CDBurnerXP – Free Full-Feature Burning Software

September 27, 2010 By

CDBurnerXP is a freeware, portable burning application designed to burn CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and HD-DVDs. Its license offers free commercial use as well as private use.

Many free burning applications are short on features or turn out to only be annoying trials but CDBurnerXP is truly free and has plenty of features including creating/burning ISOs, audio CDs, bootable disks, Lightscribe integration, and command line options. It also doesn’t require admin privileges, unlike Nero.

There are two versions, the full-install version and a portable version. Despite what the name suggests, it works on a lot more than XP; supported Windows versions are 2000/XP/2003 Server/Vista/2008/Win7 (x86 / x64).

Downloads:
Download from Official Site – 4.62 MB
Hit “More download options” under “Download latest version” to see full list of versions.

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License Crawler – Find Product Keys In The Registry

September 20, 2010 By

When reinstalling an operating system you have to search around for all the product keys for your software; a neat way to get it all in once place is with the License Crawler tool. Instead of manually searching through CD cases, emails, and instruction manuals for those keys, License Crawler searches the registry looking for anything that could be a product key. Any keys that are registered in there should be found, including the Windows key and keys for programs like Office, Nero, and VMWare.

License Crawler finds keys pretty quickly, my computer has a lot of programs installed and it finished searching in 1-2 minutes. All Windows versions from 95 to 7 are supported. License Crawler is totally free, small and very portable. It doesn’t require an installation and it can scan a remote hard drive.

More Information

Download from Official Site – 71.3 kb

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Google Chrome Portable

September 20, 2010 By

This week’s repair tool, Google Chrome Portable, is one of those that isn’t so much for repair but rather for convenience. A portable browser is handy for on-the-job when the installed browser is corrupted or not working correctly. It also may provide a work-around when there are those annoying viruses on the machine that mess with the installed browser such as redirecting or blocking your browsing activity. Google Chrome is totally free for commercial and personal use.

Google Chrome is a little newer on the browser scene but it can hold its weight against IE or Firefox by providing the same sort of features:

  • Quick to start up
  • Loads web pages in a snap
  • Runs web applications faster than ever
  • Designed for efficiency and ease of use
  • Search and navigate to web pages from the same box
  • Arrange and organize tabs however you wish — quickly and easily
  • Get to your favorite websites with just a click, from the thumbnails of your most visited sites in the New Tab page
  • Themes to add delight to your browser

Two caveats about using the portable version of Google Chrome; one is that passwords are not saved in such a way that they are available between different PCs. They are encrypted and tied to one PC but not stored locally on that PC, this means that when switching PCs the passwords will not be left behind on the old PC but they will not be accessible on the new one.

The other caveat is that security certificates are stored locally on each PC because Google Chrome uses the Windows certificate manager instead of using its own. For that reason Google Chrome strongly recommends only using private security certificates on your home PC.

Download from PortableApps.com – 11mb Download, 34mb once extracted.

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Antivirus Products Being Released on USB Drives

September 1, 2010 By

It appears that antivirus companies have begun to sell their products on USB thumb drives. This is a great idea now that Netbooks are more common since many of them don’t have an optical drive. In fact, some antivirus companies such as Panda Security are making a Netbook specific versions of their antivirus products which are lighter on resources and come on a USB drive.

Another great thing about antivirus products coming on a USB drive is that the installation of the antivirus product (which usually takes ages) would happen much faster, since it is usually much faster than installing something from a CD.

Lastly, at the end of the day the customer is left with a USB drive which they could use for other purposes.

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