FastStone Capture is a robust and very flexible screen capture program. It allows you to capture anything on the screen such as windows, objects, full screen, rectangle regions, freehand-selected regions and scrolling windows/web-pages. It has powerful features such as floating Capture Panel, hotkeys, resizing, cropping, text annotation, printing, emailing and many more.

If you want to, you can send the screen captures to editor, printer or upload them to your website. Its powerful editing tools such as resizing, cropping, sharpening, watermarking etc can be used to give your screen captures better effects. You could also record your screen activities and save them as videos. FastStone Capture saves files in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF and PDF formats.

Some of the key features of this program includes: a capture panel that allows you to access its capture tools and output options easily, global hotkeys to setup instant screen capturing, apply text effects, resize, crop, sharpen or brighten colors and several more.

In FastStone Capture version 7.1, the publishers have added a few features to the older versions of this program. This new features includes: enhanced the in-built screen recorder, pause/resume support, enhanced the print dialog, enhanced capture scrolling window tool and improved compatibility with customer preview version of windows 8.

To find out more about this program, please visit Faststone.org.

WinToFlash starts is a wizard that will help pull over the contents of a windows installation CD or DVD and prep the USB drive to become a bootable replacement for the optical drive. It can also do this with your LiveCD; and that means you don’t have to worry about scratches on the disc or misplacing your original media discs once you transfer their contents to the flash drive. The optical drive is quickly becoming a thing of the past, especially in office environments, as media is shifted to the cloud. WinToFlash will easily and quickly install the program you need and in no time; and you will find yourself writing essays on Windows and using your USB.

WinToFlash can transfer your live CD or DVD to USB card, for example, BartPE. After all you can erase your USB media and format it with Windows for everyday use. Some of its other features and benefits include the following; support all editions of Windows – Home, Professional, Media Center, Ultimate, transfer a Recovery CD or a tiny OS (BartPE based on Windows XP/2003, WinPE based on Windows Vista/2008/7/8) to a USB drive, wipe a USB media (destroy all data on it), and many more.

Want to check it out? Visit WintoFlash.

IcoFX is a program that allows you to easily create, extract and edit icons. With an array of powerful tools and over 40 effects at your disposal, you can now you can readily convert your favorite images into icons or change your icons to images. IcoFx helps you to create limitless icons, create favicons for your websites or blogs, create icon libraries or edit icons inside exe files. You can also change your Mac icons to Windows or Windows icons to Mac icons. Using its batch processing capability, you can easily work with several files simultaneously.

Some of the key features of this program include the following: batch processing functionality allows you to work with many files, support for static and animated cursors, its array of collection correction tools allows you to refine color, saturation and brilliance and adjust for color contrast.  Using this program, you can create icon libraries and cursor libraries inside exe files, you can use the QuickMask to refine your image selection, convert your favorite images into icons, and vice versa into various formats and convert your favorite.

This program works well with the following system requirement: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and Macintosh icons supporting transparency. It allows you to create Windows icons up to 256×256 for Windows Vista/7 and Macintosh icons up to 1024×1024 for Macintosh OSX 10.7 Lion.

If you want to find out more, please visit Icofx.

TestDisk is a powerful data recovery freeware. It was mainly designed to help recover lost partitions and to make disks that are not booting due to faulty software, viruses or human errors as in when you mistakenly delete your partition Table bootable again.

This program has features that are useful to both newbies and experts. For novices, TestDisk has can be very helpful in collecting information about a drive that is refusing to boot which can be further analyzed by techies. For the experts, this freeware comes in handy for carrying out onsite data recovery.

TestDisk can be used to recover deleted partitions, fix partition table, retrieve FAT 32 boot sector from its backup and fix FAT tables. It could also be used to rebuild NTFS boot sector and recover NTFS boot sector from its backup, use MFT mirror to fix MFT, retrieve deleted files from exFAT, FAT, NTFS and ext2 files.

This program can recover lost partitions from the following file systems: BeFS, BSD disklabel, CramFS, compressed file systems, DOS/Windows FAT12, FAT16 and FAT32 and several more file systems.

TestDisk can run under the following Operating Systems: DOS, Windows (NT4, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista, 2008, Windows 7, Linux, Sun and Mac OS X.

To learn more about this freeware, please visit TestDisk.

Graph Earth is an application that enables marketing and other business professionals to create stunning visual representations of their data, all without the time and costs associated with a full-featured GIS. With it, you can create one of a kind deliverables and distribute them to the world, recipients need only install Google Earth to view the resulting standards compliant KML/KMZ files. Graph Earth is now suitably designed with some new additions and features to enable you carry out your task without any major difficulty. Some of the newly added features include the following; expanded territory map with many new features, visual HTML editor for KML file placemark descriptions, support for optional attribution elements, allowing Google to better find your documents, KML file rendering speed enhanced for large KML files, and lots of other usability enhancements.

Graph Earth is an advanced program that requires some technical skills to use; and that means non professionals may find it a bit difficult to get used to it. Some of its advanced features include the following; four basic 3D graph/map types (bar, chloropleth, prism and territory), embedded statistics and descriptions (global and local), embedded 2D Charts (via Google Charts), screen overlays which allow you to show customized legends, titles and organization graphics (logo), simple spreadsheet style interface, and many more.

Want to check it out? Visit: Graphearth.

Google Drive is a synchronization tool for Google’s online storage service. If you are a Mac or PC user this is a dedicated synchronization tool that enables you to keep a local folder in sync with your online storage – add or remove a file in either location and the changes will be reflected in the other. The essence of the program can best be appreciated when the need arises to store large files, and still be able to access them from home, office or just anywhere. Though, a lot of people would prefer offline storage; Google Drive is still a highly recommended way to keep your files safe without going through a lot of stress. You can start with 5 GB free storage according to the publisher; and that is not a bad way to start.

Google Drive enables you to share files with exactly who you want and edit them together, from any device. It also gives you instant access to Google Docs, a suite of editing tools that makes working together better; even when your teammates are miles away. However, users are required to pay $2.50 per month when they upgrade to 25 GB of storage.

Want to check it out? Visit Drive.Google.com.

ICE Book Reader Professional is a powerful e-book reader. It can also be used as a teleprompter. It iis a very good alternative e-book reader and provides support for the following formats: .LIT, .CHM and .ePub files, and other files which do not use any Microsoft Reader or Microsoft HELP components. It could also serve as a file converter. You could store over 250,000 books as separate files making it a sort of book library with a guaranteed database and the integrity of the stored data is intact.

Since reading e-books is quite different form reading hard copies, this program is designed to make reading of large text files in e-book formats more convenient and less stressful to the eyes. In order to do this, it has some features such as extra smooth text scrolling, auto adjustable scrolling speed and so much more. You can conveniently read at a distance from your computer monitor, just as if you are watching TV. So you don’t have to sit close to the monitor to read using this software. This helps to prevent short-sightedness.

Some key features of this program are: support for multiple documents formats like HTML, XML, RTF, Microsoft Word documents, PALM books (.PDB and .PRC), PSION/EPOC books (.TCR), Microsoft Reader Books (.LIT), Microsoft HELP files (.CHM) and FictionBook files (all versions) (.FB2, .XML) formats. This program has 5 book-reading modes: automatic smooth scrolling, automatic page-down, automatic wave scrolling, manual browsing and book view mode. It can read files in the following formats: TXT, HTML, XML, RTF, Microsoft Word documents, PALM books (.PDB and .PRC), PSION/EPOC books (.TCR), Microsoft Reader Books (.LIT), Microsoft HELP files (.CHM).  With an array of e-books in public libraries on the internet, there is no need to pay for e-books any more. This software can do so much more.

To find out more about this program, please visit .

HyperSnap is a screen capture and image editing tool for Windows. It is built with easy to use features that enable you to capture screens from standard desktop programs and even those hard-to-grab DirectX, Direct3D, 3Dfx Voodoo, and Glide mode games.

HyperSnap can capture frames from many software DVD players and other video playing software. This standard edition of the program comes with a lot of changes that include the following; marking stamps for auto-insert damaged stamp files; auto-inserting stamps with “underlay” (emboss) style did not work correctly, inserting stamps with “underlay” (emboss) style did not work correctly when target image had 32 BPP colour, turning off the “default button” style on edit stamp or text box when editing the text (Enter key enters new lines in text then), zoom up above 400% and down twice permanently hid objects drawn over the image. Now they are shown back if they were visible before the zoom, and a few others.

HyperSnap is a shareware application that also comes with a lot of top features that include the following; image captures from anywhere on the screen or multiple monitors, in any shape or size, unlimited undo/redo, snags also those difficult-to-grab screens from DirectX and Glide games, and a host of others.

Want to check it out? Visit: Hypersnap-DX.

Core FTP is a secure ftp client that includes SSH/SFTP, SSL/TLS, IDN, browser integration, site to site transfers, drag and drop support, file viewing, file editing, transfer resuming, firewall support, custom commands, URL parsing, command line transfers, and much more. This client gives you a fast, easy, reliable way to update and maintain your web pages. It also provides a secure method (via SSL, TLS, or SFTP) to upload and download files from FTP servers. Core FTP Lite includes a few additions or features such as; CDUP problems on some paths caused crash, fixed, corecmd.exe updates, fixes spaces & share issues, Putty SFTP command line cert rejection issues fixed, SFTP hanging problem, fixed, Command line -encoding option (Unicode), and Command line – putty option putty compact sftp.

Core FTP Lite includes a number of features such as the following; secure SFTP, SSL & HTTPS support, international Domain support, fast and secure transfer, mode Z compression, user-friendly interface, site to site file transfer, full drag and drop support, auto retry of failed transfers, browser integration, transfer bandwidth control, keep Alive functionality, remote file searching, file permissions (CHMOD), command line support, favorites via menu & drop down, advanced directory listings, and many more.

Want to check it out? Visit CoreFTP.com.

DarkWave Studio is an application designed for the composition, synthesis and recording of digital music. It is great as a production tool and is also very suitable for live performance. If you have a little knowledge of music composition and sound design you will have no trouble making great music with DarkWave Studio. DarkWave Studio is a free, open source, Digital Audio Workstation for Windows.

DarkWave Studio is an open source program with a lot of easy to use features including; a modular Virtual Studio, Pattern Editor, Sequence Editor and Multitrack Hard Disk Recorder. DarkWave Studio supports VST/VSTi instrument and effect plugins. Some of the features in DarkWave Studio include; virtual studio that has a modular design allowing machines to be connected in an ad-hoc fashion, pattern editor that enables quick creation and modification of patterns by clicking to add or delete notes and dragging notes to move or resize them, sequence editor allows you to queue patterns to play for each control track in any arrangement, enabling reuse of patterns and quickly remixing projects, Multitrack Hard Disk Recorder allows you to record the output of any machine and record it to 16-bit Integer of 32-bit Floating Point PCM encoded, WAV files for full-quality post-production editing or for conversion to MP3/FLAC, and a few others.

Want to check it out? Visit http://www.experimentalscene.com/software/darkwave-studio/