I’ve never been a fan of registry optimizers and/or cleaners because i never saw any noticeable performace after using these kind of programs. But i also think that i can’t hurt either.

RegDefrag is program whose only purpose is to defragment Windows¿s registry. It is free and has one of the most simplistic, yet nice, interface.

Try it if you want to see if applications such as RegDefrag can help you with a little performance increase.

Website Download

Yesterday i read this on some sites: Windows Live Messenger is blocking sites like YouTube and Deviantart, among others…

People went crazy on this because many thought that Microsoft was behind this “censorship” of website url being sent in Windows Live Messenger. You can imagine all the complains that were posted on major news sites and forums.

Just a few minutes ago i went to the official Inside Windows Live Messenger blog and learned that this was just an error and it wasn’t Microsoft’s fault. Instead, they posted that a third-party partner of them handles the blocking system.

According to them, the problem is now gone.

As some of you noticed, we had a problem from Friday night to Saturday morning where our Messenger service was incorrectly blocking some legitimate IP addresses. We sincerely apologize for any difficulties this caused our users. And we want to thank those of you that reported this problem to us so that we could quickly fix it. Because of your help, the incorrect block was only in place for a few hours. [...]

Source: URL Blocking: Problem now fixed

Since Microsoft released Windows SP3 to the general public, some users are reporting an endless reboot cycle when installing the service pack.

There is a discussion already going on in Microsoft TechNet forums regarding this problem.

Jesper Johansson, a Microsoft MVP in Windows Security posted on his blog an extensive article about this particular problem, which seems to affect AMD-based computers only. The article has been updated to include some possible workarounds.

I haven’t tried SP3 in AMD-based computers yet so i can’t confirm this, but if you are experiencing this issue, please refer to both that article and forum topic to search for answers.

Source: ComputerWorld

AbiWord is an open source text processor that can work with documents from Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org, among other formats. It has dictionary languages and plugins that can be downloaded from their website.

You can read all the features here.

Website Download

Deluge is a great freeware BitTorrent client. It is open source and has plugins capabilities.

Its interface is simple but effective and is light on system resources. It has versions for Windows, Max OS X and Linux.

Website Download

Paint.NET is the most comprehensive free image editor. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a a great variety of useful tools.

With it you can edit, compose, retouch, fix and repair images of any type.

You can export them to a wide array of image types as well.

Highly recommended.

Website Download

Maxthon is a free browser that works with the IE engine. It is highly customizable.

You can make it portable just by grabbing all the file in the installation folder.

Maxthon is a powerful web browser with a highly customizable interface. It is based on the Internet Explorer engine which means that what works in IE, works the same in Maxthon but with many additional efficient features like Tabbed Browsing Interface; Mouse Gestures; Super Drag&Drop; Privacy Protection; AD Hunter; Google Bar Support; External Utility Bar; and Skinning.

Website Download

It seems that the old way of delivering malware, using bogus audio or video files, is in practice in great scale once more. This, according to McAfee Avert Labs Blog.

Detection of a trojan named Downloader-UA.h was added to the McAfee DAT files several days ago. Since that time more than 360,000 McAfee VirusScan Online users have reported detections, a whopping 32% of those reporting in the past 24 hours alone. Now Downloader-UA.h is not your everyday trojan, this detection covers fake music and video files associated with fastmp3player.com.

When a user attempts to load one of these MP3 and MPG files, they don’t get the music/video they were hoping for; instead they’re directed to download a file named PLAY_MP3.exe. In fact, the MP3/MPG file they downloaded was completely fake, playing no media clip what so ever. [...]

Original Article