If you ever encounter yourself stuck in a file operation that cannot be completed, like moving or deleting a file or folder this program can help you. It is called Unlocker and it adds an entry to the shell context menu.

When you try to delete or move a file or folder and windows says it cannot do it because another process or person is accessing it, you right-click the file or folder in question and choose Unlocker.

It opens a windows where you can see which process are locking the item. You can either kill the process or unlock it. The latter works great for 99% of the cases. If you still can’t do it, well, kill the process and you are ready to go.

Its freeware

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BurnAware is a program for burning files to CD/DVD.

It can burn DVD Video discs and Audio CD’s as well. Supports multi-session and can save (not from discs in the freeware edition) and write ISO images.

There is a Home Edition available which has more features but is a bit expensive is you ask me.

Look at this comparison table to learn about the differences between freeware and paid versions.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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