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Would you believe this? The Film Machine is actually the name of a software! I bet you were thinking that this is the name of some site that sells videos or DVDs, right? Nope, this is the name of a software which helps you to convert video files into DVDs. So, let’s say you have some video files which you have downloaded from the Internet like those high resolution trailers and you would like to view them on your very expensive Plasma TV but you can’t, since the player only reads DVDs. So you can make use of this software to convert that video file into a format that your DVD player can read. It’s called MPEG 2. You can also convert to VCD format (MPEG 1) or SVCD format if you so wish.

However, The Film Machine needs an encoder installed like Cinema Craft Encoder or Sonic Foundry Soft Encode to do the actual MPEG 2 conversion. Of course, you can use the freeware HC Encoder as well. But that software takes slightly longer to do your conversion than the other commercially available software. If you don’t mind the time (I don’t as I usually do the conversion at night and set it to auto-shutdown when done), then HC Encoder is your best bet. The prices of the other encoders can be heart stopping to say the least!

The Film Machine has a ton of features which makes this software a must have if you do a lot of video conversion to DVD. It comes with a easy to use wizard, just choose the video file you want to convert, choose your encoder (for both video and audio) and you are done! The Film Machine supports avi, mov, mp4, mkv and rmvb files. It also supports NTSC to PAL conversion and vice versa. For the video and audio bitrates, you can easily modify and configure them as well. Furthermore, if you like to add a menu to your DVD, this software supports it! They can create a BIN/CUE image file for you if you need to burn the image into the DVD/VCD later, or just let the software burn the DVD/VCD for you automatically. Amazing software and simple to use. Not much fuss.

This software is available for Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista 23 bit.

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I bet a lot of us make use of our emails to send important attachments to our friends, relatives and especially to our bosses, right? Well, if you DO send such emails, you will realize that there is a very serious flaw in this – the attachment size. Yes, how many times have you send a huge file across but only to have it rejected by the other side? Just imagine the time wasted when you send the file and the time wasted again when you need to figure out how to solve it. Don’t you just hate it when there are problems with your email? However, it’s not the fault of the ISPs or your email host. Why? Because the design of email in the beginning. Email was designed to send text messages across the network and it is just not meant to be send and receive huge files.

I may have the solution for you, it’s called Civil Netizen. It’s like those file sharing software or maybe like MSN’s file sharing feature. The difference is that it can send and receive huge files (that’s up to 4GB!), unlike most other software. You can transfer a large number of files with just a few clicks. They have something called a “parcel” and all the files are contained inside these parcels. It also allows you to preserve the file structure of your folders. The most important of all is that it is very secure. And you do it privately. You can share those company files with your co-worker in another laptop using Civil Netizens and find very secure. And transferring files is as easy as clicking a few links. If you are worried about transferring of huge files, you needn’t be. This software allows you to resume interrupted transfers like those FTP Clients. It will keep on trying till your files are delivered. Oh, did I mention it is free?

Civil Netizen feels a lot like those P2P software like those P2P software you see on the Internet. However, this is not a P2P software. It is meant for people to transfer files securely.

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I have started using AVG Free for a few weeks already and I find it very good. I mean, if you are a cheapskate like me who is not willing to pay several dollars for a good antivirus software, then AVG Free is for you. First of all, it doesn’t take up a lot of resources. My system is an old Pentium IV 2.53 and it runs fine with both AVG and Avira together. I don’t get slowdowns at all. The great thing about AVG compared to Avira, you can download the anti-virus definitions much faster. I don’t know why but Avira servers seemed to be always overloading and sometimes, you can’t even update the definitions at all. Or perhaps they are doing it on purpose to force their free users to buy the full edition. Not problems whatsoever for AVG. And since we all know that viruses spread like wildfire these days, it always good to get up-to-date virus definitions.

For the free version of AVG, you get only basic virus scanning and protection, while for the Internet Security edition, you get the full shebang, that is anti-spyware, anti-virus, anti-spam plus firewall protection. However, it does scan incoming emails for virus which a plus. The user interface is quite easy to use. You won’t get confused by options after options in many other software. It comes with a control center which you can administrate how your anti-virus software runs and setup your scheduled updates. Oh, you can also download their anti-spyware software for free. But as always, the free software is limited and doesn’t have any real-time protection. If you need that, go and get the Pro version of their anti-spyware software. Hey, what do you expect? Everyone needs to eat right?

If you don’t have a anti-virus software, what are you waiting for? You want to get infected by viruses? Go and download and get at least some protection for your PC for god’s sake. Oh, this only applies if the system in question is not a commercial one. If you are a business entity, then get the full version, you real cheapskate!

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Introducing to you yet another very cool tool – Wink. It is actually a screen capture tool and flash converter rolled into all. This presentation software allows you to easily create basic presentation slides, but it is designed especially for software usage tutorials. You know, sometimes when you visit a website for help, it will provide you with a tutorial on how to do something on your PC and it comes to you in Flash? Well, this software can help create that flash file for you. Certainly very useful for people like me who has to spend hours and hours in explaining to users on how to use a certain software. For example, where to click for which function and so on. This software can help me create a presentation video and help guide the users with detailed instructions. A great time saver.

It can record (using screen shots) mouse movements and it allows you to add captions and explanations to it. The callouts and shapes for the text explanations can also be easily customized. Furthermore, it allows you to add images or photos to the file. You can also add audio to your presentation as well, making it a more complete tool. I find it a very easy to use software. Although I won’t say it is a complete presentation tool, it’s free and it works well. If you don’t need the more flashy and much more complicated tools, then Wink is for you. All you have to do is to record what you are doing, add in the audio (if you so desired), key in all the notes and explanations and then export to flash or even an exe file. You can even export it to PDF as well. Wink produces pretty good quality recordings however, if you need a smaller file, you can always reduce the resolution or quality. They support different languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and even Chinese.

The latest version is out for download now. Please check it out. You can download it from their website however the latest version is only for Windows. If you are using Linux, then you may have to wait for version 2 to come out. Or you could just use version 1.5.

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This is yet another one of those registry cleaner software. As you guys know, the Windows operating system is full of crap, and what makes it even worse is crap in it’s registry. What’s a Windows Registry? It’s like a list of information about your software, link libraries and whole lot of stuff to run your Windows. However, it is also very prone to getting corrupted or getting invalid or obsolete links. Like when you install and then uninstall some software, registry entries are still left behind by the installer. All these registry entries take up resources because the registry is loaded up everytime your Windows start up. Just think, if you have been using your Windows Operating System for years, how much crap has it accumulated already.

What you need is a Registry Cleaner. So, I introduce to you Glarysoft Registry Repair. As usual, this software is free and you can download it from their website. It claims to be the safest registry cleaner out there. Anyway, I am using it and there doesn’t seem to be any problems with using it. And the interface is easy to use. Just click on Scan Registry for problems and after it finish scanning, click on repair. And if you have problems with your Operating System after that, you can always restore your configurations back.

It helps you clean up your registry by searching and removing invalid paths, invalid file types, invalid file associations, dead file associations, adwares and spywares in the registry, invalid fonts, invalid shared programs, invalid startup programs among others. So why not give it a try. Just remember, you can always restore back your old configuration if you face any problem. And it works for Windows Vista as well!

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This is an interesting little plugin, it’s called Lyrics Plugin. I guess they spent several months thinking of what to call their software and suddenly, out of the blue, they thought of a great one! Anyways, this plugin is for the media players WinAmp and Microsoft Media Player, two of the more popular media players out there. And what does it do? Well, it displays lyrics, stupid. So all you have to do is to play the songs and the lyrics will be automatically displayed on your software. And if it can’t find the lyrics, you can add them yourselves. And the file size is very small. Good, I like files which are small in size, they usually don’t take up a lot of resource. Oh, it’s free as well!

Well, there is not much I can say about this plugin. It’s pretty simple and very useful as well, especially if you are a fan of the music sense. Oh, I believe that a lot of popular songs should already be in their database so you shouldn’t worry. But you need Internet access to do that. I wonder is there a way to store the database locally so that when there is new song I play, I don’t need to connect to the Internet every time? Hope that in the future, they will allow us to download their music database.

If you guys have any software which you find interesting, please do not hesitate to contact me. I am always always always keen to check out new and interesting software.

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Are you the kind that is extremely paranoid? Are you worried that every time you change a harddisk, your data is being mined by others or by the government? Do you have tons of porn inside your harddisk and you are embarrassed by some of the kinkier ones? Do you have sensitive data which you don’t want to fall into the hands of criminals? Or you just don’t like your stuff falling into the hands of your rival? Well, if so, then you should take a look at Active @ KillDisk.

Normally when we format or delete our harddisk, the data is not completely removed. You can always restore the data with recovery software or tools. And for those who thinks that deleting your files from the recycle bin means that the data is gone forever is going to be shocked that is it pretty easy to recover those deleted files. There are a lot of software which can easily recover those files. The trick to all these is overwriting the files. For example, if you delete off a file, the data is still there, just that the the Operating System sees it as empty and can be used. However, if you write over these “empty” spaces, the previous data will be overwritten. Thus the data cannot be recovered using conventional methods. This is exactly what these types of software do. They overwrite the empty spaces of your harddisk with zeros or ones (or some random data) and this ensures that the data cannot be easily recovered.

You can use Active @ KillDisk to erase all your data securely from your harddisk. And the latest version allows you to wipe out the “empty” space from your harddisk. So this way, you can be sure that the data you deleted is really deleted. They support floppy disks, zip disks and thumb drives too, probably the ones which can be lost very easily. You need to get the professional version if you need really hardcore erasing. The professional version allows you to overwrite your data several times (called passes). It cost about US$39.95 for the dos version (v4.1) and US$49.95 for the Windows version (v5.1). Note that the dos version most likely cannot support your USB thumb drives. Get the Windows version if you are planning to erase thumb drives. Or you could just use the Free version.

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First of all, I would like to say I was a big fan of the Firefox browser. In the past, I had used Netscape Communicator as my browser of choice, but as times goes by, it just don’t cut it. Internet Explorer 5 had better features, better interface and a more modern feel to it than my little Netscape. I had no choice but to switch to Internet Explorer. And IE 6 was even better than IE 5 in so many ways.

However, then my friend introduced to me a rather unknown browser – Firefox! Well, at that time nobody had heard of it. It was just a little round ball with a fox head it in. But after downloading it and testing it out, I was quite impressed. It rendered webpages pretty fast. Sure, it had it share of problems but the problems were mainly caused by Microsoft who did not follow standards when it comes to web programming and design. Thus, a number of websites looked off in Firefox. But luckily for me, people start to take notice of Firefox and soon, a lot of them started using the browser. Best thing, they started demanding that websites be standards compliant so that Mozilla and Firefox would render the pages properly. Even websites in Singapore started respecting international set standards to cater for Mozilla and firefox users! It was amazing!

However, as version 2 of Firefox came out, I started noticing a serious problem. It took up a lot of system resources and my system started to slow down significantly. Sure, my PC isn’t top of the line, but at times, it could take up nearly half of my computer’s memory. With just around 3-4 tabs, it could use up 200MB of memory! I was shocked to see how much a resource hog it became. I had no choice, it was either I go out and get myself a high end system or I have to ditch Firefox and use Internet Explorer. With the new Internet Explorer 7 already out, the choice was obvious. Not even the infamous Internet Explorer took up so much resource!

I don’t know what happened to Firefox. But I think that they should solve the memory “leak” problem soon. I had read that this problem is known to the developers for some time, but it seemed that they didn’t bother to correct the problem. I have received a lot of version revisions from Firefox but nothing solved the memory leak problem for me. Perhaps I would just have to wait till version 3 comes out?

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Seriously, if you are thinking of getting an antivirus software, you should start clear away from Norton Antivirus family. And if you already have Norton Antivirus installed (because it is a pre-configured system or you are just plain dumb), you should uninstall it immediately. Of course, uninstalling the software will probably take 15 minutes or more because it is such a resource hog and a dead-on system crasher. In fact, I think it should be made illegal in every country. It seems to me that Norton Antivirus has not really changed much over the years. I discovered that it was a resource hog since the launch of Norton Antivirus 2002. It’s been 6 years already (the latest version is 2007) and the software has not improved. I think all they did was add more features to the software. That’s about it.

Yes, the main reason why I would recommend you to remove Norton from your system is because it is a resource hog. It slows down your PC tremedously to the point where you feel like everything is in slow motion. Even if you have a very high end system, I am very sure you didn’t buy that system so that Norton can slow it down right? Free up resources to play that graphic intensive game you just bought! For low-end system, you will be very glad to get rid of that antivirus as you will find that your system starts to speed up a lot. No more waiting for that hour-glass to stop, no more “Not Responding” messages, no more stress, no more long coffee breaks…..

And there are a lot of other alternatives out there. And one of the best commerical offerings is actually Symantec Antivirus Corp Edition. Yes, they are supposed to be the same developers but it seems that the consumer version is pure crap and bloatware while the commercial one rocks. Doesn’t really use a lot of resources and comes with plenty of (useful) features. And if you don’t want to spend money on antivirus, there are several free ones available. These include AVG, Avast, Comodo and Avira. I would recommend AVG and Avira. Both are very good antivirus software.

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It seems that some Windows Vista users are experiencing weird things, like their machines updating and then rebooting by itself (automatically). You can read the story on ZDnet here. According the Microsoft (those people who created Windows), they have no idea what is causing this behaviour. They are claiming that some third party software is responsible for that. But I guess it is not a smart excuse, since what they are saying is that Windows Vista is not secure. Just think, if some sotware can force Windows to update itself, what else can they do without your knowledge! Perhaps it is some antivirus or security software which automatically enables the Windows Update?

I mean if the creators of Windows are at a lost, what can normal users like us do? Or perhaps it is the idea of Microsoft all along? Sure, sometimes updates are good, but how do we know what Microsoft is “updating” for us. And what information is Micrsoft taking from our systems? We have no idea how it works and to what extend this type of updates will affect our system. In fact, we will never know. And how about the updates themselves? What do these updates do to our systems? I am sure most of us want to know what updates are being done and whether we need those updates in the first place.

How many of you face this behaviour in your Vista machines? Do you face the same problem in Windows XP machines as well. From what I know, none of my company’s Windows PCs have this “problem”, so it is very likely a third party software causing it. But what do I know, right?

Perhaps one day, Windows Machines can updated themselves and when they reboot, presto! Linux! The best update to Windows ever. Now, if only I can teach others to use Linux.

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