Vector graphics at this point in time are very popular because of the perceived value that they have and of course the real value that they have amongst people that enjoy graphic design. Vector data formats are also useful amongst people managing geographic information systems because it allows them to use the approach of points, lines and polygons in order to create the ultimate end result that their boss might want. So, all in all, vector is a format that is very much loved around the electronic and online world and one of the reasons that people have a love-hate relationship with vector is that all of the programs capable of creating vector images cost an exorbitant amount of money.

Not AutoTrace for Windows, however. It is a program that is useful in the conversion of bitmap raster images to the vector graphics that we all know and love. AutoTrace is also completely free to use and the author of the software (Martin Weber) specifically states that AutoTrace is going to remain free to use because the goal of the project initially was to create a free option to combat the large prices that people have to pay for vector creation software at the current moment in time.

Martin has certainly shaken things up with this program and more information about it can be found at http://autotrace.sourceforge.net/

If you’re like the average internet surfer, chances are you’ve developed a very large collection of music over the years.   Ever since peer to peer surfing has come about starting with Napster and then getting larger and larger as time goes on, what we are finding is that many people that have large music collections just keep downloading songs time and time again, with new songs just getting added to the list as they continue to download. This is what causes the large growth of their music collections and when it gets to a certain point, a music collection can be quite difficult to sift through.

This is exactly where the TagScanner software comes in.  It is a program capable of a range of functions all relating to the organization of larger music collections. It allows you to browse through the files on your computer and organize your music files by changing the tags on them. Tags that can be changed include things like album, artist name, song title and anything else you can think of that would be pertinent to cataloguing and organizing a music collection. It can also automatically rename files for you based on the tags that you give them and therefore allows you to automate some of the more mundane tasks of organization.

More information can be found at http://www.xdlab.ru/en/

As more and more people become aware of all of the coding behind a lot of the software that is created in today’s world, there is always a rising need for some sort of regulation in the form of software developers including information about their products and applications so that the people using those applications have some background on where those applications comes from and what they might do. These types of files are in the .diz format and are commonly known as Portable Application Descriptions, or PAD for short.

PAD is used by a software developer to get all of the information relevant to their file out into the public so that anybody that wants to find out about their file only has to load up the PAD and read through to find out everything they need to know. PADs are very useful and that is why a piece of software like the PADGen 2.0.2.30 is so useful as well.  It is a piece of software that specifically allows you to create PAD files and include them with your applications so that consumers know exactly where your applications are coming from. PAD files tend to inspire confidence and with the PADGen you can easily attach them to all of your files.

The best part is that the software is completely free! To find out more about it, take a look at the developer’s website at http://www.asp-shareware.org/pad/padgen.asp. However, don’t let the domain name fool you; this particular piece of software is completely freeware; no shareware elements to it.

If you’re like me (and i am!) then as time goes by, your computer gets more and more filled up with various things.  This continues until one day you find you’re almost out of space!

Where did all the free space on your once huge drive go?! Well you can start digging through your directories and folders looking for old files you no longer need, this can be a very time consuming task as you may know!

An alternative to doing it the hard way is to use a tool such as SpaceMonger. You simply select the drive you want to check out, and it very quickly goes to work, creating a visual representation of where all your stuff is and how much space it’s using. It shows you using a treemap and also a pie chart, these show proportionally whats taking up how much space and where.

This is an invaluable utility for anyone who’s a packrat when it comes to their hard drive. Check it out here.

Did you play with LEGO when you were a kid?  I certainly did and one of the things that I absolutely loved about playing with LEGO was the ability to envision a completely different world from the one I lived in.   In other words, the ability to create things like dragons and wizards and play with them all day long was what kept me interested in LEGO time after time and one of the reasons that LEGO continues to be popular is because there is that element of escapism to it; it is able to keep young minds enthralled.

Well, now LEGO has become digital with the designers of the great building block toy now releasing a version that is completely free to use for people that want to give LEGO design a try online.   It is a very fun piece of software to use and people both young and old can use it to construct any number of different things.  Because the software is still early on in the development stage there are some kinks in the software, but ultimately as the software gets better it is going to come very close to simulating the real world experience.

More information about this software can be found at http://ldd.lego.com/

One of the interesting aspects of operating systems is that everything that they do automatically generates logs. Whether the particular task at hand is security measures against intrusive programs, system applications that are running in the background unbeknownst to most of the users, applications that the user specifically selects to run or anything else you can think of that might go on within an operating system, there are going to be logs kept of all of the activity that happens.  These logs are useful not only to users that are looking for past activities of theirs, but also to computer technicians that are trying to diagnose problems with different software programs.

While the Event Viewer that comes with Windows allows you to scan some of these logs, it is very limited functionally simply because there is not that much demand from the wide range of Windows users for a better version of the program.   If you are interested in extending the functionality of that program, then download the Event Log Explorer to replace it.  This is a completely free program that allows you a number of different features in dealing with event logs and the latest update fixed the bug that made the free license expire for non-commercial users.

More information is available at http://www.eventlogxp.com/

One of the biggest pet peeves that a lot of people have concerns the idea of lots files.  Chances are if you’ve been using a computer for any amount of time you know exactly what this means. How many times have you had all of your stuff saved quite nicely on your hard drive only to find out one day that something bad has happened to your hard drive and in the wake of that something bad happening you have lost all of your files?   Damaged media can really hamper a person’s ability to do anything nowadays and regardless of whether it is a hard drive or some sort of removable media, you need to find a way to recover some of those files.

And this is exactly where Encopy 4.32 Beta can come to your rescue.  Because of the way in which the software was designed, Encopy can help to rescue data from damaged media even when standard system tasks fail at the task.   It has become the best friend of a number of people because of this ability and many people have been able to recover extremely important work specifically because of the use of the Encopy software.   Best of all, the software is absolutely free to use!

More information can be found here.

Zoommy is the software is for magnifying anything that is present on the desktop or anywhere else. It is also of much use for the partially visually impaired people using PC for their work. You can use it for having the information about the various aspects of the images.

The software gets quickly downloaded and installed. It opened up with a small rectangular screen on the right bottom of the desktop. Making the software active wherever you take the mouse the screen below shows the magnified form of the area. It has the zooming option from -4 x to 30 x that you can see the minor parts also. When you take the mouse to a place the blue information panel appears on the lens screen. It shows the Zoommy lens pixel size, the axis information, the RGB level of that particular area, HEX, etc. You need not to open the properties of the images. You can know the image properties of your desktop wallpaper and almost everything. It stays at your system tray and contains the right options. When you come back to the lens area then the lens disappears and the screen shows the options. You can zoom in and out whenever you want, have the measurements and also can slow down the mouse. Hide or show the lens; change the lens width and height; and show border and pointer position. Set the color mode, brightness, contrast and you can make it transparent through the given levels. Select the measure unit to be pixel, inches, percent, etc. You can choose the info to be shown on the blue panel and select the new profiles or delete one. Clicking on Options a dialog box appears showing different options. Set the general options relating windows, select image copying and saving options, etc. Set the color, transparency, etc; and select the hotkeys, language and info options. You can even take the screen shots of any area and save it as an image file.

The software is a good utility for design professionals and for the people who are visually impaired. The downside point of the software is that it does not have any help guide and needs internet access for any help. Overall we will still give it an appreciable 4 star rating because it performs exceedingly well.

(More info and Download)

One of the pitfalls of the modern internet explorer (the person, not the software program) is the ease with which our computers can contract programs that we never wanted in the first place. Installers, dialers, spyware, malware, viruses and everything else under the sun can be downloaded to our computers without our knowledge and a lot of the time we can’t do anything about it, if for no other reason than the fact that we don’t even know about it in the first place. It is possible to fight back against these types of unwanted intrusions and one of the ways that it can be done for free is to utilize the RunScanner tool as part of a larger fight against getting rid of unwanted software.

As previously mentioned, RunScanner is a completely free tool and herein lies a lot of its appeal. What it does is it scans your hard drive and the rest of your system in the attempt to find all of the different programs that are configured and running on your system. This means that it will find all of the programs that you currently have running and in addition to that will find all of the programs you didn’t even know you had on your computer.  

Installer programs, autostart programs, adware programs, spyware programs, homepage changing programs, drivers and malware programs will all be easily detected by the RunScanner software. Once you know where they are, you can take the appropriate steps to make sure that they are gone!

More information can be found at http://www.runscanner.net/

There are a number of people nowadays that have made the switch to some kind of broadband service for their Internet, but there are at the same time still quite a few people that are interested in the idea of broadband, but either don’t have it in their area or alternatively can’t afford it. Dial-up is a cheaper option and one that is more accessible to the majority of internet users in this world today.  Therefore, enhancement of dial-up is going to be something useful to a large number of people and that perhaps accounts for some of the popularity of the TICK 1.17 software.

The TICK 1.17 software is a free piece of software that does a lot for enhancement of your dial-up experience. Firstly, it will allow you to keep track of all of your sessions of internet browsing so that you can see how long each dial-up call was and ultimately how much that call is going to cost in the context of your current internet service provider. It will also give you information about the amount of data transfer that went back and forth during that call so that you can get an idea of how your efficiency with using the internet changes from day to day or even session to session depending on how many times you use the internet each day.

It is a very useful piece of software about which more information can be found at http://www.reallyeffective.co.uk/tick_index.html