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++.

For those who use the dial-up method to connect to the internet, I’m sure you would save your dial-up password in your system. You can connect to the internet faster, without the need to enter the password every time you want to connect to the internet by saving the dial-up password. However, in case you’ve forgotten your dial-up password (for example, you want to format your computer), and you haven’t saved your password anywhere else, this small tool will help you to recover your stored dial-up password.

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.

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.

TrueCrypt is a free and open source on-the-fly encryption software. TrueCrypt will create a 'drive' (TrueCrypt volume) and you can work with the drive' just like any other normal drive. The encryption and decryption process will be done on-the-fly without the need of interaction from user. In this post, I will show you the way to use TrueCrypt easily to protect and encrypt your sensitive files.

Basic Way to Use TrueCrypt

Creating TrueCrypt File Container for TrueCrypt Virtual Drive

TrueCrypt is a very handy tools that provides you an on-the-fly encryption to protect your sensitive data. On-the-fly encryption means that the files are available immediately, just as accessible as any unencrypted ones. The encryption and decryption process are transparent to users.

There are 3 ways on how you can use TrueCrypt to encrypt your sensitive data:

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.

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).