windows

Communicate

Fishbowl Brings Facebook To Your Desktop

8:00AM Whitson Gordon | Windows only: Fishbowl, the Facebook client demoed at Microsoft’s introduction to Silverlight 4, is now available for download — and it adds quite a few new desktop features to the Facebook experience, including badges, a mini news feed, and more. More »
Work

Windows Surface Scanner Finds Bad Hard-Drive Sectors

8:30AM Lisa Hoover | Windows: When your computer starts acting hinky and spitting out error messages, it’s hard to know exactly where to begin to diagnose the problem. Windows Surface Scanner gives you a place to start. More »
Work

MinimizeToTray Revived Puts Firefox In Your System Tray

8:00AM The How-To Geek | Windows only: Firefox extension MinimizeToTray Revived puts Firefox in your system tray, and replaces the popular MinimizeToTray extension that has been abandoned and doesn’t support Firefox 3 or later. More »
Work

TorrentFetcher Searches For Torrents From Your Desktop

6:00AM Whitson Gordon | Windows only: Most people use torrent sites like Mininova or The Pirate Bay to search for torrents online, but free program TorrentFetcher lets you search straight from a desktop program and quickly start the transfer in your BitTorrent client of your choice. More »
Design

Use Windows 7 Themes In Vista Or XP

11:30PM Kevin Purdy | Microsoft put far more work into the look and themes of Windows 7 than its previous operating systems. Pull down that design work into your non-7 system with Digital Inspiration’s simple work-arounds. More »
Work

Restoring From Your Windows 7 Backup

12:00PM Angus Kidman | Having a sensible backup strategy is vitally important, but so is knowing how to restore your backup if things go wrong. Microsoft’s storage blog runs down how to make that happen in Windows 7. More »
Work

LockThis! Password Protects Your Open Programs

9:00AM Whitson Gordon | Windows only: If you’ve ever wanted to keep a program safe from prying eyes but don’t want to close it, free utility LockThis! will let you easily protect any open program, so that un-minimising it requires a password. More »
Organise

Sisimizi Organises Your Video Game Collection

8:30AM Lisa Hoover | Windows: Gaming is fun. Organising all your personal video games isn’t. Sisimizi takes the hassle out of managing your collection so you can get back to raiding villages and killing zombies. More »
Work

Bypass Reduced Functionality Without Activating Windows

3:00AM Adam Pash | If you’ve installed Windows 7 (or Vista) but still don’t have a product key, you’ll eventually end up with an activation nag screen and “reduced functionality” until you get a proper key. Still not ready to buy? Temporarily bypass the problem instead. More »
Work

Growl For Windows Updates To 2.0

10:00AM Whitson Gordon | Windows only: Open source notification system Growl for Windows has finally hit the 2.0 milestone, and with it comes a ton of new features that let you further customise the way you receive your pop-in corner notices. More »