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

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.

Google Chrome installer will download the browser component during the install process, which prevent you from installing it on a PC without internet connection.

Google Chrome is the latest open source web browser, built with WebKit and Mozilla technology, developed by Google. When I first run Google Chrome, I noticed the simple GUI of Google Chrome. You will get the basic GUI such as tabs, address bar, back, forward and home buttons. Even bookmarks is actually hidden by default (you have the option to show it somehow).

Some Google Chrome features:

• Phishing and malware sites blacklist will be periodically downloaded by Google Chrome.
• Each tabs in Google Chrome are sandboxed, meaning that each tab is isolated and cannot affect other tabs, and have the similar ‘Protected Mode’ used by Explorer 7 on Windows Vista.
• The new Javascript virtual machine, V8, used in Google Chrome will significantly improve Javascript executions.
• Multiprocessing
• Google Chrome comes with its own task manager, so you can see which tab or plugin that hogs your system resources.

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).