It happens to everyone sooner or later, you try to use a CD or DVD for one reason or another and, no luck, the thing just can’t be read!Now you have two choices, either kick yourself for not having another backup, for buying “bargain” quality discs, or try recovery software such as IsoBuster.

It can recover data from a damaged or corrupt CD or DVD. It supports all optical disc formats and all common optical disc file-systems. It can use both generic and alternative ways to get to the data and the use of primary and secondary file systems to get to the data and/or make use of file system data that might be ignored or ‘forgotten’ by popular OS. At the homepage you’ll find a massive and very impressive list of the various methods it uses to attempt to recover your data.

To read much more info and download the demo at the homepage visit here. Hopefully after trying IsoBuster out you’ll have your data back and have avoided getting a self-kicking and a shiny new coaster !

Civil Netizen is a free and secure way to send a file via the internet. It involves no complicated FTP settings, shared website settings, large email attachments, etc.
You can send your file(s) through a simple drag and drop interface. Files can be up to a huge 4 GB!! Thats an awful lot of data, so now you can easily send and share your latest project you’ve been working on, etc, no matter how big (well, as long as its under 4GB obviously). It also fully preserves the folder structure if thats important to you.

You simply “parcel” your content with the online interface, and then you send a pick up slip via IM or email to your recipient. An important feature to mention is that all files are fully encrypted with 128 bit encryption from end to end, so it really is totally private.

It’s a totally free service and they say it always will be! Sounds good! Another one for the bookmarks! You can check it out or use it by going right here.

Acronis True Image is the ideal solution for making an entire exact copy of the contents of your hard disk. This means an exact clone including the operating system, applications, user settings, and all data. This is extremely useful if you’ve just bought a new computer or drive and want to move everything from your old computer or drive to the new one.

It does exactly what it claims to, all it takes is a few hours, depending on size of course, size doesn’t matter with Acronis True Image either!

It’ll work no matter how big your hard disk is, but obviously time taken to clone is relative to size, although it worked pretty fast cloning a 20 GB drive the time i used it. It can even work in the background. The best thing is that even though you wont need to clone an entire drive for upgrade purposes often, it works good as a ‘normal’ backup program too.

Tip: Check the site for updates first before using to avoid any potential problems.

You can get a 15 day trial and more info by going here

If you’ve had problems using plug-ins, tubes or other add-ons in a graphics, video or animation application then you might find this software, which I recently came across, very useful. It’s called Plugin Commander.

Plugin Commander is a tool for dealing with various image formats, plugins and effect types from various graphics applications. It allows you to manage and preview your plugin, tube and add-on collection quickly and easily. You can deactivate the plug-ins you rarely need and define how your favorite effects will appear in the host application.

There are two editions of this useful software, the commercial Pro Edition and the Light Edition, which is freeware. The light edition being freeware has limited features but to enjoy a fully-featured version, it’s best you go for the Pro Edition.

CHECK IT OUT!

PDF is the ideal electronic package to contain everything from spreadsheets, presentations, and brochures, to photographs, rich graphics, and more. So it is necessary to have a good software that can help you create PDF files with ease.

Aloaha PDF Suite is the perfect tool to create your PDF Documents. One click is enough. Just print your document to any of your printers and it will convert the print job to a PDF Document, which you can save, email or publish to an exchange public folder. Of course you can opt for 40 or 128 encryption and digitally sign the PDF automatically.

The great thing about this software is that PDF Signer and PDF Editor are included in the Aloaha PDF Suite Pro package – no extra license costs!

Though this package is great, it is not a freeware, to get the full version you will have to come up with nothing less than $49. In case you are thinking, there are other free software like PDFCreator that does the same thing. Let me point this out to you: PDFCreator doesn’t support encrypting documents with smartcard/certificates; hardly will you find a free generator that does that. If all you want is a cheap and easy way to send a CV to someone, PDFCreator or OpenOffice will do the job but if you want a secure method to distribute and control sensitive or important documents, this suite does the job a lot cheaper than Acrobat.

Ready to try it out! CLICK HERE to learn more about its features and download the commercial demo.

NOTE:

• The evaluation version is fully functional and works without any serial key. The only limitation is a watermark in the left upper corner of every PDF Page
• It works well with Windows 2003/NT/XP. NT4 Users should read the NT4 FAQ before installing Aloaha
• All monitored printer have to remain on status paused!
• Some features such as the digital signature API, the signature hotfolder “tosign” and the XP/2003 FAX Connector require an evaluation key. You have to contact the publisher if you need to evaluate one of these features.

CHECK OUT THE TRIALVERSION! 

Get it on tape! Well, the modern digital version! Here’s a useful program that can record almost all sound from your sound card with good quality. It can also record from the microphone, line-in, and just about any programs such as your media player of choice.

For example you might wanna record an internet radio show. You can easily do that with this, and what’s more, it can record straight to mp3 format,saving you valuable disc space! To get an even small file size, mp3 modes are fully configurable.

Additional features include voice activation, file length limitation (so that it can’t make overly huge files) and schedule (how about recording your favorite internet radio show while you’re asleep or at work?) and it can even stop recording automatically.

Sounds like it could be the perfect solution for almost any situation where you might wanna record and save audio from your computer? You can download a demo (limited to recording 3 minutes) and more find out more info right here.

To be sincere with you, I am one of those who appreciate good things for free or next to nothing (that is why I love freeware). Be that as it may, one cannot ignore the fact that the best things in life do not come cheap. That brings me to why I am talking about this software. WebPosition. I’ve heard a couple of guys grumble about the price saying it’s expensive but I guess the question is, does it give great value for the money?

WebPosition 4 (previously known as WebPosition Gold) increases your web site visibility resulting in more qualified search engine traffic. WebPosition 4 offers all of the tools necessary to improve your web site’s search engine rankings and increase revenue. The new version now includes a summary dashboard, trend graphs, essential off-site metrics (link popularity and search engine saturation reporting) and 200+ new search engines.

WebPosition 4 allows you to:

• Report your search engine rankings
• Target your keywords
• Optimize pages using built-in expertise
• Submit URLs to search engines
• Analyze conversions using WebTrends

It comes in two options – WebPosition 4 Standard and Webposition 4 Pro. The professional version possessing additional features like unlimited domain support, PPC keyword rank reporting, meta tag manager and much more.

Since it is necessary, no matter how good your product or service is, for people to first find you, having a software that makes your website very visible is vital for business. Is it worth it?  That’s up to you!

Learn More and check out the free trial version first. Previous version of this tool can be found right here.

A couple of days ago, November 19 to be precise, AcceleRun was updated to version 1.6. Accelerun is a software that launches any of hundreds of installed programs within two seconds.

You don’t need to search through long menus again; you don’t have to worry about complex key combinations. All you have to do is to type in a few letters in the name of the program, folder, file or website, and Accelerun will find the matches – the more letters you type, the more the search narrows.

Accelerun makes your PC easier to navigate; you can move round a lot quicker using Accelerun. The fact that it requires minimum memory usage, has an easy-to-use design and it is ready for use in minutes after first launch make it a very useful tool.

Latest Changes in this latest version include:

• New options
• Speed and size optimizations
• Bug fixes

Learn more and check out the free version!

In my unrelenting quest to get the best of the Internet and make “my PC life” as stress-free and easy as possible, I recently stumbled on this software. eprompter… 

eprompter is a freeware that automatically and simultaneously checks and retrieves your email messages from up to sixteen password protected email accounts and then gives you notification whenever you have new messages. eprompter also lets you know how many new messages you have in each account, once new messages have been retrieved.

What I love about this program is that it allows you to have access to your latest messages without opening your email conventionally i.e. without going to the website that hosts your account. It also retrieves your messages without disturbing the original ones in your email account.

Ain’t that cool? Not having sign in into different email accounts just to read your mail every time, eprompter lets you have access to your email accounts easily. If you have different email accounts and you are tired of signing in and out of all of them just to see whether you have a new mail or not, then this program is for you but if you have only one you may not really appreciate the need for this kind of program, it probably seems much easier for you to assess your mails conventionally. 

In case you are all for this software but you are not sure whether it supports your email account hosts or not, there is good news. eprompter supports AIM, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Yahoo Beta, POP3, Earthlink, Excite, Juno, Lycos, Mail.com, Mindspring, MSN, MyWay, Netscape, Rediffmail, SBC Yahoo, USA.net, Windows Live Mail, and hundreds of other email domains.

Try It Out! It’s free!

Munnin is a desktop client for all eBay platforms, including USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It keeps itself fully synced with the online database of Ebay.

It allows you to watch desired items using drag-and-drop, manage your search favorites and repeat them at the touch of a button, calculate shipping costs using the integrated shipping costs calculator, plus many more features.For example,’Hot Items’ searches for items with more than 25 bids.

Its available in several versions, Light, Advanced, Professional and Business, Light being free, but this version has some restrictions when compared to the paid version of course!

It’s worth checking out for anyone who takes their ebaying really seriously or who makes a living out of buying and selling on it! For the rest of us its not really necessary.

Check out the site here for more detailed info.