1.2

Although some people are completely satisfied with the default Windows desktop interface, for others, customization is a must. Rainmeter (32-bit) is an attractive way to view system performance and a variety of other useful information--e-mail, weather, RSS feeds, and much more--right on the desktop. Casual users should beware, however; although it's not difficult to get started with Rainmeter, learning to fully utilize its features will take some time and geekery.

The program comes with two different themes, Enigma and Gnometer. Both of these are modular, transparent, and highly customizable. There is a wide variety of other themes around the … Read more

Facebook is a great way to keep in touch with friends and family, and the site's chat feature makes it possible for users to talk to everyone from their third-grade best friend to their spouse, all in real-time. Unfortunately, using Facebook's chat keeps you tethered to the window or tab in which you have Facebook open. Facebook Chat, a browser extension for Chrome, endeavors to change that. And it succeeds, at least partially.

The extension sounded promising. By simply clicking the small icon it places next to Chrome's address bar, users can bring up a version of … Read more

There are fewer image-editing apps for Android than we'd like to see, which is why it's a good thing that Adobe created a version of its Photoshop.com app for the Android platform. That is, if works on your phone at all. Although the simple, intuitive app produced a thumbnail gallery of saved photos on our Nexus One, it failed to read the SD card on our HTC Incredible and popped up a blank gallery.

Click "edit" to start cropping, straightening, color-correcting, and adding effects and borders. While there are generally enough tools to accomplish our … Read more

With a Francophile name, mobile Twitter app Touiteur may come across as a stylistic ploy. But it's one of the good guys in the tweetosphere, with its stylish design, convenient slide-away bars for posting status updates and responding to tweets. It handles retweeting, file uploading, search, lists, and trends. Plus, it handily pops up @username options when you type.

The premium version ($2.41) is a more complete option overall, opening the door to multiple Twitter accounts, home screen widgets, URL shortening, an internal browser, and the Twitlonger service. There are other free Twitter apps that provide link shortening … Read more

The official Facebook for Android app is undoubtedly the best way to view Facebook on your Android, but that's hardly saying much. The free app is limited, but simple to operate. You can update your status from the app and read your newsfeed; take and upload a photo; and comment and like a status message.

A long press on a status message gets you quick links to view a contact's wall message and see user info, but you're unable to do much more--like see pictures and access invites and birthday reminders--without going to Facebook's mobile Web … Read more

Dolphin Browser was quite the find when it first broke the surface, pretty much pioneering alternative browsers on the Android platform. Since then, alt-browsers have become plentiful and sophisticated, and the Dolphin team has responded with a "high def," redesigned version of its app, meant for version 2.0 and higher of the Android operating system.

Dolphin's feature set is definitely its strength. In addition to tabbed browsing, bookmarking (that syncs to Google bookmarks), and multitouch zooming, it can also flag sites to read later as well as a tie-in to Delicious. You can search content within … Read more

The explosion of free BitTorrent peer-to-peer (P2P) software has given users a powerful downloading tool that makes a joke out of older file-sharing technologies, but even with the fastest connection, slimmest clients, and most optimized configurations, there's room for improvement. Sharest's SpeedLord is to P2P clients what nitrous oxide is to racing cars: a kick in the seat. It's a free, automatic acceleration patch utility that can either help you dramatically boost your download speeds by sorting out an inadequate connection or help you extract every last bit of bandwidth from a fast pipe. It claims the … Read more

Hard disk maker Seagate's SeaTools for Windows scans your disk drives for driver corruption, broken master boot records, viruses and Trojans, spyware, and any hardware conflicts. You'll have to take its word that it's working, though, because it doesn't offer any scan details.

SeaTools' user interface is extremely stark: basic menu items line the top of a plain window, with detected drives are listed below. It detected our only drive, along with its serial number, model number, firmware revision, and drive and test status. We went through each test that the program offered, starting with the … Read more

We've reviewed a lot of games for Download.com, but we can't say that we've ever seen anything quite like Mevo and the Grooveriders. We really, really wanted to like it, and for the most part we did, but the game seems to have some functional problems that hinder its fun.

We're not totally sure we can even describe the premise of Mevo and the Grooveriders. Apparently the evil Silence has come along and robbed the world of music, and it's up to you, a weird little dude named Mevo, to rescue your bandmates and … Read more