If you use Nero before, you should noticed that you are not using most of the features that came with the default installation, especially if you are looking just for the basic CD/DVD burning features. The latest Nero 9 is becoming more bloated, with more than 350MB installation file, and it take 1GB of space after installation.

In this post, I will list 8 free CD/DVD burning software. If you are looking for the simple alternative for Nero, you can try the software listed below. The first 2 is my personal favourite.

1. ImgBurn

You are browsing YouTube and you’ve found nice video. You want to save the video so you can view it offline. In my previous post, I’ve shown you one method on how to download flash video from websites using Mozilla Firefox and DownloadHelper. In this post, I will show you how to download most of the media (audio and video) from any websites, using any of your favourite web browser.

What you need is, Grab++. Grab++ is a small utility that will help you to capture audio and video files from most of all websites, and enables you to download them. Grab++ is integrated with OrbitDownloader, and it is free. Grab++ works by sniffing files that being downloaded by your browser for media. Below, I will show you how to download a video from Youtube with Opera, using Grab++.

In this post, I will list 6 free system utilities that can be used to monitor your hardware temperature such as CPU and hard drive.

1. Core Temp

Info: Core Temp is a compact, no fuss, small footprint program to monitor CPU temperature. The uniqueness of it is that it shows the temperature of each individual core in each processor in your system! You can see in real time how the CPU temperature varies when you load your CPU. It's also completely motherboard independent.

Core Temp is available for Intel Core and Core 2 processors as well as the whole AMD's Athlon64 line of CPUs only. Older processors are not supported.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is one of the best free (and open source) image editor. GIMP is often considered as a free alternative software for Adobe Photoshop. On 1st October 2008, the GIMP developer has released the latest stable version of GIMP 2.6.0.

Some changes in GIMP 2.6:

- Integration of GEGL, a graph based image processing library that bring high bit-depth and non destructive editing to GIMP.

- Toolbox menubar has been removed.

- Toolbox and docks are now part of utility windows.

- The ability to pan beyond the image border when working with images.

- The free select tool has been enhanced and improved.

Before this, I use TeraCopy as the default copy handler. However, the latest TeraCopy seems to have problem on my machine when trying to transfer a lot of small files between different hard disk (103GB of mp3 files). After searching for the alternative of TeraCopy, I found FastCopy. FastCopy is a small tool that will help to accelerates the file copying process. While TeraCopy seems cannot handle small files, FastCopy works perfectly.

Multiprotocol instant messaging program is an instant messaging program which can connect to multiple IM network simultaneously. Usually a multiprotocol instant messaging program support AOL, ICQ, Jabber (Google Talk, Gizmo), Windows Live Messenger, IRC and Yahoo Messenger. Some of these popular applications are Pidgin, Miranda IM and Trillian.

A few days ago, one of my friend asked me on how to create a list of files and folders of a directory so that he can print the list. You can do this easily by using the built-in command in Windows Command Prompt or by using some software.

Using command prompt

1. To make your work easy, open notepad or your favourite text editor.

2. In the text editor, type dir /s > output.txt.

Installing lots of extensions on a single Firefox installation can turns Firefox into a bloated, heavy and memory hogging browser for web surfing. If you love to use Firefox in your web development and design, you should install the addons for web development to a separate Firefox installation, not the one that you use for daily web browsing.

Steganos LockNote is a free and open source utility that offers you fast encryption for text files. Why encrypting text files is so important? Well.. if you are someone who like to store your passwords and other sensitive notes in a text file, of course you don’t want that particular file to be in the wrong hands.

Encrypting is the best solution to prevent unauthorized individual from accessing the data in the text file. Why Steganos LockNote is the best software to do this job? First of all, the software doesn’t requires any installation, which means it is portable. It is also small in size (312 KB for version 1.0.4).

This is actually a quick n dirty solution to check software updates and keep your system up to date with the latest version of the software that you use.

FileHippo.com is offering an update checker software. Currently it is still in open beta stage. The update checker will check your system for installed software, and then send the version information to FileHippo.com server to check whether there are any new versions. The updates will be shown on your browser. The links to download the software updates will also be displayed.