Kindle for PC 1.10.5 Build 40382

Kindle for PC is a free application that lets you read Kindle books on your PC.

View the Original article

SUPER v2012 build 54

SUPER is an easy-to-use Multimedia Encoder and Player, requiring only one simple click.

View the Original article

SkyDrive Build 17.0.2003.1112

SkyDrive is Microsoft’s cloud storage solution in response to Dropbox and other similar online services. The SkyDrive application integrates with your desktop and functions like any other folder on your PC or Mac. Files copied or moved to SkyDrive fo...

View the Original article

Build a $1,500 Gaming PC

As we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, $1,000 is our favorite place to begin building a gaming PC. (Though, as we showed in the weeks before that, you can still put together fine, 3D-focused computers for $500 or $750.) But it's not a good place to stop if you don't have to. With many things in the technology world, the more money you can invest, the more impressive the final product will be—and that's undoubtedly the case here. So we upped our budget again, this time to $1,500.

Believe it or not, this was the hardest of all the builds we did for this project. When you're faced with a severe price restriction you have to get both extremely detailed and extremely creative, which makes the process seem like it's more about open doors than closed ones. And when you have essentially no price restriction, you can do whatever you want. But with $1,500, you’re free to ignore so much less-expensive equipment that you may feel as though you don't have room to move. You can buy some terrific hardware, but not a lot of it is the best that’s out there—and having to “make do” with something that’s only mostly excellent is less fun than it sounds.

So figuring out the proper balance between the good stuff and the really good stuff is not just crucial to building a system in the upper-middle pricing tier—it’s also maddeningly difficult. Still, this isn’t a bad problem to have, and with that spare $1,500 you’ll be able to build a gaming computer you can feel really positive about, even if the road to it is paved with (tiny) cobblestones of regret.

For our final installment in two weeks, we’ll look at the kind of system you can put together for $2,000. We love it, but our feelings for this $1,500 machine are only slightly less strong.

Choosing the Components

We’ve said in previous weeks that choosing the video card is an easy way to start laying out a gaming system. That remains true at $1,500, but there are more pitfalls here. You have enough money to buy some of the best (single-GPU) cards on the market, but you don’t want the rest of your computer to suffer as a result. So do you go all out on the graphics, or do you hold back just a bit so that the overall system is really a screamer?

Ultimately, we opted for the latter approach. Doing our shopping via Newegg we built on the base configuration we established with our $1,500 machine, but tweaked upward wherever we could. A number of things we just didn’t bother to change. We went with the same case (the $99.99 NZXT H2), power supply (the Thermaltake TR2 TRX-650M, priced at just $59.99 after rebate), and motherboard (the Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD3, which this time we caught on an outstanding special-rebate combo for just $104.99), CPU (the $219.99 Intel Core i5-2500K).

As we mentioned last time, we arranged for our previous hard drive, a $99.99 1.5TB Western Digital Caviar Black, just before the recent Thailand floods caused an ungainly price spike throughout the hard drive market. Unfortunately we couldn't avoid paying more for less this time, but we decided to give up some speed and get more capacity with a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Green ($189.99)—it uses less energy and spins more slowly. But we weren't too concerned about rotational speed, because this time we had enough money to set up a two-drive system with one of the drives having more than enough speed to compensate: a solid-state drive (SSD), the price of which hasn't been adversely affected by the flooding. We settled on a 120GB OCZ Vertex 3—it’s not necessarily the fastest drive you can get, and certainly its capacity is nothing to email home about, but at $149.99 after rebate it’s a compelling entrée into the segment. Pairing that as an OS drive with a larger storage drive meant we’d get the best of both worlds, which is exactly what we wanted.

We made use of every other inch of wiggle room we could find in our budget, too—and the value-oriented components we'd already selected made it easier to splurge in a few other places. One of them was the third drive we needed: an Asus Black Blu-ray burner for our optical storage needs. Coming in at just $69.79 after a mail-in rebate, it would let us both read Blu-ray discs and burn DVDs—a nice combination. We also decided to spend a bit more ($94.99) on 8GB of extra-fast Corsair Vengeance memory, so we’d be able to maximize efficiency wherever we could to make up for the less-speedy-than-absolutely-ideal processor.

Last but by no means least was the video card. We didn’t even have a choice here: It had to be based on the Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 chipset—the fastest you can get in a single GPU card. We lucked out and found an overclocked EVGA version for $479.99 after rebate that we knew would make an outstanding centerpiece for our system.

For less than $1,500, we had put together a computer that would kill with nearly everything we threw at it, and that looked terrific to boot. Yes, for $2,000 we could go even further, but this system left us no room for complaints.

View the Original article

Build a Touch-Screen All-in-One Desktop

Normally 'round these parts we restrict our build projects to standard desktops. After all, those are what most DIYers do, and the vast majority of hardware on the market has them in mind. But you don't need to be left out of the building game just because you don't need (or want) a PC that boxy. With the right kind of help, you can build almost anything—even an all-in-one desktop.

That's right. You may think that these systems, which combine the computer and display in one attractive package, are too complicated or esoteric to put together at home, but you're wrong. You can build one with (almost) all the currently available components you want, at a price you can afford to pay—and you can even get a touch screen as part of the bargain. When you're through, you won't only have a solid system (that you can further upgrade at your discretion), you'll also have an attractive showpiece ready for display in your living room, kitchen, or anywhere else in your home you might want a computer but not a bulky tower.

Did we mention that it's also not that much harder than constructing a regular desktop? That's because you don't have to worry about actually putting together the screen yourself, or even fiddling around in ultra-cramped spaces to get the motherboard installed and working. We found a bare-bones kit that contains all the basics (the chassis, with the screen and the motherboard preinstalled; a heat sink; fan; and even an adjustable stand so you won't need to bother with wall mounting), and runs you just $449. Once you have this, your work is essentially half done.

Admittedly, the ECS AIO G11 LED Multitouch with Motherboard is not the fullest-featured system in the world. Its "extras" count a handful of USB ports, Ethernet, HDMI out, headphone and microphone jacks, a multiformat card reader, one Mini-PCI Express slot for a bit of expansion (in case you want to add Wi-Fi connectivity, for example), and not much else.  And there are certain things, such as play intense 3D games, that you'll never be able to do very well on the G11.  But if you're okay with that, it has a nice 21.5-inch screen and a simple, clean, and attractive design, complete with a glossy finish and a laid-back look that should help it fit snugly into any décor.

As for the rest of the components, you have some limitations, but still a lot of choice. The big boundary is the motherboard, which can only use Intel Sandy Bridge processors with TDPs of 65 watts or less—this means that top-of-the-line chips, like the Core i5-2500K and the Core i7-2600K, are off-limits. RAM needs to be in the form of SO-DIMMs, which are considerably smaller than the DIMMs desktops typically use. And if you want an optical drive, it must be the half-height variety. But you can still choose from a wide selection of processors, memory (the system can hold up to 16GB), and hard drives (you can use full-speed 3.5-inch models), so feel free to go as far as your imagination—and your bank account—will take you.

We wanted to keep our choices (and thus our budget) relatively modest, so we went with an Intel Core i3-2120 CPU (for $117), 8GB of Kingston memory ($39.99), a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive ($199.99), and a Lite-On DS-8A5S DVD burner ($32.99). But faster processors, double the memory, and a lot more hard drive space are possible if you want them. On the next pages, we'll demonstrate the process of combining all this hardware into a finished, working all-in-one; even if you think you know the drill, it's worth checking out to see an example of something you might never have known you could build—but that could be just what you need to round out your home technology collection.

View the Original article

FastPictureViewer 1.9 Build 274 (32-bit)

Axel Rietschin Software Developments - 30.66MB (Commercial Trial)

Description Technical Change Log Comments 

Fast Picture Viewer, an image viewer designed for photographers. Now with powerful workflow tools helping to automate file management duties like copy, move, delete, save-for-web and more.

Fastest RAW viewer ever. Period.Instant zooming to 100% view, for quick sharpness checks. Best in industry!RGB histogram, EXIF shooting data and Adobe XMP Rating/Label/Urgency instant display.Instantaneous display of the next image in line (when computer resources allows).Instant industry-standard Adobe XMP compatible rating and tagging.Fast tethered shooting through MTP/PTP. Tether a Nikon D3S or D3X in 64 bit, today!Supports most common image formats, including Adobe DNG, plus specialists formats such as OpenEXR, DDS, PNM and more, through separately installable image codecs.

This is the 32-bit version.

View the Original article