Flock is a free open-source Firefox-based web browser developed by Flock Inc for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Just like any other Mozilla-derived software which is always named after animal-centric words, Flock is probably named either after the word that represent a group of birds or perhaps after a genus of flower plants. As an open source software, it is mainly licensed under GPL, while some other components of it are separately licensed under LGPL+MPL.
Advanced SystemCare Free is a system optimization package for Windows. It is developed by IOBit.com who is known for their award winning optimization tools.
Advanced SystemCare Free offers a basic optimization options for Windows system. This 'free' version offers some basic options to optimize the system. More optimization options are available in the Pro version but for average home user and occassional gamer, the free version is adequate to meet their needs.
We tested the software on our Core 2 Duo (mp3 & games infested) office PC with both Windows Vista Ultimate and the good old Windows XP Professional installed side by side. First, we boot to Vista to test it. From the test, we have to say "don't judge this software by it's name". Despite the so-called 'Basic' nature, it managed to give performance gain up to 50% in Vista. Still unable to believe the result, we reboot the machine and now into XP. Since we use XP a lot more compared to Vista, it is no surprise to see the system crawls. However, after running all the available optimizations, we can see significant increase in performace, perhaps around 25-30%.
To put this software to the ultimate stress, we fork out our unused dusty 1GHz Pentium III machine from our store. After ensuring the Windows XP Pro inside up and running after a 5 years hiatus, we install the software and crossed our fingers to see the result. Surprisingly, we managed to get approximately 20% of performance gain! It is really impressive considering that many of the hardware inside have been obsolete in terms of today's computing standard. We even managed to play some resource hungry games of past years such as The Sims 2 and Sid Meier's Civilization IV smoothly without having much problem on the same machine, thanks to the optional tool named Game Booster that can be downloaded separately and integrated into this software.
Advanced SystemCare Free offers better system optimization tools than those Windows built-in defaults. The utilities are are well categorized and all of them are reliable. Most of them are very useful and usually found only in commercial software. IOBit did a good job for offering this software for free and there are even utilities we didn't expect to be bundled in this free package. Our final words? Highly recommended not only for those who want the most out from their system, but also for those who want to keep their old machines run at their top peak performance.
Download Andvanced SystemCare Free here:
http://www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html?Str=download
Avira Antivir Personal is a free antivirus software developed by Germany-based Avira GmbH. It is available in various major computing platforms like Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Solaris. Avira Antivir Personal is currently in version 9. From version 9, the free Personal edition comes available with antispyware and antiadware which was only made available in Premium and Security Suite version before.
For those who are familiar with the Avira company for a long time, you should know that today's Avira Antivir is an evolved version of the previously known as just 'Antivir'. Before adopting the Antivir name, the antivirus was weirdly named "H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH"; may sound like a technical stuff to many.
AS its name bears, Avira Antivir Personal is free for personal use, and any new scanning engine comes with one year license, of which renewing is just a matter of installing software updates; a very simple license renewal system for an antivirus software. So far, we found no annoying restrictions for the software.
Other than the free Personal edition, the antivirus also have two other versions, namely Avira Antivir Premium and Avira Security Suite, which is targetted at commercial and business user and of course, comes with more extensive crucial features for people in this field. The free Personal version is on the other hand, is adequate for the basic, day to day home use.
Avira Antivir Personal is one of the best free antivirus software. The downloaded installer package for Windows is roughly 33MB in size, small enough in today's standard. Upon installation, it only occupies double of that size and only utilize slightly more than 10MB of system resource when running in the background, even with the AHeAD (Advanced Heuristic Analysis and Detection) enabled. The heuristic behavior scanning ability is important to detect the virus based on behavior, should they passed the traditional first level virus signature check.
In our test, it even beats some of well-known commercial ones. For example, our office which is using the regularly updated PC-Cillin OfficeScan antivirus solution fails to detect the surprisingly common SPR/AutoIt.Gen, TR/Patched.GY.3, TR/Crypt.ZPACK.GEn and JS/Dldr.Agent.VG! This is quite humiliating for a commercial antivirus software but then it shows how good this software is as it managed to detect all four. We even comparing it with 3 other 'big name antivirus software' but those software only managed to find 1, 2 and 3 respectively. Shocking, ain't it?
The only bad thing we found about Antivir is it keeps alerting us about some of legal hacking tools found in our system, even after we choose to ignore it for several times. It's not really a bad thing though as it only show that how good the "Luke Filewalker" engine (a pun for Luke Skywalker?) in doing it's job. Other than that, it keeps telling you to purchase the other 2 versions whenever you run the update, though this only occur once in a day, or once every 3 days, if you choose to update in every 3 days, that's it.
Personal home user will have to bear with the unavailability of webguard (against maliciously scripted webs), antispam (for email), rescue system (should things go haywire), firewall, backup, game mode and some more though. However, you can always opt for many other free tools available on the net to cover these absences. In conclusion, this software is highly recommended.
Download Avira Antivir Personal for free here:
http://www.free-av.com/en/trialpay_download/1/avira_antivir_personal__free_antivirus.html
Flock is currently at version 2.5. What distinguishes Flock from the original Firefox browser is it integrates social networking and Web 2.0 technology into its user interface. Flock supports all common social networking and media services including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, MySpace, AOL Mail, Digg, Facebook, Youtube, Photobucket, Picasa, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, etc. With these services built-in interface, Flock users can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more, as long as the service are supported. This is a very convenient feature especially for those who are regularly using these services.
Just like the original Firefox browser, Flock shares many of Firefox's user-configurable optimizations, provided that the user know how to deal with the "about:config" settings editor, though this is not really advised as it might rendere Flock unusable should any misconfigurations happen. However, users always have other options as Flock also supports 3rd party add-ons, just like Firefox. On top of that, Flock supports numbers of Firefox extensions. We tested Flock with all Firefox-recommended extensions and all of them works without a glitch. Our advise: only use Firefox extensions that modify the core settings, not the interface. If you're unsure on what you're doing, you can always ask the Flock developer community.
Since its first release to the public in 2007, Flock has gained many awards due to its usability and functionality. Frankly speaking, we are agreed because we can hardly find anything that turn us off about this browser. So far, we found there is no other way that makes the Web 2.0 user experience very smooth and exciting. It really deserves those awards. If we are really going to give an award to this browser, we could give it "Editor's Choice" or "Editor's Power Award" or "Editor's Platinum Award" or something like that. Enough about the award thingy, we can say from our desk that this browser is 100% recommended. Just hope that Flock can retain this reputation for the future releases.
Download Flock for free here:
http://flock.com/download/