe, cpl, etc. Most of the times its used to modify Windows look, for example you can change look of dialog boxes, menus, etc.
We have posted a detailed tutorial about resource Hacker at following link:
Now the good news is, our friend "Angus Johnson" has released an updated version of Resource Hacker which now supports 64-bit files as well as PNG files.
That's a major update and every Resource Hacker user should download the new version 3.5.
Changes List:
As you can see in above screenshot, the older version can't show PNG files but the new version can show PNGs without any problem.
You can download the new version using following link:
Download Resource Hacker 3.5 Beta
Although its beta version but its a fully functional and bug free version and can be used without any problem.
EVEREST 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 a comprehensive system diagnostics tool that offers a total of 100 pages of information about your PC.
Download : Everest Ultimate 5.30.1944 Beta
WinRAR is a general purpose archiving and compression program competing with/replacing programs such as PKZip, ARJ, and others. It offers significantly improved compression ratios, easier use and a cheaper price as well as supporting long file names, disk spanning, and self-extracting file creation.
Download : WinRAR 3.91 beta 1 | 64-Bit
Although Windows has its own built in task manager to manage processes running, there are many third party tools to do this job. We have covered quite a few third party free task managers for Windows. Nauplius TaskManager is another free task manager for Windows which has the ability to end process from a local computer as well as remote computers connected through network.
This task manager does not show all the process from the computer when opened, but you need to enter the computer name and then query for the processes running under it. By default the current computer name is displayed.
If you want to get processes from a remote machine, enter the machine name connected to the network and click on query. You can end process running on the remote computer using this tool.
Although it has the remote process shutdown option, there aren’t much feature available in this task manager when compared to other task manager reviewed here.
MyPorts 2010 is a program specifically designed to inspect system TCP and UDP ports and find open ones.
The program displays local port and Address, remote port and address and which process owns the open port.
This could be useful to find trojans, keyloggers or other malware "listening" for incoming calls.
An automatic 2-second scan can be activated, to ensure continuous monitoring of the sysem ports.
This program has been tested and works under For Windows7 RC1, Vista, XP, 2000, 98
TuneUp Utilities makes Windows faster, more secure, and comfortable. All important aspects of system configuration, security, cleaning and maintenance are combined under a modern graphical user interface.
Download: http://www.tune-up.com/download/