Monday, November 30, 2009

Best Free Antivirus Software

A guide to the best free antivirus software.

Antivirus (or anti-virus) software is used to prevent, detect, and remove malware, including computer viruses, worms, and trojan horses. Such programs may also prevent and remove adware, spyware, and other forms of malware.

1.Microsoft Security Essentials

Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software.

2. AVG Free Edition

AVG Free provides you with basic antivirus and antispyware protection for Windows and is available to download for free.

3.Avast Home Edition

Free antivirus software providing desktop security and data protection. avast! detects and removes all forms of malware, including spyware, rootkits and trojans. Free for home users.

4.BitDefender Free Edition Build

BitDefender Free Edition is your chance to use one of the world's most effective antivirus engines for free

5.Avira AntiVir Personal

Avira AntiVir Personal from Avira GmbH protects you computer against viruses, malware, adware and spyware, unwanted programs and other dangers.

Best Audio Media Players

This audio pack is focused on the best media players to play music on your PC.

An audio player is a kind of media player for playing back digital audio, including optical discs such as CDs, SACDs, DVD-Audio, HDCD, audio files and streaming audio.

In addition to VCR-like functions like playing, pausing, stopping, rewinding, and forwarding, some common functions include playlisting, tagging format support, and equalizer.

Many of the audio players also support simple playback of digital videos in which we can also run movies.

1. AIMP

AIMP is a free audio player with support for large number of formats and playlists.

2. XMPlay

XMPlay is a Windows music player, supporting the OGG, MP3, MP2, MP1, MO3, IT, XM, S3M, MTM, MOD, and UMX audio formats, and PLS and M3U playlists. Many other formats are also supported via Winamp plugins.

3.Foobar2000

Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats.

4.Jaangle

Jaangle (formerly Teen Spirit) is a free music player and organizer software. It categorizes your mp3, ogg, wma, avi etc collection and displays it in easy to browse, user interface. It has a quality audio - video player and also an integrated tag editor.

5.Winamp

Winamp is more than just a player. It's your window to the multimedia world. From MP3s to streaming video, Winamp is the one place you go to feed your audio/video habit.

6.VLC media player

VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats.

Best Free MP3 Tag Editor

A tag editor (or tagger) is a piece of software that supports editing metadata of multimedia file formats, rather than the actual file content.

1. Mp3tag

Mp3tag is a powerful and yet easy-to-use tool to edit metadata of common audio formats where it supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags.

2.TagScanner

TagScanner is a multifunction program for organizing and managing your music collection.

3.MPTagThat

Auto tag of lyrics and cover arts from internet, auto tag from file names, organize and rename files, case conversion, remove tags, execute scripts, etc.

4.PicardTagger

MusicBrainz Picard adopts a different way of updating tags via its online database.

Sunday, November 29, 2009

SiSoftware Sandra 2010: OpenCL Support Released

London, UK, 16th November 2009 - SiSoftware releases its suite of OpenCL GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processor Unit) benchmarks as part of SiSoftware Sandra 2010, the latest version of our award-winning utility, which includes remote analysis, benchmarking and diagnostic features for PCs, servers, and networks.

At SiSoftware we are constantly looking out for new technologies with the aim to understand how those technologies can best be benchmarked and analysed. We believe that the industry is seeing a shift from the model where heavy computational workload is processed on a traditional CPU to a model that uses the GPGPU or a combination of GPU and CPU; in a wide range of applications developers are using the power of GPGPU to aid business analysis, games, graphics and scientific applications.

As certain tasks or workloads may still perform better on traditional CPU, we see both CPU and GPGPU benchmarks to be an important part of performance analysis. Having launched the GPGPU Benchmarks with SiSoftware Sandra 2009 with support for AMD CTM/STREAM and nVidia CUDA, we have now ported the benchmark suite to OpenCL.

OpenCL is an open standard for running parallel tasks on GPUs, CPUs and hardware accelerators using the same code - unlike proprietary solutions. We believe OpenCL will become "the standard" for programming parallel workloads in the future, thus we have ported all our GPGPUs benchmarks to OpenCL.

Below is a quote we would like to share with you:

"AMD believes OpenCL is what the industry has been waiting for: an industry-standard, cross-platform development platform designed to allow developers to harness the immense computational power available in today’s GPUs and multi-core CPUs. We’ve been a staunch supporter of and contributor to OpenCL since its inception," said Patricia Harrell, director of Stream Computing, AMD. "SiSoftware has made significant contributions to the OpenCL ecosystem with the release of its GPGPU benchmark suite with OpenCL support. This benchmark suite enables customers, partners and OpenCL developers to easily measure application performance on heterogeneous platforms, and provides the information required to help optimize this performance."

The SiSoftware OpenCL Benchmarks look at the two major performance aspects:

* Computational performance: in simple terms how fast it can crunch numbers. It follows the same style as the CPU Multi-Media benchmark using fractal generation as its workload. This allows the user to see the power of the GPGPU in solving a workload thus far exclusively performed on a CPU.

* Memory performance: this analyses how fast data can be transferred to and from the GPGPU. No matter how fast the processing, ultimately the end result will be affected by memory performance.

Key features

* 4 architectures natively supported (x86, x64/AMD64/EM64T, IA64/Itanium2, ARM)
* 6 languages supported (English, French3, German3, Italian3, Japanese3, Russian3)
* AMD OpenCL 1.01
* nVidia OpenCL 1.0
* GPU + CPU parallel execution supported, up to 8 in total.
* Different models of GPUs supported, including integrated GPU + dedicated GPUs.
* Multi-GPUs supported, up to 8 in parallel.

With each release, we continue to add support and compatibility for the latest technologies. SiSoftware works with hardware vendors to ensure the best support for new emerging hardware.

Downloading

For more details, and to download the shareware version, please click here.

About SiSoftware

SiSoftware, founded in 1995, is one of the leading providers of computer analysis, diagnostic and benchmarking software. The flagship product, known as "SANDRA", was launched in 1997 and has become one of the most widely used products in its field. Nearly 600 worldwide IT publications, magazines and review sites use SANDRA to analyse the performance of today's computers. Over 8,000 on-line reviews of computer hardware that use SANDRA are catalogued on our website alone.