Well, hats off to...

Avast! Antivirus Free Edition

I was a little suspicious after looking at the project entity name (Fenrir). But, I decided to take a look at...

Sleipnir 2.7

It looks like one of the patches from the July Microsoft Patch Tuesday is stopping Secunia PSI from starting after Windows Vista boots. I've been manually starting it from the Vista provided error prompt.
I just changed it to Run As Administrator to see if that resolves the issue.

I downloaded and installed the free...

Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP

To the left you see the Windows Vista thumbnail for a Canon RAW image before I installed the Canon 1.2 CODEC for RAW images. To the right is the same image thumbnail after installing the CODEC. There is such an, um, nothing much, huh? I also downloaded the free Microsoft Pro Photo Tools from the...

Microsoft Pro Photo downloads area

I downloaded Google's Lively virtual worlds installer (for Windows XP/Vista only) and tried it out by logging in with my existing Google account. You can see the giant mess it created on my PC running Windows XP SP3 with IE7. It looked and felt more like a malware attack than a new cool Google service. Yuck.

Secunia Personal Software Inspector RC3 0.9.0.4 scans a Microsoft Windows PC for software with security issues and recommends ways to fix it including direct links to updates for the software. I heard about it a while back but didn't take a close look at it. Then, while catching up on listing to podcasts, I learned more about it on the Security Now podcast #145.

LifeHacker, a great site that is on my RSS feed list, has a post titled...

Five Best Windows Maintenance Tools

Best lists are always subjective of course. And, since I don't expect people to agree with my best lists, I'm taking the opportunity to list some alternatives to LifeHacker's list with some reasons why. Here's LifeHacker's list and my alternatives. LH indicates a LifeHacker pick.

PortableApps 1.1 is an Open Source utility for Microsoft Windows that lets you run applications directly from an attached USB storage device such as a USB flash drive or Apple iPod. One obvious but useful example is carrying fully configured versions of Firefox (with your bookmarks, etc.) for web browsing and Thunderbird (with all your accounts configured) for email.

I just noticed that Piriform released a release candidate of their freeware Windows disk defragmenter...

Defraggler 1.02.077 RC1

I've been using it as my disk defragger of choice since learning about it back in early May 2008. But, hmm, wasn't it missing an "e" (Defragglr) back then?

There are a lot of good secure file transfer utilities for Microsoft Windows. But, over the years, I've found myself mostly using WinSCP. A new beta release just became available a few weeks ago on May 23. You can find it here:

WinSCP 4.1.3 beta

Windows Vista really has a habit of getting in my way. I just updated Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 to Service Pack 1 (SP1). I probably should have Run as Administrator. However, that is NOT specified in the SP1 update instructions...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 for Windows Vista have been giving me fits for many months with their respective memory leak issues. Firefox 2 has been a bit more stable on my Mac but blows up there now and then too.

Microsoft just released...

Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 SP1

Hmm. I couldn't even solve the regular Rubik's cube (without taking it apart :-). So, I'm not even going to try this 4 dimensional puzzle with 2641 pieces.
Magic120Cell

...is a freeware for Microsoft Windows that requires .Net Framework 2.0 to run.

While looking for the latest version of CCleaner, I noticed that Piriform also has a freeware Windows disk defragmentation utility now.

Defragglr 1.01.068 BETA

If you want to try Ubuntu Linux but don't want to repartition your Windows hard disk, this might be the tool for you to consider...

Wubi - Ubuntu Installer for Windows

I just followed a link from Techmeme (which has replaced Digg as my source for tech news) over to an article on TorrentFreak reporting that Filesharing Report Shows Explosive Growth for uTorrent. The report says that uTorrent is now the most installed bittorrent client overtaking the Open Source Azureus torrent client.