The German computer magazine COM is currently running a giveaway of Avast Internet Security. The offer is in German but is accessible to anyone and the license works with the English version as well.

Enter the first name, last name and your email address on the promotion page (link at the end of the page) to receive the license in you email address.

In your email click the link which ends with license-com-so-gehts.zip.

This is a zip file and you will use this to register your Internet Security suite. The license expires in 9 months. That is you will be able to use this till April 2012.

Promotional Page Link

Download the English Avast Internet Security

Disclaimer: Before we proceed further a word of caution that if you rename some important system files, it could cause irreversible damage to your computer.

1. In order to take ownership of a specific file or folder you will need to download the following file:

takeownership

2. Open the zip file and click the file InstallTakeOwnership.reg to install Take Ownership option in context menu

3. Once installed you will be able to see Take Ownership option in context menu.

In order to revoke this feature just double click the file RemoveTakeOwnership.reg

Opera 11 has been released and comes with a much awaited feature of extensions which has been one key missing feature that is the ability to use extensions. With the release 11 it has now taken the war to the doorsteps of Mozilla, Google and Microsoft.

Following are some of the new release features:

Tab stacking
Dragging one tab over another allows you to create groups of tabs. Now you can keep dozens of webpages open, organized and under control.

Safer address field
The address field has been improved and now hides the complexity of long web addresses. It also provides more security information to help you stay safe when browsing; just click the badge for the website to see security information about the site you are visiting.

Visual mouse gestures
Perform many common browser actions with a quick flick of your mouse. Holding down the right mouse button on a webpage now shows a visual guide that indicates how to perform the available gestures.

Webroot Spy Sweeper is a leading solution provider against the latest spyware threats. Now you can get the Webroot Spy Sweeper free license for 6 months. All you have to do is download the package from their facebook page.

Webroot Spy Sweeper Facebook page

It causes immense pain when an important file which has lot of important stuff is corrupted or damaged. Unless you have backed up the file you might have lost everything, or not? Here are are some ways which can help you recover your corrupt excel file.

1. Run Repair

The first method to try recovering your file is to use the repair option of excel.  Go to :

File->Open-> Click on the excel file.

In the open dropdown menu choose open and repair

It opens a dialogue box giving you option of repair or extract data. The first option will recover as much data as possible and second option will copy formula and values.

You can try repair first and then extract if the first option doesn’t yield results.

2. Save File to Different Format

If you can open the excel file, you can try saving it n different format and then try to open it in excel and then save it as excel workbook.

Select SaveAs option and choose any other format such as SYLK from the Save as type menu.

Now go to open and open the file you just saved as SYLK. Now again when file open choose the SaveAs option and save the file as excel workbook.

You can also use html format to save the file.

3. Open in Word

You can try opening the file in Microsoft Word. But for this you have to be sure to have Microsoft Excel converter installed. It can be downloaded from Microsoft Website. But with option, you will lost chart sheets, dialog sheets, macro sheets, and you will lose all cell formulas. However, you should be able to view the data.

4. Alter Calculation Option

If you are unable to open the file at all, you can try setting the recalculation option in excel to manual. Go to :

Tools->Options->Calculation->Manual

For Excel 2007 or higher versions, the steps are different. Click on office button on top left and choose excel options. Click on Formulas, then click on manual under calculation options section.

Now try to open the corrupted excel file.

5. Link to Corrupted File

In excel one can link a excel workbook to a a worksheet. you can try this to recover the corrupted excel file.

Open a new file in excel but be careful to open the file in the same folder as your corrupted file.

In cell A1, Type =<Filename>!A1

(For eg. =Sales.xls!A1)

If it works, then the data(of cell A1) of the corrupted file should appear in cell A1. Then you can drag for the rest of the worksheet to obtain other values.

Hopefully these techniques should help you recover your excel file. If you know of any other ways to recover the files, do feel free to post them here.

Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 9 yesterday and we manage to do some tests to see the performance. Though there’s been some major improvements from IE 8 however, sadly there’s not much of an improvement in terms of performance.

Some interesting features for a regular user are:

1. Universal bar: The address bar is universal now that means you can go to a URL from the address bar or even search using the address bar. The default search engine is of course Bing. This feature was first launched by Google in Google Chrome.

2. Pinning the Websites: This feature allows the user to pin a website to the Windows task bar.

Following are some of the screenshots of the new interface.

We also ran some performance testing for IE 9 using the famous SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark and following were the results of the test.

============================================
RESULTS (means and 95% confidence intervals)
——————————————–
Total: 622.2ms +/- 11.4%
——————————————–

3d: 111.8ms +/- 36.6%
cube: 48.8ms +/- 81.6%
morph: 36.8ms +/- 7.3%
raytrace: 26.2ms +/- 2.1%

access: 63.6ms +/- 11.6%
binary-trees: 11.2ms +/- 45.4%
fannkuch: 17.8ms +/- 15.1%
nbody: 28.4ms +/- 7.3%
nsieve: 6.2ms +/- 60.8%

bitops: 43.4ms +/- 15.1%
3bit-bits-in-byte: 4.2ms +/- 48.6%
bits-in-byte: 12.4ms +/- 41.1%
bitwise-and: 8.4ms +/- 37.1%
nsieve-bits: 18.4ms +/- 30.4%

controlflow: 5.4ms +/- 44.9%
recursive: 5.4ms +/- 44.9%

crypto: 32.4ms +/- 8.0%
aes: 11.0ms +/- 0.0%
md5: 9.2ms +/- 6.0%
sha1: 12.2ms +/- 19.6%

date: 74.8ms +/- 24.8%
format-tofte: 40.8ms +/- 44.1%
format-xparb: 34.0ms +/- 3.7%

math: 64.4ms +/- 42.7%
cordic: 2.8ms +/- 19.9%
partial-sums: 42.8ms +/- 67.6%
spectral-norm: 18.8ms +/- 34.8%

regexp: 32.4ms +/- 2.1%
dna: 32.4ms +/- 2.1%

string: 194.0ms +/- 9.8%
base64: 14.4ms +/- 39.4%
fasta: 35.8ms +/- 12.9%
tagcloud: 54.6ms +/- 29.6%
unpack-code: 55.8ms +/- 6.2%
validate-input: 33.4ms +/- 17.0%

Download IE9 Beta

Win X DVD Ripper is one of the few tools which are light and at the same time pack in features at par with most of the leading softwares in the category. WinX DVD Ripper can rip your DVD s to a number of formats including AVI, MOV, FLV, WMV, MPEG, MP4, 3GP. It also has the ability to rip files directly to the formats supported by different hardware devices such as Sony PSP, Apple iPhone(iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4), iPod, iPad, iTouch, Apple TV, Zune, etc.

The makers of the software, Digiarty Software, also claim their ripping solution to be the fastest in the market taking around 5 minutes for ripping as well as backing up the original DVD. It also supports ripping of numerous encrypted DVDs.

It also supports various editing feature

Some of the key features :

• Continuously update to support the latest DVD copy protections. With free life-time upgrades, you can convert and backup any new DVDs at any time
• Decrypt & copy DVD to PC with 100% original video, audio and subtitles within only 5 minutes
• Multi-core CPU supported, which makes your conversion process much faster
• All video/audio parameters are adjustable for users to optimize video quality
• Trim any segment of DVD to convert
• Crop the frame size of movie image, cut off unwanted area to feature a highlight, crop DVD video to remove the black bars, and freely adjust the video size to fill variety of portable devices screen

Check out more features here WinX DVD Ripper

Rules for obtaining free licensed copy :

There are 3 simple rules for you to obtain a free copy.

• Follow us on twitter and retweet this post @tech_reviews
• Like us on facebook : techreviews facebook and share this link on your facebook so your friends can get a free copy as well.
• Subscribe to our RSS feed : RSS feed

Once you have followed these steps, drop a line the comments section (be sure to use your real email while commenting, so we can send the license to that email) with the link to your tweet which mentions this post and your facebook user name.

Once you download the software and follow the mentioned conditions we will send you the license key on your for the full version of the product.

This is a first come first receive offer. So the first 20 users who participate will get the license for free. Also, there will be more offers in near future, so subscribing to our feeds and following us on twitter/facebook will help you get more free goodies.

Download page

Go to https://www.airdropper.com/ and you will see very neat and friendly website

Click on START button and you will be redirected to dropbox log-in page or if you are already logged in, you will see permission request page:

It is a Dropbox officially supported Add On so if you trust Dropbox, I guess you have no worries to trust AirDropper as well.

You will be redirected to AirDropper website and now it is just pleasurably easy: fill in your e-mail and your friend’s. Add some message so they know what that is. You can also check Don’t send them an email and you will get a link and a password to be used for upload:Your friend gets a secure link like that:The upload is really easy too. One just have to follow the link and upload files. Multiply upload is available too so just select more files and upload!

It will be in your newly created Dropbox/AirDropper folder :

You are done. Everyone is happy now! Non-techy friends too!

uTorrent is one of the most popular bittorrent clients and isextremely powerful and light. The demand for its release for linux has been for long. This new release for linux is definitely please many.

But this new launch is only the uTorrent server without an UI for linux. This is only the alpha version being released and UI may come in the future. Ofcourse, without an UI one’s activities may be restricted a bit but still all is not disappointing from any view. One can do a lot of things without having a uTorrent UI too.

UTorrent has a feature called WebUI. This feature is an alternate control for the client mode allowing control from anywhere in the world through the web. μTorrent sets up a server on your computer which you can access from any other computer if you have your computer’s IP address. WebUI provides all the features of a regular client UI but is accessible through a browser.

The new linux version is this WebUI based. Thus, you can start uTorrent in your system, have it running in background and connect it through a browser and then manage your torrents as normal.

Talking of uTorrent, the version 3 of uTorrent has generated much excitement and speculation among users. Version 3 is set to integrate 3 new core technologies changing your uTorrent experience for good.

• The first new technology is uTorrent web. This service allows you to access your uTorrent interface from anywhere without worrying of firewalls and NATs. Once you configures a username and password, you can log into web.utorrent.com and manage your utorrent downloads from anywhere. You can even stream media files from your computer and hence see them anywhere.
• Another function is torrent sharing. It has simplified the process of torrent usage for beginners. With the new ‘Send Torrent’ feature, you will be taken to a page from where you can download a version of μTorrent which comes prepackaged with the torrent file you chose. You can then share this link with anyone and he’ll be able to directly download the torrent. If the client is not installed then utorrent is installed and download is started else the download is started automatically.
• Another feature is addition of Griffin – apps framework. This provides a light framework for apps for uTorrent using html.

Other changes which may be noticed are change in the icons and look or uTorrent providing a sleeker look. Along with UDP support, further changes have been made in priotiy setting features of uTorrent.

These new changes in uTorrent seem quite promising and will probably strengthen the popularity of uTorrent as one of the best bittorrent clients available.

• Detailed informations about Tasks, Processes, Modules, Startups, IE Addons, Uninstallers, Windows, Services, Drivers, Connections and Opened Files.
• Security informations about processes with online File Reviews.
• Easy check of suspicious files via VirusTotal or Jotti service.
• Easy search details about file/process via online databases.
• Action History for monitoring processes activities.
• Performance graphs for monitoring usage of system resources in time.
• System Snapshots for easy finding of system changes
• WMI Browser and System Additional Info
• Tray Hint with detailed System and Battery status
• **NEW** CPU Cores Usage Graphs
• Multilanguage Support

Download System Explorer

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