Microsoft has officially released beta 2 of Internet Explorer 8 and is available in a number of languages. Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for the following languages: English, German, Japanese, Simplified Chinese. In addition, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for the following operating systems:

Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows Vista x64
Windows Server 2003
Windows Server 2003 x64

One of the most talked about new features is InPrivate Browsing, which enables you to browse the web without saving your history with Internet Explorer 8’s InPrivate Browsing. Now you can shop for that special gift with confidence knowing your family won’t accidentally find out or use a shared computer without leaving a trace. Learn More.

Finally, please look for more information regarding Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 during the week, more specifically, I will be publishing my full review of the updated browser tomorrow. Also be on the look out for our exclusive screenshot gallery.

Download: Internet Explore 8 Beta 2

Now that governments track, and even block more and more internet traffic, anonymous and encrypted networks are fast gaining importance.

i2p is a Java application which builds up such an anonymous network from hundreds of routers, similarly to the Freenet and Tor projects. Data is encrypted en relayed through several other i2p routers, to maintain anonymity.

There are a lot of services that are integrated into the i2p network. These include IRC, web browsing, email, bittorrent, gnutella, instant messaging... All of these programs work anonymously via the i2p network infrastructure. There are no official connections from i2p to the 'normal' internet, however, unofficial 'outproxies' do exist and can connect to regular websites.

The 0.6.3 release provides more protection against malicious routers and improves access for people behind firewalls.

CUE Splitter is a freeware tool that split a single big audio track, mostly an album or a compilation, into the relative individual audio tracks, using informations contained in the associated "CUE" file. Sometimes you can find a big compressed audio file (for example MP3, APE, FLAC, OGG, WAV, WMA, etc...) equipped with a small "CUE" text file that contain informations about tracks title, artist and length. Usually these couple of files are generated by programs like EAC (Exact Audio Copy), CDRWin, BPM Studio, GoldWave or similar. With CUE Splitter you can split audio track files without burning to CDR or decode/re-encode any audio data! Moreover audio files are automatically named using a user-defined "file mask" string, it's tags are filled with information extracted from "CUE" file and, optionally, an M3U playlist file can be generated (option enabled by default).

Changes in this version:

• Fixed search problem on CUE load
• Fixed strange menu bugs (vertical line)

Screenshot: >> Click here <<
Link: Website

Stardock is excited to announce that “phase two” of its digital download platform, Impulse, has begun and all updates, new games and software applications will soon be live. Phase two of Impulse sees new games from 2k (Civilizations III, Shattered Union, Sid Meier’s Pirates! and Sid Meier’s Railroads!) and Tilted Mill’s Children of the Nile enhanced edition. New software applications include a host of Corel applications like WordPerfect Office X4, CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4, and Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 as well as software applications from Genie Soft, Iolo, and AVG Internet Security and Anti-Virus & Anti-Spyware software.

Phase two of Impulse also adds the ability for users to install and update third-party freeware programs that are available via Impulse. This makes the transfer of the catalogue of programs installed on a user’s machine extraordinarily simple from machine to machine as it’s all centrally located on Impulse. Phase two has already addressed user feedback and incorporates significantly faster load times, downloads, a smart queue option and a smarter updating process which exponentially decreases processing time for updates.

Link: Impulsedriven.com
Download: Impulse
Screenshot: Impulse Phase II

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Whats New:
• Improved: Effect rendering should be a little faster now.
• Changed: Implemented some changes to the "Add Noise" effect that were suggested by a forum member.
• Changed: The canvas background color is now always #c0c0c0.
• Changed: The auto-updater should now correctly detect .NET 3.5 and newer, which will help to save bandwidth when Paint.NET v4.0 is released (it will require .NET 3.5).
• Fixed: Paint.NET now works on a system that has the .NET 3.5 SP1 "Client Profile" installed.
• Fixed: When zoomed in and the cursor is to the top-left of the image (negative coordinates), the ruler is now highlighted in the correct area. Fixed: The effect rendering system no longer sets the "Tag" property on the configuration dialog.
• Fixed: Some incorrectly authored plugins would cause a crash when loading their support details (author, copyright, etc.).
• Fixed: There was a bug in the color wheel for IndirectUI that caused it to show the wrong values at initialization.
• Fixed: There was a performance problem for effects that used the IndirectUI color wheel control.
• Fixed: In some rare cases, Paint.NET would crash while shutting down.
• Fixed: When using the "Fixed Ratio" feature of the Rectangle Selection tool, it would crash if 0 was specified for both the width and height.

View: Official website
Download: Paint.NET v3.36

BurnAware is the ultimate disc burning software. BurnAware Free is ideal for users with basic disc burning needs as backup, creating data, audio, video discs and burning disc images. Free, easy to set up and maintain, it enables you to save your files to disc quickly, provides more flexible interface to help you complete your burning tasks much faster.

Key Features
* Create data and multisession CD/DVD/Blu-ray Discs
* Create Audio CDs and jukebox CD/DVD/Blu-ray Discs
* Create DVDs-Video
* Create and burn disc images
* On-the-fly writing for all image types (no staging to hard drive first)
* Supports Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista (32 and 64 Bit), no drivers required
* 100% Free for home use. No spyware, malware, banners etc.

Download: BurnAware Free | Freeware, 7MB
Screenshot: >> Click here <<
View: www.burnaware.com

NetInfo is a collection of 15 different state-of-the-art network tools on a single, easy-to-use interface. Designed from first-hand experience, NetInfo allows businesses to more effectively combat network downtime by allowing network administrators, webmasters, and Internet service providers to more accurately isolate faults, simplify processing of diagnostic data and increase internal network security.

What's new:

• Windows Vista 64-bit compatibility
• A few other minor improvements and bug fixes

Download: NetInfo 6.6 | 1.83 MB (Shareware, $39.95 US/Euro Home License)
Screenshot: >> Click here <<
Link: Company Website
View: Product Details

A-Patch has been updated for Windows Live Messenger 9.0 beta (14.0.3921.0717). Some options have been removed due to them not being needed and some options including the "Live Preview" have been temporarily disabled until a future A-Patch build.

A-Patch is a lightweight program designed to enhance your Windows Live Messenger experience. It does this by giving you a multitude of options, over 70, which allow you to customize the look and feel of Windows Live Messenger, even change some functions. Some of the options include the ability to remove the big advertisement located on the contact list. Another option would be to disable the nudge delay timer, allowing you to send consecutive nudges without having to wait a few seconds in between. Other useful options include removing buttons such as "Activities", "Windows Live Today", and dozens of others buttons, multi-msn, show idle status of other users, and so on.

Some new options have been added for removing the Photos button, the Groups button and the text which is alongside all those buttons on the toolbar.

Changelog:

- Added: Compatibility support for Windows Live Messenger 9.0 (14.0.3921.0717)
- Added: Remove Photos Button
- Added: Remove Groups Button
- Added: Remove Standard Toolbar Text
- Removed: Some un-needed options and some options to be re-added in future versions

Download: Download A-Patch
Link: Homepage

ChrisPC Media Streamer is a powerful broadcast software application with a friendly and ergonomic user interface that allows you to stream your favorite TV shows and multimedia files to your friends through local networks and internet. Your friends, colleagues and business partners can connect using an internet address to watch the streams you broadcast, with any multimedia player software that works with DirectX and Windows Media Encoder.

Features:
- Broadcast your favorite TV shows, Movies, radio stations to your friends through local networks and through internet.
- Broadcast from up to 3 (three) media sources at the same time.
- Using ChrisPC Media Streamer you are able to broadcast video and audio streams from capture devices and multimedia files.
- Support for many capture devices and TV cards by integrating some core functions of the well known ChrisTV PVR application. For the complete list of supported capture devices please click here.
- Adjust capture device settings very easy: channel number, image settings, volume etc.
Customize at anytime your broadcast settings: video and audio bitrate, frame size, quality, port number.
- The posibility to store the broadcasted content locally.
- Change the broadcast properties like: title, description, author and copyright.
- Save the current broadcast settings into a Media Streamer Session (.mss) file and load it later without any problem.
- Minimize ChrisPC Media Streamer to systray and keep the application window always on top.

Screenshot: >> Click here <<
Download: ChrisPC Media Streamer
News source: Chris P.C. Website

AMD/ATi has released version 8.8 of its Catalyst drivers.

Download: Catalyst Driver Page [43.0MB]

COMODO Registry Cleaner is a tool developed to fix errors and optimize the performance of the Windows registry. This tool is very careful with the registry and never deletes a registry entry if this could harm your system. For safety reasons, COMODO Registry Cleaner makes automatic backup before cleaning the registry entries.

COMODO Registry Cleaner removes items from the Windows Registry which are no longer in use or are unwanted on the system. Such items may include information left by software that has otherwise been removed from the computer. It is possible that these persistent items may interfere with performance or have other negative impacts.

Why would you need such a product?

- because analyzes your system registry and fixes all problems found;
- the compact option shrinks your registry and increases the performance of your system;
- this tool offers the possibility to add keys and values (Filter Entries) which will be always scanned and cleaned;
- you can add registry keys to be ignored by the scan engine;
- you can schedule periodic registry scan and clean to maintain your registry healthy;
- because the cleaner makes backup for any deleted keys, so that you can easily recover any changes if required.

We’re pleased to announce the first full release of Photosynth, available now at photosynth.com. Photosynth takes a collection of regular photographs and reconstructs the scene or object in a 3-D environment. For those of you who have seen the videos or tried our tech preview, you could experience synths that we made in the lab and get a feel for what Photosynth is and how it works. But now, for the first time ever you can create synths from your own pictures and share them with your friends. Explore great synths from others or create a few of your own.

Link: Photosynth Homepage
Screenshot: Photosynth

The second release candidate of Contentteller CMS is available. Contentteller is a powerful open source content management system written in the PHP scripting language designed for sites of all sizes and types. The free Community Edition is licensed under the terms of the GPL v3.

Key features:
* Powerful but simple to use
* Search engine friendly out of the box
* Support for multiple websites
* Caching for high traffic websites
* Import and update everything from RSS feeds, POP3 email accounts, news servers, PAD, and CompatDB XML files
* Powerful template and style system
* Integration with 3rd party applications such as vBulletin 2.x - 3.7, UBB.threads 7.x, phpBB 3.0, MyBB 1.2/1.4, SMF 1.1/2.0, and IP.Board 2.x
* Optional Windows installer to install Contentteller without the need of a FTP client.
* Fully extendable with modules
* Available as full install with 20 modules or as lightweight (lite) install with content/news module

Download: Contentteller Community Edition 1.0.0 RC2 (Open Source GPL v3)
Screenshot: Admin control panel
View: Announcement and change log
Link: Homepage

Once again MS is offering Office 2007 software for students who quality at totally rock-bottom prices. and they have extended the list of software this school season, for you to snag at really awesome prices. New to the list is Office Visio Pro 2007, Office 2007 Language Packs, and Vista Ultimate. For those who missed out last season heres your chance to cash in, its currently running live in the US and slated for Canada Sept 15.

Check out Link: The Ultimate Steal to see if you qualify to snag some really cheap software that is full retail package product that comes with warranty support.

NexusFile is a file manager for Windows. You can manage many files very fast and easily. NexusFile will increase your computing performance. If you still use Windows Explorer, you must try this one.