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Download of the Day Archive

Up to the minute Macworld coverage

giantappleLive coverage of the 2009 Macworld event, Apple’s last, began at around noon. Keep your eyes here or on Twitter for time-stamped updates straight from the keynote address.

1:37 PM EST: That’s all, folks. Apple’s 2009 keynote address has come to a close. Are you excited by what you saw today? Disappointed? Were you expecting some additional gadgets like the iPhone Nano or the Big McHugelarge iTouch? Sound off in our comments!

We’ll keep the coverage going throughout the day as more details roll in from the show floor.

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Virtual desktops for Windows

Today’s download of the day, WindowsPager, brings four virtual desktops to Windows 2000/XP/Vista. The unassuming little program uses just 5MB of system memory and brings all the Linux nerds to the yard or, you know… Doesn’t.

Create Word docs from PDFs

Though PDF is proprietary and Acrobat is trashy, the PDF remains a swank format because it guarantees every reader sees the same document free of font or formatting quirkiness. Yet no matter how super awesome PDF can be, sometimes it’s just plain better to have a document that can be edited at leisure. To that end, today’s download of the day is the aptly-named Free PDF to Word Doc Converter which does exactly as the name implies.

While moving to the Word .DOC format can spell some wacky results, the program does allow for some control in the final output. Give it a try and let us know how it worked for you in the comments!

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Scrub data for good with DBAN

Today’s download of the whenever day, Darik’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN), can wipe the contents of a drive with all manner of thoroughness. If you’ve ever had the desire to clean a hard drive to Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Department of Defense standards, well, DBAN delivers.

Just be careful. Data scrubbed with this program can’t be brought back. Ever.

Windows Vista SP2 beta released

The first beta of Windows Vista SP2 has just been released to the public via Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program.

Microsoft blogger Mike Nash reminds us that this CPP release is a way for enthusiasts and professionals to do compatibility testing in advance of SP2’s release date. “The CPP is intended for technology enthusiasts, developers, and IT Pros who would like to test Service Pack 2 in their environments and with their applications prior to final release,” he said.

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Automagically tidy folders

Today’s download of the day, Download Mover, allows a user to pattern-match files in source folders at regular intervals so they can be moved to any number of destination folders.

Rather than whiling away the hours with manual folder organization, let Download Mover clean up that nasty dump you call your download directory.

Portable apps are decidedly swank

I have a fascination with useful programs that depend neither on the registry or system folders. Those utilities that consist of only an executable? Even more delicious.

This is why I am always so excited about PortableApps, today’s download of the day. This popular, open, and completely free platform provides a launcher and an endless array of popular applications that fit with isolated cleanliness on any external storage.

From IM clients, to browsers, to management utilities, the PortableApps platform delivers countless options without a single byte of registry data.

Put any ol’ video on your iPhone or iTouch

While the popular media encoding program Handbrake has been available for some time, recent updates have made it vastly better than ever. The newest version of today’s download of the day now accepts input from virtually any media source, not just DVD! Though DVD decryption support has been axed from the latest version (boo DMCA), the new features should more than make up for the loss.

Archive DVDs easily with AutoGK

We don’t endorse anything untowards, but we can’t help but imagine the possibilities presented by AutoGK. You provide the DVD, it provides quality DiVX or XViD files at the touch of a button.

It’s simple, it’s fast, it’s feature-rich, and it’s not crapware. We’re loving this bloat-free week.

USB 3 zips along at 450MBps

At this week’s SuperSpeed USB DevCon, the robustness of the freshly-minted production standard for USB 3.0 was shown to onlookers.

While retaining backwards compatibility with the current ecosystem of USB devices, the new specification was demonstrated by moving an uncompressed 30 FPS 1080p stream along at 450MBps. This system is expected to be used in the company’s future HDTV transmission products.

The official USB 3 standard is expected to hit the shelves in equipment by 2010.

Nehalem Overclocking Calculator

Armed with QuickPath Interconnect, Intel’s new Core i7 CPU has a whole suite of multipliers and frequencies that make overclocking more complicated than ever. To keep track of the dizzying array of clockspeeds and multipliers, we’ve developed NehalemCalc to do the number-crunching for you.

For a peep, a rundown and a download, pay a visit to the content after the jump.

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Tweak Vista’s UI with Ultimate Windows Tweaker

We know you guys like to tweak and tune the hell out of everything, so why stop at Windows Vista’s user interface? Thanks to a shiny find by the lads at Lifehacker, we’re goin’ lockstep to make Ultimate Windows Tweaker our download of the day.

It’s 370KB, it’s portable, it has over 130 tweaks. That’s bloat-free music to our ears.

Defragment specific files with FragExt

While it is agreed that defragging an entire drive yields little modern reward, particularly large files can still benefit from defragmentation. With today’s download of the day, FragExt, you can capitalize on that good mojo by adding one-click folder and file defrags to the right click context menu for Windows.

Block shutdowns with Shutdownguard

Between Windows Automatic Update and pesky applications that unceremoniously force a restart, it’s easy to have your compute rebooted in the middle of something awesome. To prevent this situation in the future, Shutdownguard will automatically intercept shutdown calls and prompt to abort or continue as planned.

Rescue your papers, essays, documents and tabs from obliteration!

Hack those Windows 7 features to life

At Icrontic, we are completely in favor of great hacks and cool tools. Today’s download of the day, Blue Badge, drops the hax on Windows 7 which we do not doubt is in the hands of selected readers (arrrrrrr).

Unlocked features include:

  • The new Windows 7 taskbar
  • Gestures
  • Panning
  • Desktop slideshow

Backups are advised, but you’re not worried about borking anything if you’re running an alpha, are you?