Shark007, a fellow member of MSFN Forums and author of Vista Codec Package, has released his new version of Adobe Reader Lite. It is now version 9.0 made from the latest version i posted about.

This Lite versions leaves out many plugins and has customized preferences so it opens faster and has less features than the average users needs. Also, the file size is a lot smaller.

I use his Lite installer in all my unattended installations and in my personal computers. I totally recommend it.

Right now it is only available in english, but soon all other languages will follow. Visit the discussion thread to keep an eye on new releases for other languages.

I recommend to uninstall any previous version of Adobe Reader and restarting your computer before installing this Lite version. This way you reduce the chance of having problems when installing it.

MSFN Discussion Thread Download

Adobe launched its PDF publishing suite Acrobat 9.0 some days ago. They were missing the updated Adobe Reader 9.0, but today here it is.

There are lots of changes. You can read about them here.

Now they are including Acrobat.com support based on Adobe AIR so you can work on it like in a desktop application. I will try the new Reader version to see how it improves over its previous version.

The only thing i hate about Reader 8.x is that everytime you open a PDF document, the program freezes for a few seconds. This happens just about a 1 or 2 seconds after the document finishes loading, so i hate that when i’m opening something to take a quick read at it.

If your language is not ready in the new 9.0 version, just wait a few days and try again. They will soon release it in all languages.

Edit: I just saw that Adobe released a critical security fix for Reader 8.1.2. Get the patch.

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While Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 a week ago, they just updated version 2.x to 2.0.0.15 to include some security updates.

This is great for people that still prefer 2.0 over the new version, or for those that are still waiting for their favorite extensions to support Firefox 3.0.

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This little program lets you drag & drop your taskbar buttons (open windows) to rearrange them in the order you want. It also support systray icons, so you can move them as well.

You can choose to have its icon in the systray or hide it completely.

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Backing up you USB memory sticks can be very important to preserve your data in case something goes wrong.

While all the backup programs out there can save data from USB drives, USB image tool unique feature is to make disk images out of them so you can store all the drive’s data in one file.

This can be useful for all audio players like iPods or Zunes, because you can store disk images for different occasions. When you want a particular images on the drive, just select restore and select the file.

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AudioGuru is a program that lets you see all relevant information (and not so relevant too) about audio files. With it, you can open an audio file to see all the metadata, like covert art, text lyrics, bitrate on a per-frame basis and scan it for errors.

It can be useful to compare your encoded files for compression rates. Also, if you have some audio files that play weird in some players, you can scan them with AudioGuru to check them.

You can integrate it in the explorer shell menu for easier access to scan files.

Support all the major audio formats, such as MP3, AC3, MP4, WavPack, MPC, APE, among others.

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Another update for CCleaner.

This program is really into development, which is great because for time to time the author includes more applications to the cleaning process.

Remember that you can download a portable version as well an installer without the toolbar. Just click on Other Builds in the download page.

CCleaner 2.09.600 changelog:

• Added full support for Internet Explorer 8.0 beta
• Improved Opera 9.5 support to fix cache cleaning
• Improved interface for Startup tool
• Changed memory management routines to reduce footprint
• Fixed rare 64-bit performance issues
• Added splitter bar to interface
• Fixed repaint issues with certain themes
• Fixed Spybot cleaning detection
• Internal code optimizations
• Updated installer engine to fix icon bug
• Minor GUI tweaks

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I was looking for some Firefox extensions and i remembered that i wanted to make a post about some of the best IE7 add-ons i know for people that use Internet Explorer 7.

Well, i searched through my bookmarks and there were some links i saved a while back.

If you want to enhance IE7 and add some nice features to it, first try navigating through the official Add-Ons for Internet Explorer website. Almost 400 are listed there.

The official IEBlog has a post titled Must Have Add-Ons for IE7. That post is a little old but you can check it out.

There is also this article in Computer World that covers some of the best.

Personally, i think that IE7Pro is really great and covers some of the most needed features in IE7, like an ad-block program, tab history and inline searching. If you use IE7, you will love this one.

Sadly, the offering of add-on is nowhere near Firefox but at least there some great ones you can use everyday.