Softpedia News - Compared Reviews

Windows Ranks Third in File Transfer Tests

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Tue, 4 Jan 2011 18:21:00 GMT

FastCopy and TeraCopy are two popular tools designed to speed up file copy/move operations under Windows. We have opposed them in a series of tests in order to determine which runs the job at a faster pace.

Relying on the option available in Windows operating system is the default choice for most computer users, especially if the file copy/move job inv... (read more)

Browsers: From Zero to Double Rainbow Hardware Acceleration

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 10:51:00 GMT

New web standards push web browsers to farther limits - and the limits have been stretched this year more than ever. Faster browsing and better content rendering is what the regular user wants from a web navigation tool.

The general trend in the most popular web browsers is support for hardware acceleration, as well as a bett... (read more)

Antivirus Freebies: AVG and Avira

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:51:01 GMT

This article is also available in Spanish: AVG Free Anti-Virus vs. Avira AntiVir Personal

Talking about a free anti-virus a few years back would have been blasphemy, while today, users have the luxury to be picky about the security brand to entrust the protection of their system to. And even if nowadays there are at least eight free anti-malware prog... (read more)

AVG Free Anti-Virus vs. Avira AntiVir Personal

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:51:00 GMT

Este artículo está también disponible en inglés: Antivirus Freebies: AVG and Avira

Hablar de antivirus gratuitos hace unos años hubiera sido una blasfemia, mientras que los usuarios de hoy se permiten el lujo de ser exigentes con las marcas de seguridad a las que quieren encomendar la protecci&oacu... (read more)

Antivirus: Free vs. Paid Detection

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Fri, 2 Apr 2010 14:57:00 GMT

This article is also available in Spanish: Antivirus de pago vs. gratuitos

Taking care of your system these days seems to be a less complicated task than it used to be a few years back. Now, protection against malware begins the moment you install your operating system. Windows 7 offers some basic security through Windows Defender and also pro... (read more)

Antivirus de pago vs. gratuitos

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Fri, 2 Apr 2010 12:55:00 GMT

Este artículo está también disponible en inglés: Antivirus: Free vs. Paid Detection

El cuidado de tu sistema parece ser una tarea menos complicada de lo que solía ser hace unos años. Hoy en día la protección contra el malware comienza desde el momento en que instalamos el sistema operativo. ... (read more)

IE7 vs Firefox 2.0 vs Opera 9.20

Softpedia News (Ionut Ilascu) — Fri, 11 May 2007 15:14:00 GMT

Looking for a better, free browser has been restricted for many years. The market did not offer too many choices and Internet Explorer was by far the easiest way to go. However, its mischiefs soon echoed on our computers and we were compelled to strap it with a myriad of applications designed to reject the nasties and alert us upon intrusion.

After year... (read more)

Image Grabbers Duel

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 14:45:00 GMT

How many times did you visit a website with excellent image galleries that you just couldn't download as a batch? Of course that it's always good for the business to keep users as long as possible on your website so they see as many ads as possible, maybe they'll click one...but looking from the user's point of view, I can say that nobody is immortal, so what about a little software helper?

In most cases, you could use a download manager that supports batch downloading, but if you can... (read more)

CDRWIN vs. Ashampoo Burning Studio

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 14:53:00 GMT

Lately, the number of programs below average that I encountered was higher than usual, and this almost made me think about trying a "worst of the worst" competition, but I got back to my senses after a while. There's still a lot of time until the moment when I'll say "there are no good programs to have here anymore", and probably I'd be dead in the meantime...

Due to the storage devices' prices that keep going down, I can dare to say that having a large hard drive to store your data c... (read more)

Stop Viruses for Free!

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 14:35:00 GMT

Yesterday was a Friday 13th indeed, because I was just about to have some electrical cables inside my house melted, and I don't want to think about what could have happened if this problem hadn't been detected in time� but let's move to the computer world. Fortunately, no viruses here, and apart from one over voltage problem that gave a little work to my UPS, everything's just fine. Having these in mind, I thought about giving you a hint on some excellent antiviruses that are also completely f... (read more)

Jetico Personal Firewall and Outpost Firewall Pro

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 7 Oct 2006 12:44:00 GMT

The only thing a beginner should know about firewalls is that he (or she) needs one. Of course you don't need such a program if you're not connected to the Internet, but if you're reading this, then you have Internet access for sure. This is the generally accepted theory, because there are a lot of things to think about when deciding whether to use a firewall or not.

I still haven't found a firewall that good and attractive to make me use it, although I have seen a lot of excellent on... (read more)

Ultimate File Annihilators

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 13:54:00 GMT

One day, this week, I found myself thinking about file shredders. To be more precise, I was thinking about free, reliable and easy to use file shredders, and in the meantime, I decided that this would be an interesting topic to have here.

File shredding, usually known as "wiping", is the process of overwriting a file, sometimes more than just once and using different data patterns, to ensure its total deletion.

There are more reasons behind the need to use such a program, an... (read more)

Hungry for Information?

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:34:00 GMT

I guess that nobody can deny the fact that SiSoft Sandra and Everest are two excellent system information tools that could be crowned as market leaders, and a side by side review of their commercial version is a very interesting idea that I am saving for a future weekend encounter, because today I'll try to stay free. No, don't worry, I am not followed by the police or something like that, I was talking about the pricing problem...because no matter what people say, the "M factor" is decisive i... (read more)

Commercial Offline Explorers' Duel

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 16 Sep 2006 14:51:00 GMT

Before everything else, I must excuse myself. The reason is that I may forget about some other products that could be here today, but I am too much into these two that I'll tell you about a little later, so if you are a software producer and you think that your program should have been here, just drop us a line and I'll do my best to have your product entering a future compared review.

Now, what do we have here? Since some websites deserve to be downloaded entirely on your computer, y... (read more)

Don't Think about Writing, Just Write!

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sun, 10 Sep 2006 10:45:00 GMT

UltraEdit was my favorite text editor for a long time, but recently I discovered a freeware wonder that I use to write all my articles since the day I found it. Its name is PSPad, and in the last days I had an interesting idea - what about a battle between a commercial program and a free one? To be more specific, what about UltraEdit vs. PSPad? Sounds great to me, and I hope you'll enjoy this as well, there's a lot to talk about here.

There are a lot of common features and also some u... (read more)

Run, ISO, Run!

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sun, 3 Sep 2006 17:46:00 GMT

I cannot imagine the disc images disappearing in the near future, and the reason for that is extremely simple - hard disks have always been faster than optical drives, and that won't change any time soon. If the mobile doesn't go away, then the crime stays with us too. Well, it's not a crime, but a family of programs that appeared to take care of the disc images. Of course, I am talking about the CD/DVD image tools!

There are so many programs that can fit into this category that I am... (read more)

The Commercial Disk Defragmenters Triad

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 12:07:00 GMT

Today's hard drive capacity reached 1TB already and it can go even further, but I am thinking about only one problem: how much time would you spend on defragmenting 800GB of data? Unfortunately, access time and data transfer rate were left behind in the race, and capacity increased much faster- especially when talking about the drives for home users- leaving the SCSI realm aside. So, if I buy a 400GB drive, I don't say 1TB, what are my choices for having it run fast and safe for as long as pos... (read more)

Two Free FTP Clients Drag Race

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 12:24:00 GMT

Free FTP Clients Drag Race - Together as One

This week's compared review topic was a really tough decision. I thought of something, then I changed my mind, and now I am going to do exactly that - a slightly different battle. How's that?

The topic I thought first, and which finally became my decision for today is "Free FTP Clients", but I bumped into a quite big problem: there are only two popular and really free FTP clients around, most of the others being stripped down vers... (read more)

Free Graphic Editors Challenge

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 12:19:00 GMT

Graphics editing is an old topic that won't get old too soon, no matter how strange this may sound. Those who are into this field in a way or another will understand what I want to say, while the others should try to open the graphics realm's doors first.

If there's a better way to enter an area like computer graphics than learning the basics while playing with various programs, then I would love to find out about it, since there are some topics that I find very hard to reach, especi... (read more)

Today is the Time for Emailing!

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 5 Aug 2006 12:21:00 GMT

Email started in the sixties as a way for multiple users of that time's mainframe computers to communicate. The @ sign was introduced in 1971 to separate the users' name and their machines' names. Since that moment, everything started flowing faster and faster, taking us where we are now.

A lot of people are using Yahoo, MSN and other Web based email services, and all they need for that is a Web browser, nothing more. When having more accounts or need advanced features that you can't... (read more)

Internet Explorer - Engined Browsers Competition

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 11:01:00 GMT

Internet browsers are a subject so hot, that I don't have to say anything special about them. The history of the Internet is pretty well known, and when talking about browsers, most people don't want to hear many details, but only the final verdict: which one is the best?

The browsers family is split basically in two large categories: IE and IE-based browsers, and others. Today I have four free browsers here that have an Internet Explorer engine under the hood, and I will run a quick... (read more)

Free Setup Creators Drag Race

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 22 Jul 2006 11:12:00 GMT

Every encounter with a computer software starts with that application's setup program. Since first impression counts, this setup program must be as user friendly and easy to use as possible.

Today I will quickly browse through three setup creators available for free use. First we have the notorious Nullsoft Installation System, second on the starting grid is Setup2Go, while the last setup creator that I have on today's timetable is CreateInstall 2003.

I won't keep this for... (read more)

Free Image Viewers Challenge

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 15 Jul 2006 11:45:00 GMT

Images and image viewers...these topics won't get cold soon, I am sure of that. Each one of us has at least few image files on the computer, and the need for a good image viewing application increases with the number of pictures that we own.

I will leave behind the commercial products from this family and I'll target the best free ones in the wild. The five applications in sight today are IrfanView, Fast Stone Image Viewer, Fresh View, Force Vision and XnView.

All these prog... (read more)

Disk Catalogs Special Challenge

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 8 Jul 2006 12:16:00 GMT

Every computer user has a collection of optical discs. The numbers may vary from just a few pieces up to thousands. Even if every CD and DVD from your collection has printed covers, you will still lose a lot of time to find a certain disc.

This is the main reason for the development of a new family of programs, the file/CD/DVD cataloging tools. Their task is to help you manage your media collections, keep track of lent disks and more.

Today I have three great applications fo... (read more)

Video Players Special Challenge

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 1 Jul 2006 10:38:00 GMT

Today, you can find so many video players around that choosing the right one could really mean trouble. There are a lot of free and commercial video players, and their quality ranges from bad to excellent. As always, lowest price is a winner, so part of my choice for today should be obvious by now.

We're going to have four free video players as guests today, but the review is going to be different this time. We're not going to talk about performance or image quality; the target will b... (read more)

7-Zip vs IZArc

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 24 Jun 2006 10:03:00 GMT

The story of data compression starts back in the late 1940s and early 1950s with the publication of first papers on information and rate-distortion theories by Claude Shannon. In the meantime, the theory became practice and the data compression can be found everywhere, from mobile telephony to electronic devices in your kitchen.

I won't leave the computers behind today, don't worry! Size does matter, speed matters too, and above all these, if you could have a great archiver for free... (read more)

GetRight vs. Flash Get

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 09:49:00 GMT

For a while Web Browsers were also used to download files from the Internet, but soon the need for specialized programs to do this became obvious. Why? Web Browsers are very good at surfing the Web or organizing the Favorites, but they don't handle downloads well.

When downloading a file you should be able to perform operations like pause, resume for broken or paused downloads, scheduling, downloading several files automatically from a site according to certain rules, searching for mi... (read more)

CLI vs CLI

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 19:32:00 GMT

Remember Matrix? Why weren't they using a mouse and a nice GUI instead of typing commands? I didn't write the script though, so I can only guess. The command line has the power, while the GUI has the looks and ease of use, and the Matrix was a battle for power, after all. I am not going to talk about the GUI anymore, so let's see a bit of command line history next...

CLIs hav... (read more)

Audio Players Challenge

Softpedia News (Codrut Nistor) — Sun, 11 Jun 2006 13:21:00 GMT

There are a lot of good, very good and excellent audio players. Some of them are popular, some are not. Usually, most are not free, and that's why I thought of testing two free ones head to head. Then I changed my mind and increased that figure to three, just to end up doing a compared review using four free audio players...

Maybe some of you would like to see Winamp in here too, but it's not going to be. Winamp is perhaps the most used player on the planet (at least most of the peop... (read more)

AIM VS AIM

Softpedia News (Stefan Fintea) — Sun, 2 Apr 2006 14:46:00 GMT

AOL Messenger is America's favorite instant messenger. Not long ago, AOL created a beta team which gave birth to several, very interesting projects. Among them was AIM Triton, which represents an enhanced version of the old AOL Messenger with a new user interface and features.

And since the latest version of AOL Messenger was released 8 months ago, while new versions of Trit... (read more)