GameTop: The Simple, The Free And The Funny

When I came across GameTop.com I thought that it was just another free and simplistic games site which will pass unnoticed till I downloaded the first game, Deadly Stars. A deeper exploration brought a lot of categories where to choose from.

This non-stridency site offers a curious and sometimes naïve selection of free games suitable for most ages. Being in the “what you see is what you get” modality GameTop will satisfy not only beginners but also hardened gamers. What is more interesting, GameTop.com periodically adds new titles to its already extensive game list.

Regarding Deadly Stars, I found it highly addictive, you may say it is just a classic (boring) space shooter, nevertheless, it features a nice graphics section for a 50 MB disk space requirement. You may also say that the plot is simple (boring again), well, it is nothing but an excuse for a relentless action game with a lot of adrenaline packed levels (I’m not exaggerating at all). All you have to worry about is enemies annihilation and not being hit by their hard shooting.

Games categories in GameTop.com:

• Classic
• Driving
• Flying
• War Games
• Action
• Arcade
• Racing
• Puzzle
• Breakout
• Sport
• Platformer
• Match 3
• Space
• Cards
• Board
• Skill
• Planes
• Cars
• Tanks
• Helicopters
• Sea
• Retro
• Shooting
• Top-Down
• Eye View

Enjoy GameTop Free Games!!

Boost Your SwissFlash With These Free PC Repair Tools

Since 2004 the Swiss Army Knife incorporated a USB Flash memory to some of its models with an initial capacity of 128MB. Nowadays the SwissFlash stores up to 32GB and comes with fingerprint authentication, what a gadget! However, you can boost it with this feature packed list of PC repair tools which are as handy as the cruciform Phillips screwdriver. The applications listed in this article are the “Swiss Army Knife” of PC Repair Tools and I'm going to arrange them into categories, however all of them are free to download and install or at least offer a decent free full functional option.

System Optimization

CCleaner

Formerly named Crap Cleaner, takes the first place in this category as it is an incredibly fast and free tool for system optimization and privacy. It allows you to remove all kinds of unused and temporary files which are allocated in your HDDs and thus reducing your system's performance. By freeing up all that disk space, Windows runs smoother, more efficiently, additionally you are going to have more hard disk space at your disposal for more important things. It will clean your Internet browser cache, history, cookies and i

ndex.dat file, recycle bin will go empty, and it will wipe out all temporary and log files, recently opened URLs and files will leave not even traces and many other temp files.

CCleaner also includes an advanced Windows Registry scanner and cleaner which is very handy when it comes to unused and old entries removal. The Windows Startup tool will allow you to eliminate all those undesired programs that make windows boot time longer.

JkDefgrag

What we find in second place is a powerful disk defragmenter and optimizer. At first sight you will realize how fast, easy to use complete and solid it is. As it really works in a totally automatic way and with a very low resources consumption, it is ideal for beginners, but power users will find it very handy as well. In order to cover all optimization aspects, it brings several optimization strategies, and it is able to work in almost any kind of data storage devices provided Windows can read it, in the list we find floppies, USB Flash memories, memory sticks, and many others.

JkDefrag also includes are a version to run directly in Windows and a commandline version which you can scheduled by the task scheduler or you can use it from administrator scripts, a screensaver version, a DLL library for its use from programming languages. This piece of free software is available for Windows 2000/2003/XP/Vista/2008/X64.

DoubleKiller

Our third and last option for System Optimizers is a very simple but powerful freeware whichis able to find duplicate files inside single or multiple directories by making a thorough comparison having in account file name, size, modification date and content. It brings the possibility to make user-defined masks like *.mp3 or *.dll and in this way giving you the ability to focus the scan only to desired files or even protect important data from being scanned and feasible of being erased. Moreover files can also be exclude according to different parameters such as determined file sizes or files attributes (i.e. hidden or system files).

As you can see once the program finishes scanning it shows a list which contains all found duplicates, so, now you are able to the files which you want to erase in a manual or automatic manner. An outcome text file can be obtained as an and you can be read it as well as a spreadsheet application.

What is more important is that DoubleKiller is a portable app, that means it can be executed with out the need of installation, all you have to do is just unpack and run. It is also hazard free as it will not change the system in by no means if you do not give your permission.

Recovery Tools

Recuva

In everyday work most people creates and deletes files and sometimes that deletion is not as conscious as it should be and of course accidents easily happens where you permanently delete important files that were, perhaps, in the wrong folder at the wrong time and were mixed with those to be erased. Fortunately, Recuva helps to restore accidentally (or intentionally) deleted files. But Recuva's abilities do not restrains its work to manually deleted files, it can also recover files that were emptied from the Recycle Bin, from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players not only by careless users but also by bugs, crashes and viruses.

This title is suitable for everyone even advanced user will find it really solid and useful. But what is more surprising to me is the fact that it is totally free even for commercial use.

Restoration

And last but not least, we find this portable yet really solid and powerful file undelete utility. Brian Kato, the author, couldn't have been made it more user-friendly and straight forward, as a matter of fact this tool is able to restore deleted files which were formerly allocated in the recycle bin or even if they were directly deleted under Windows.

Deleted photos from a Flash card (even if it had been formatted), erased mp3 format files from a mp3 player, wiped files and archives from a thumb drive, you just name it, Restoration recovers them all. Once you started the app you are able to perform a filtered scan for all files that you want to be recovered, thus you can limit the outcome by determining a search criteria using a search term or extension. Restoration has the ability to work with FAT and NTFS file systems.

In conclusion

I hope you find this selection interesting and useful, as always you can tell us which are your favourites and why through the comments, I promise to answer every single one of them. By the way, there are many categories to come and quite a lot of applications to review and discover, fortunately freeware apps grow, they are healthy and spreading far and wide in an unstoppable way.

How-To Speed Your µTorrent Downloads In Windows 7

Most torrent users know that the initial key to success is to search and find good working torrents, once they find, the second step is to make the best in order to achieve the highest download speed.

Regarding the first we cannot do much more than a good search and try to cover the maximum of possibilities in order to make a good choice. However when we talk about Download Speed, this is the aspect of torrent download where we will find the widest range of opportunities for boosting our torrent downloads.

Today I'm going to share with you some tweaking tips I found very helpful in the empowerment of torrent downloads. In this article I'm going to try to cover as many points as possible in order to provide a comprehensive torrent download speed enhancement guide mainly for µTorrent installed in Windows 7, anyways, it will work all the same in Win XP.

Making Good Choices

Above I talked about making a good torrent choice. So first we must understand some frequently used terms: P2P stands for peer-to-peer computer network, peers are the computers involved in the torrent files download/upload process, seeds or seeders are those points (computers) where complete copies of the shared files are held, and finally leeches or leechers are those computers having an incomplete copy of that file or has just got connected to the network in order to download that specific file which when is completed turns a leecher into a seeder.

Having understand these few basic concepts, when we look for a torrent file we should pay attention to numbers, the larger numbers for seeds the better is the torrent and also is better the possibility to achieve a higher download speed. Common sense tells us to preferably select those files with a large number of seeds and smaller number of leeches.

The second choice we have to make may sound a bit obvious but it is about the torrent client we are going to install. There are so many to choose from and some of them are really efficient software. Above all I prefer µTorrent because it is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client. The most important issue about the torrent client is to keep it updated to its most recent version. Secondly, we have the client tweaking, and these tips go for it:

Tip 1 Firewall Unblocking: go to Options → Preferences → Connection → and there check Add Windows Firewall exception. Also make sure Windows Firewall is configured in order to admit connections. It can be configured to do this by checking the torrent client on the list of allowed programs, you go like this: Start → Control Panel → Windows Firewall → Allowed Programs.

Tip 2 Limits: let's take a look at the download and upload rates, first of all search for an online broadband speed checker (there are a lot of them) and find out what your upload and download maximum speed are (to my 640 K connection it was 580 for download and 110 for upload) so, to have a balanced overall speed you must set your upload rate limited at about 80% of the maximum speed. Go Options → Preferences → Bandwidth → and there set Maximum upload rate (kB/s) value (it was 88 in my case). It has to be done like this because an unlimited upload rate has an impact on the download speed.

Tip 3 Port configuration: First of all disable Randomize port each start under Options → Preferences → Connection (over Add Windows Firewall exception which we have just enabled, see screenshot) after that set the port number over 10000 to avoid problems with other applications and also ISP traffic which is usually throttled between number 6881 and 6999 ( µTorrent defaults)

Tip 4 The rest of the figures: Having in mind that my upload max speed is 110 and download is 580 It should look like this:

Note: For the last figure in particular (Number of upload slots per torrent) you can run the Speed Guide in the Options menu. It is also advisable to check the box for Use additional upload slots if upload is <90%.

Note 2: Additional tweaking to the number of simultaneous connections can be made through the patching of TCIP.SYS file in the Windows\Sysytem32 folder but I consider it a risky action because it lowers system barriers against viruses multiplication, thus, I don't recommend it at all. Also be aware of programs which promise to fantastically increase your download speed some may work others may not, it will always depend on your particular configuration.

To Sum Up

I hope you find these tips for torrent download speed up, as always we are open to hear about any additional tips you tried and worked, so share it with us!

The On-going Battle against Monopoly: Free Software Available for all of us

We are all submerged in a capitalist world which promotes the exchange of good and services only by paying for them, usually sums of money totally unjustified and exaggerate. Philanthropy, or the willingness to give in exchange of nothing more than a “thank you” seems not to be something applicable for the modern world. However, what we may call the globalized per excellence phenomena, the Web world, surprises us with an increasing trend towards the development and spread of free software made by people who deliberately attempt against monopoly and capitalist abuse. Yes man…geeks are generous people! They are definitely the Good Samaritan of the modern era!

Let’s have a look at some of the greatest free software we should be grateful for. The offer is really wide, so today I am going to focus on a few of them…let’s say Image Viewers and Editors, and we’ll leave others for a next article…

Picasa

This year, the generous Google guys, who love sharing things, launched the third release of this great software that helps you organize, edit, and share your photos. It's free, and easy to use, thus lovable for beginners and preferred by advanced PC users.

You know what I mean, I have two children, and an incredible amount of pictures which would be spread all over several folders disks in my PC or my husband’s PC, if I had not decided to make use of this great tool that makes it simple not only to have everything at hand, labeled and in chronological order, but which also lets you correct potential errors such as red-eyes or inconvenient sizes and much more. You can also turn photos into movies, collages, slideshows….great enough, specially to be free, isn’t it?

Among the new features of Picasa 3, we can mention: the new tabs, the function to create videos with your photos, an amazing picture viewer and an enhanced collage-making tool.

IrfanView

The black viewing window you are faced to once you open IrfanView does not say much of all the great functions this freeware offers. IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative graphic viewer. Presented by its developers as the “first Windows graphic viewer WORLDWIDE with Multiple (animated) GIF support”, InrfanView is a really easy-to-use tool with loads of pre-configured, simple keyboard shortcuts that simplify enormously the handling of images. Its slideshow capability and its simple function to resize images are also great.

Another useful thing is the extraordinary loading time of pictures…it opens the picture you select faster than any other image viewer I have ever tried!

In sum, IrfavView’s image, music and video capabilities make this one of the more flexible image viewers available in the FREE market!

Paint.Net

Paint.NET is a free image and photo editing software for computers that runs in Windows, bearing a user interface designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable.

So as to simplify the handling of multiple images, Paint.NET presents a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description, making navigation absolutely simple and fast.

Your images can be edited by applying a number of special effects, such as blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing. Also included is a unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect.

These and much more are the great features this FREE software presents.

In sum…

No matter if you are short of cash…when it comes to image viewing/editing you are going to find some excellent apps on the web available for you to freely download and use them at ease. Let’s enjoy this anti-capitalist move!