lite

Collage your pictures

Picture Collage Maker Lite for Mac is a free, nicely designed, easy-to-use photo collage maker for creating greetings cards, collages, or scrapbooks for special moments, and it has 150 great templates. Unfortunately, almost all of them are locked, despite the fact that the promotional material talks about more than 100 being available, which is annoying.

Although the design resembles other applications available on the market, such as CollageIt for Mac, Picture Collage Maker doesn't just copy its competitors. At first launch, users will be asked to choose a template from the long list of those available, but this is … Read more

Rainlendar Lite 64-bit beats widgets and PIMs as a desktop calendar

If your idea of a desktop calendar is a stack of paper you can write notes on as opposed to a trifold organizer or day book, Rainy's Rainlendar Lite is probably your calendar. It's largely unobtrusive and transparent, like a widget, though you can customize its look. But unlike a simple calendar widget or gadget, Rainlendar Lite is also a personal manager that can remind you of tasks and important events. It's fully compatible with most other iCalendar apps, so you can import and export data such as events. You can back up your calendar and even … Read more

Boost your system with Diskeeper 12

Condusiv's Diskeeper 12 Professional is the latest iteration of a premium file fragmentation utility that is suitable for home, enterprise, and server applications. It actively prevents file fragmentation and can defragment your drives regularly.

It doesn't defragment your SSDs, which shouldn't be defragmented, but they're not left out; a feature called Hyperfast optimizes I/O to maximize SSD performance and lifespan. Diskeeper also places our most frequently accessed files in the fastest area of the volume. Among the other new features in Diskeeper 12 are improved Alerting and Reporting mechanisms, a Disk Health feature that monitors … Read more

Monitor your car's performance with the Torque app for Android

Your car's dashboard is probably home to a speedometer, a tachometer, a fuel gauge, and -- if you're lucky -- a coolant temperature gauge. However, your car's electronic brain (ECU) is actively monitoring dozens of parameters behind the scenes that you, the driver, could find useful. This is where diagnostics hardware and apps like Torque Pro and Lite for Android step in, putting all of that data at your fingertips.

Torque doesn't require anything more than the hardware already present on your Android phone to function. Without any external hardware, Torque can still pull sensor data … Read more

FBI: New Internet addresses could hinder police investigations

The FBI is worried that an explosion of new Internet numeric addresses scheduled to begin next week may hinder its ability to conduct electronic investigations.

A historic switchover that will give the Internet a nearly inexhaustible supply of network addresses -- up from the current nearly exhausted total of 4.3 billion -- is planned for next Wednesday. AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, Cisco, and Microsoft are among the companies participating.

Side effects from the transition to Internet Protocol version 6, or IPv6, "could have a profound effect on law enforcement," an FBI spokesman told CNET. "… Read more

Tweak your media playback with K-Lite Codec Pack

K-Lite Codec Pack is a free package of media player codecs that can improve both audio and video playback in Windows Media Player or the included free Media Player Classic. It includes many components but has a single installer and setup tool.

K-Lite Codec Pack's installer offers three options: Simple mode, which hides most options and uses recommended defaults; Advanced mode (the default setting), which shows almost all options; and Expert mode, which unlocks additional options. Well, we couldn't resist Expert mode, especially since our biggest concern was having existing codecs displaced or replaced by new but possibly … Read more

Nintendo DSi and DSi XL drop to $99 and $129

It's been a tough time for handheld game systems that aren't phones or tablets. Sometimes, the only real solution is a price drop.

Nintendo is lowering the prices of the Nintendo DSi and DSi XL, the larger-screened version of the DSi, to prices that, frankly, most people probably imagined they'd be at anyway: $99 and $129, respectively. These prices take effect May 20. The Nintendo DSi currently has an MSRP of $149 while the DSi XL is $169, which seems ridiculous considering the more powerful but more battery-challenged Nintendo 3DS now costs $169.

Meanwhile, the Nintendo DS LiteRead more

Ultra File Search Lite Portable

Ultra File Search Lite Portable, which can be launched from a USB device, has the sole purpose of helping users find files quickly, a function that we believe it does very well.

The free software has a plain, business-like interface that, like its big brother, organizes search options in simple tabs at the top of the window. These four options give maximum flexibility, allowing you to find files with specific text or by file attributes such as date or size, and each tab allows you to expand the search functionality or narrow the possible results. Results were returned quickly in … Read more

Ultra File Search Lite

Ever lost a particular file among a multitude of similar files within your PC? If the built-in search tool isn't helping, Ultra File Search Lite may be able to help. We found it to be an efficient and effective alternative to the Windows search tools.

Ultra File Search Lite, once installed, presents a plain, business-like interface that proved very easy to use. You can initiate a search using any of the four tabs at the top of the application, which are divided into Files and Folders, Containing Text, Date and Size, and Attributes, but each tab can be configured … Read more

National Geographic Talk Abroad Lite review: At least it's cheap

I don't mean to be a hater, but if the National Geographic Talk Abroad Lite weren't attached to the Talk Abroad international cell phone SIM card, I'd have to wind caution tape all around my review.

So why wouldn't you run from this handset, given my less-than-glowing recommendation? Its two saving graces are the travel plan that gives you a U.S. and U.K. number, so friends and family can always reach you while abroad, and the fact that for an unlocked phone, its $59.99 price tag is extremely affordable.

Let's face it, … Read more