For years people have wondered why music labels set the prices too high for new releases Mainstream artists, first Radiohead with their album In Rainbows, and now Nine Inch Nails and The Charlatans are giving away their newest albums for free as digital downloads.

Nine Inch Nails uploaded their own album to some torrent sites. The album is available in many DRM-free formats under a Creative Commons license which states that the music is free to distribute and you can use it for all purposes except commercial use.

Also, the band released a note along with the album, which you can find in this site, along with links to the songs.

The album is called Ghosts and is comprised of 4 parts, all instrumental. The first one, Ghosts I is available for download on their own website, but the site has been down since this morning, maybe because excessive traffic as this news are flying around fast. Anyway, you can still download it if you want from a torrent site here. For just USD $5 you can download the whole 4 parts.

The other album i saw that is being given away for free is You Cross My Path by The Charlatans. For more information on the album and links to download it, read this XFM (UK radio station) article. It has news from the band manager as well as download links to get the album.

I was reading the other day a blog entry from the developer of Xplorer2 and i remebered that i suffered the same problem when i was traveling some time ago.

The problem is that some times, one can’t send email when outside the region of our own ISP. I don’t remember where i was but i could’t send any email. I returned home frustated after that and i forget the problem until recently when it happened to me again.

The solution is to change the port for the Outgoing email server. The default in all email clients such as Outlook, Thunderbird and Eudora is 25. Chage it to port 587 and give it a try. I was able to send email this way without any problems using Outlook 2007.

Read the article here.

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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I read about some users having problems when installing Vista SP1. The problem i had with it was post it here.

Some users ran into problems because they had installed a language pack in windows prior to installing the service pack.

If this is your case, read the following article which describes the error and offers a solution.

I already tried a new disc image that microsoft released with an existing spanish language pack. It worked great but some items were not translated to spanish from the english disc image. This is because some things has changed in SP1 and microsoft will release updated language packs in the near future.

Mozilla Thunberbird is a full-featured email application that works great.

Here is a list of the features.

It supports, just like firefox does, the installation of plugins, dictionaries and themes which makes it even better.

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Free Download Manager is a freeware and open source download manager.

It allows you to download files and whole web sites from any remote server via HTTP, HTTPS and FTP. The latest versions also allow you to upload files, download flash object and can serve as a bittirrent download manager.

Can be used as a portable application as well. The lite version lacks some functions (BitTorrent support, video conversion and upload manager) but can be downloaded as plugins later.

It has the best set of features and options among the freeware download managers i have tested before.

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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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Yesterday Realtek released a minor update of it HD audio drivers.

This is very unusual since they normally release major versions only. Maybe there was something buggy in the previous Vista release.

Unattended usage:

setup.exe -s -f2<path\LogFile> -z[-rp<path\LogFile>]
example:
setup.exe -s -f2C:\mylog.log -z[-rpC:\RHDSetup.log]

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