While we love the idea of free TV (who doesn't?), it never seems to be quite what we hoped. FreeZ Online TV is no exception. The channel selection is unimpressive and user guidance is nonexistent.

Desktop Uploader offers easy and convenient upload of files from your local machine to Uploading.com. All you need to do is download and run .exe application on your PC, then you can choose files that need to be uploaded to the service and that is all - all the files will be uploaded via the tool. Desktop Uploader is available for any Uploading.com user regardless of the account type and status.

VLC Media Player is a long-time open-source favorite, and the latest version is also the first to be out of beta development. Along with multiple improvements, VLC continues to offer robust support for a wide range of video and audio formats, including OGG, MP2, MP3, MP4, DivX, HD codecs like AES3, Raw Dirac, and even support for playing back zipped files.

WinRAR offers the features and ease of use that place it at the top of the compression category, it is easy to use, lightweight, and flexible. WinRAR offers unpacking support for a large number of archive formats, including TAR, ACE, BZ2, JAR, ISO, and ZIP. WinRAR's advanced features are icing on the cake, with Unicode support for international formatting, embedded file comments, damaged archive repair, archive locking, self-extracting archives, and easy encryption.

Internet Download Manager is a full-featured package that handles downloading tasks with aplomb. It conveniently integrates into your browser, even if you use Mozilla or Opera. It automatically sorts incoming files by file type and puts them in the appropriate folder. Other features include automatic virus checking and the ability to download all files linked to a page. The new version has a Web spider that can analyze a site and retrieve, for example, all the images on it.

With the advent of high-definition video, many people are finding that programs like Windows Media Player just aren't good enough anymore. HD video demands a player that can do it justice, and DivX 7 for Windows handles this task formidably.

RealPlayer SP is perfect for playing and sharing video with your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter. Also it works easily with your favorite flavors of Blackberry, iPod, iPhone and game systems. Now you can download and organize your favorite videos from YouTube and thousands of other sites. Then watch them anytime, anywhere you want.

The software allows you to download FLV files from YouTube and to convert them to most major formats. If there is a YouTube URL in your clipboard, it will automatically paste it for you when you click on the dialog box. From there, just hit OK and the downloading will commence. One more left-click is all it takes to load the file in the converter, which supports iPhone, iPod, PSP, cell phone, AVI, MP3, WMV, and Xvid.

From its start as a post-Napster clone to its leading role as the quintessential Gnutella client, LimeWire is the highest-profile P2P application. Version 5 re-envisions LimeWire for a Web 2.0 world, with an emphasis on sharing with friends, square buttons with rounded corners, and overall a cleaner interface.

CCleaner is PC-cleaning application that makes it easy to wipe away your tracks from Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome from various Windows system areas, and from some third-party applications. CCleaner can erase traces from such popular programs as Spybot - Search & Destroy and WinZip. CCleaner now offers secure file erasing along with a Registry-cleaning utility that quickly scans for invalid entries before removing them.

doPDF is a fairly basic program that's utterly bereft of features beyond its main function: to let users create PDF documents from within any program using the native Print option. Along with whatever printer you've got hooked up that shows up in the Print dialog box, doPDF adds an eponymous option. Select it, hit print, and you get the chance to change the name of the PDF you're creating. Hit enter and the PDF gets created, then automatically opens for you to proofread it.

AVG Free provides the bare necessities when it comes to security, but that should be enough for savvy Windows users. You'll get a combined antivirus and antimalware engine, LinkScanner, and e-mail scanning. AVG Free 9 introduces a few new features, with improvements focused on performance, including claims of faster scan and boot times. One new feature is the Identity Theft Recovery Unit. Only for users in the United States, ITRU is a business partnership with Identity Guard which provides "consumer identity theft solutions," accessible only from the AVG toolbar in Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Firefox 3 is a full-featured, lightning fast browser software, the latest update makes version 3.5 about two times faster than version 3. Several notable improvements in the latest revamp keep Firefox abreast of current browsing tech. Along with Mozilla's new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine that renders Web applications faster on Firefox than ever before. The new Private Browsing brings a feature to Firefox that competitors have had for a while: the capability to turn off cookie and history logs.

There are plenty of solid compression utilities to choose from, but this shareware powerhouse offers the features and ease of use that place it at the top of the compression category. WinRAR is easy to use, lightweight, and flexible.

Small enough to run off a USB key, but powerful enough to download any torrent in a jiffy (if it's got enough seeders), uTorrent 2.0 is easy on the eyes and smart on your network. The memory footprint for uTorrent is very small, and system resources are barely touched. While you're torrenting, you shouldn't be surprised to find that other programs that use your Internet connection slow down, but the latest version of uTorrent has an answer to that. Called uTorrent Protocol, or uTP, it's a built-in throttling that detects network congestion and slows down the torrent until the traffic jam has dissipated.

PhotoScape is a feature-rich freeware image editor that is perfect for those making the jump between JPEG and am-pro dSLR work. It supports RAW, as well as all other major image formats from JPEG and PNG to animated GIFs. It comes with prebuilt templates for users to create photo collages, fumetti, and Web comics, and has a standard set of red-eye removal, light/shadow, and contrast-editing features.

Consistently at or near the top of independent efficacy testers, Avira's AntiVir remains one of the best freeware security solutions around. Its scans are flexible, allowing the user to fully scan both internal and external hard drives, run a preloaded scan--for rootkits, for example--or customize a scan. The latest version introduces antispyware protections, scanning tech that can crack open "locked" files, improved internal security to prevent AntiVir's files from being maliciously altered, and one-click threat removal--no more baby-sitting.

This download manager brings much more to the table than fast file transfers, but it definitely delivers those, too. Increased download speeds are Download Accelerator Plus's bread and butter, speeding up downloads by almost 200 percent in most cases and occasionally as high as 400 percent. Besides splitting files into smaller pieces, it thrives on automatically seeking faster mirrors. It also can get a file simultaneously from several sites, which is useful if a particular site limits the download speed; it can resume downloads; and it can preview some media files while downloading.

Downloading videos, Flash games, and large batches of files is greatly simplified with this freeware download manager, but Firefox users may have difficulty with integration. To get a media file, simply right-click a video or photo and choose Download from your context menu. Grabbing a Flash game is even easier. Hover over a Flash file, and Orbit displays a button for a fast download.

CamFog is perfect mix of video, audio, and text socializing. The chat rooms feature everything from music lessons to sign language to non-English chatting, and integrating video, audio, and text components are a great leap forward for chat . You can create your own chat room and password-protect it, and the Contacts list has a section for favorite rooms and one-click contact adding, user searching, and profile management.

GOM Media Player supports a wide range of file, supported formats include DAT, MPEG, DivX, XviD, WMV, ASF, AVI, and MOV, as are common codecs like FLV1, AC3, OGG, MP4, and H263. A pop-out playlist can save and organize your various media files, though the limited sort modes--two--hardly makes it a champ. More impressive are the customizable settings on the control panel. Here you can adjust a video's image brightness, hue, and saturation. There's also a built-in screen-capture feature that includes zooming and panning, customizable themes, hot keys, and a host of preset and adjustable audio controls.

This powerful application offers extensive utilities to improve your system's performance and protect your privacy. Glary Utilities' well-organized interface allows users to easily choose from several tools. It cleans unwanted junk files and removes invalid and broken shortcuts, freeing up valuable disk space

The Media Player Codec Pack is a simple to install package of codecs/filters/splitters used for playing back music and movie files. After installation you will be able to play 99.9% of files through your media player, along with XCD's, VCD's, SVCD's and DVD's. Also included in the package are a number of encoder codec's...

FLV Player's exceedingly simple controls allow you to navigate backward and forward through videos and play them in a loop. You can also adjust the volume, mute it, and adjust the size of the player. The Settings menu provides some basic control over program behavior, such as opening a new player window when double-clicking on an FLV file and remembering previous settings.

Get fast and flexible digital-media playback with access to smart organization features and online stores.