Windows Software

Mozilla's Thunderbird has come into its own with version 2 for Windows, Mac, and in a portable edition. Starring features and innovations that take aim at both Web e-mail clients and industry standards such as Microsoft's Outlook, open-source Thunderbird offers the best of both worlds.

Back and forward buttons, like the ones you have in your Web browser, let you jump through messages in the order that you viewed them. Keep your e-mails organized with tags, even across dozens of message folders. Configuration is as simple as entering your e-mail address and password. Search results can be saved, … Read more

The initial release candidate of Firefox 3 is ready for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

It's a public preview of the new Firefox code, available in 45 languages, aimed at developers and early adopters to test out the new features. It has an extensive list of known bugs.

Among the major improvements are changes in the look and feel on the various operating systems, major security enhancements, and increased performance and stability. It is based on the Gecko 1.9 rendering engine, which includes 14,000 updates to the code.

On the performance front, the documentation states that … Read more

Cerulean Studios' Trillian has long been one of the top multiprotocol IM clients. The program offers simultaneous access to the fab-five chat clients: Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, ICQ, IRC, and AIM, but still doesn't support Jabber/Google Talk in the basic version. For that, users will have to upgrade to Trillian Pro.

Despite lacking this major chat protocol, Trillian's interface is slick and sharp, a professional design that's way ahead of its competitors. Users can import passwords, buddy lists, and client preferences, as well as transfer files and encrypt chats. SMS text messaging and audio chat are … Read more

Last week when Microsoft released Windows XP Service Pack 3 unto the world, a few "lucky" XP users had their computers come to a screeching, brain-jarring halt. Kitty Kilobyte's best friend Penny Penryn was hit badly by this bug, and she had to do a full reinstall of her operating system.

As frustrating as a crash of this magnitude can be, Penny Penryn was surprisingly as cool as a fan for a quad-core CPU. She didn't lose any of her important documents because followed Power Downloader's advice and backed them up using SyncBack. She didn'… Read more

Got a file that won't play in Quicktime? Maybe you have a short clip you found on the Web that Windows Media Player won't have anything to do with. Whatever your media-related issue is, VLC media player for both Windows and Mac usually has the solution. With support for several common (and not so common) media file types, it's no wonder this player remains a user favorite.

Still not sure? Then check out this First Look at VLC media player with CNET Download.com's Jason Parker to see if its the program you've been looking … Read more

It's time to replace that bloated, sluggish PDF reader everybody on the planet has been using with something leaner, faster, and--no, really--easier to use. Join Seth Rosenblatt as he takes a First Look at the freeware Foxit PDF Reader.

Newsgator's FeedDemon, the formerly pay-for-play, now freeware, RSS feed catcher upgrades to Version 2.7 with one useful new tool and a flowering bunch of bug-fixes. The Mac version, NetNewsWire, has also been updated.

FeedDemon now lets users subscribe to multiple feeds at the same time, under the tool name Find Feeds. For longtime FeedDemon users, there are a stack of improvements that should be instantly noticeable to users who've raged against the occasional "flagged" feed drop and other problems synchronizing multiple configurations across several PCs and operating systems.

FeedDemon's biggest claim to fame in … Read more

It's easy for Windows users to forget that WinZip isn't the only file-compression utility in the world, nor is WinRAR its only replacement. Like its better-known competitors, the free 7-Zip unpacks a host of archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, GZ, and its own 7Z format. Unlike the competition, though, it can create TAR and GZ archives, which are commonly used on Unix and Linux systems. Even though it's small, there's an even smaller portable version, too.

The program's ability to shrink files was stunning. 7Z archives tested up to 40 percent smaller then their ZIP … Read more

Power Downloader and I have talked about how useful RocketDock can be, and it is still is. But another excellent program dock to check out is ObjectDock, from Stardock. Besides providing a skinable and extensively customizable Mac-style dock, the free ObjectDock lets users replace the Windows taskbar completely.

Colorful and animated, ObjectDock is so customizable it's impressive. Not only can you choose your own icons to represent programs and documents, set the dock size and location, and configure icon behavior, but you can also set the dock to run faster and take up more RAM, or sacrifice the gloss … Read more