25 Best Windows 8 Themes & Visual Styles

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Anyone would get bored looking at the same computer screen day after day. Changing the look of your system with new wallpapers and themes every now and then makes it feel fresh. Applying new themes isn't all that hard; it's looking for the perfect theme that takes a fare bit of time. Back in 2009, we compiled a list of great themes for Windows 7, and now, after a long time, we have put together for you a collection of awesome Windows 8 themes. While the themes remain roughly the same, a major (and much needed) addition in Windows 8 personalization now allows you to apply a different wallpaper to the each display in a dual-monitor setup. In what follows, you'll find some of the best themes from deviantArt and Windows' own downloads page, plus a little surprise for our dual-monitor users. Read More

List Of Windows Services That Can Be Safely Disabled

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Windows Services are executable programs that run constantly in the background and perform specific functions on their own. Users with administrator privileges can choose a default startup behavior for these services. For instance, they can be set to start at system boot, paused and restarted whenever required, or simply disabled. While some services come with the operating system by default, at times different third party software also add their own services. While leaving the services running in the background allows certain tools and utilities to function better, disabling the ones you don't need can also increase the performance of your system. In what follows, we'll guide you through the process of starting, stopping and disabling Windows Services. Read More

Easily Download & Launch Sysinternals & Nirsoft Utilities With WSCC

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Having too many applications installed on your computer can eventually slow it down. You may already know that different programs and their associated services running in the background consume system resources, adversly effecting the overall performance of your computer. Having individual applications installed might not seem like that big of an issue but having complete software suites such as Puran Utilities - - a collection of various tools to perform different operations such as cleaning junk data, managing files and uninstalling software - installed on your computer can have a bigger impact on system performance. Instead of installing a bunch of utility suites, you can just use WSCC (Windows System Control Center). It is a portable application that lets you install, update, execute and organize tools from different software suites, as well as several built-in Windows tool, all from one interface. Other than the available utilities, it lets you install and automatically update several other tools from within the interface as well. Keep reading to find out more about WSCC. Read More

How To Get The Windows 7 Look & Feel On Your Windows 8 PC

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Change has always been hard for most people to accept; they generally want things to keep running in a set pattern that they are used to, and any deviation from their regular practices can cause them a lot of panic. That is exactly what happened with Windows 8. With such a huge shift from the conventional Windows UI, Microsoft managed to displease a lot of people, including some critics as well as a significant user base. However, as people came out of the initial effects of the shock, a lot of them decided to stick with Windows 7 for now,  some decided to try and adapt to the new system, and the more tech-savvy lot with the knowledge of coding started writing programs to bring the old Windows 7 interface back in Windows 8. As a result, different tools surfaced, promising to bring back the Windows 7 UI to Windows 8 either by installing the missing features, or by disabling the new Windows 8-specific ones. If you are among those looking to transform your Windows 8 to Windows 7 in terms of the interface, here is a list of some of the best tools out there that can help you achieve that. Read More

Tibi’s Mathematics Suite Combines Scientific, Graphical, Matrix & Factorization Calculators

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Some love it, most hate it and many have tried their level best to avoid it at school, but Mathematics is everywhere all around us, and there's no escape from it in any field. Every element of the world is either based on or in some way related to numbers and mathematical calculations. Behind every piece of technology including your computer and smartphone, there are millions of calculations going on every second. While these complex, automatic calculations are handled by computers, there are many that are still needed to be done by humans, in order to create those machines. A calculator is one particular device that has helped almost everyone at some point in their lives, allowing them to perform complex calculations in a few seconds. Windows has its own calculator with basic arithmetic and scientific calculations, but it doesn't quite cut it for more complicated ones. Tibi’s Mathematics Suite is a portable open-source application featuring a Scientific calculator, Graphical calculator, Matrix calculator and Factorizator, each with its own feature set to let you to perform complex calculations with ease. Read More

Customize Aero Glass Effect Opacity & Blur In Windows 8 With AGTweaker

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Immediately after the release of Windows 8, transparency-obsessed users and developers have been demanding and developing different methods for bringing window and taskbar transparency back to Windows 8. The choice between transparent and solid window borders depends on your preference between a visually pleasing UI or better performance. A lack of transparency does not mean that the Windows 8 interface isn't as aesthetically pleasing; it is just that for some people, a shift from the rather stylish look of Windows 7 to a simpler, minimalistic one seems like a step back. Over time, a lot of tools have been developed for the purpose, Aero Glass for Win8 being the best of the lot. It is the closest you can get to the original Aero Glass effect with blurred transparency. However, the application does not have a GUI or any settings to control the transparency or blur effect. Today, we bring to you a tool called AGTweaker that works as a supporting utility for Aero Glass for Win8, allowing you to control the level of opacity and blur to apply to window borders. Moreover, it lets you set the Aero Glass effect to be applied at Windows startup to avoid the trouble of loading it every time you reboot your system. Read More

Light Alloy Is A Portable Video Player With Borderless Viewing & Advanced Scheduler

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Audio and video players come in all shapes and sizes. While some people like to stick with the native Windows Media Player, many choose to go for third-party alternatives that offer a lot more features and options. I personally like to use KMPlayer as my default application for watching videos, as it plays back any format you can throw at it, provides easy navigation and volume controls, and offers a plethora of options related to every aspect of audio and video playback including subtitle and audio syncing, and a lot more. Other video players boast their own specific features, such as QuickPlay that has support for playing videos of up to 4K resolution, and the world-famous open-source VLC Player that packs with a large number of widely known as well as little-known features. Light Alloy is yet another media player for Windows that comes with simple playback controls, borderless viewing, switchable skins and multi-language support for English, German, Japanese, Romanian, Chinese and more. The navigation bar displays a timeline so you can see exactly how much playing time has passed, and the player supports Blu-Ray playback as well. More on Light Alloy after the jump. Read More

View Folder Sizes In Windows Native File Explorer

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Applications that analyze the disk space usage allow you to identify the programs and folders hogging your hard drive. If you have a big hard drive, you might not care about duplicate files stored in your computer, but if you have limited disk space, storage memory management is of high importance. We have covered a lot of applications that allow you to keep an eye on the memory consumption by different folders. These include OverDisk - an application that provides details about file and folder sizes in a graphical representation - and DiskFerret, a Java-based disk analyzing utility. While these programs are very useful, you are required to launch them manually every time you want to view folder sizes. By default, the Size column in Windows Explorer only lists the size of files present inside a selected folder, and does not display the size of subfolders. Folder Size is an application that provides you with an easy, automated way to view the sizes of folders while using Windows' native file manager. Read More

View 500 Image Formats, Convert Between 130 & Apply 50+ Effects With ImageCool

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These days, one can find a large number of free and paid image editing tools. Some of them provide you with color correction controls like changing the hue, brightness, contrast and saturation, while others let you quickly apply different preset filters to your images. Most images captured with high resolution cameras are in resolutions much higher than our display devices. Having a 2560p image to view on a 720p or 1080p screen does not offer any benefit when it comes to the picture quality, and having a lot of such images on your disk can consume significantly high amounts of storage space. Image resizing is also very important if you need to frequently upload images online, because larger images take more time to upload and consume more space on the server. However, most image resizing applications can only handle the common image formats such as JPEG, PNG, BMP and GIF. Today, we bring to you ImageCool - an image converter for Windows that can handle up to 500 image formats. You can view images in any of these formats, convert between 130 formats, apply 50 different effects and filters, and perform other functions such as cropping and applying watermarks. Read More

Memorylage For Windows 8 Creates Collages From Images & Webcam Photos

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Collage is an art technique that involves creating an image by using a number of other images, but it is not limited to that; you can use newspaper cuttings, images, text, photographs, parts of other artwork - almost anything that you can find, provided that your creativity and the available tools allow you to work with the raw materials. Previously, we have covered some great collage-making applications, such as CollageIt that allows you to make a collage in just 3 steps, and Shape Collage, a cross-platform tool to create collages in any shape. While there are a lot of desktop apps available to create photo collages, Memorylage is a new Modern UI option for Windows 8 and RT users. It allows you to create simple image collages using images stored on your computer. Moreover, it lets you capture images through your webcam and create an instant collage, which can be perfect if you are having a party and want to capture its great moments straight to a collage. Read More

Chrome App Launcher From Chromebook Comes To Windows On Dev Channel

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Chromebooks have been gaining significant popularity lately. These Chrome OS-toting computers basically use Google Chrome itself as a computing and app platform, and require continuous internet connectivity to run all these web-apps. Chromebooks rely solely on the Chrome apps but since the browser itself is always running as a part of the OS itself, you do not need to launch it every time you want to run an app. Instead, you get an app launcher similar to the Start Menu for accessing all these apps. Today, Google has released a developer preview of its app launcher for Windows that allows you to launch your installed Chrome apps directly from Windows desktop. As of this writing, the app launcher is only available for Windows on the Chrome Dev Channel, but Google plans to push it to Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux soon. Read More

Rename & Organize Music Files Into Folders Based On Metadata With MusicZen

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Time is the most important commodity in today’s fast paced world, and it is something everyone always seems to be lacking. To counter the problem of having a limited amount of time, more and more advanced tools and techniques are being developed enabling people to make more efficient use of their time. If you also face the problem of never having enough time for all the things you want to do, being organized certainly helps in making the most of your day. Just like in real life, keeping everything organized in our computers can go a long way towards saving us time. Sometimes, mostly because of work requirements, people put an effort into sorting documents, but they usually don't bother much with the more casual content such as audio and video files. MusicZen aims to help you with that by automatically renaming and organizing your music files into separate folders based on their metadata information. Keep reading to find out more. Read More

AI Picture Explorer Is A Dual-Window Image Viewer, Editor & Manager

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The native image viewer of Windows allows you to view images, set them as desktop background, rotate them and delete them, but that is where its functionality pretty much ends. Personally, I feel that the default Windows 7 Photo Viewer is not up to the mark, as it does not provide any image editing options, and even lags a bit when quickly switching between images. This can be especially annoying when you are trying to locate a particular image by browsing through an album. Previously, we have covered some great image viewing and editing applications such as Zoner Photo Studio and Fast Stone ImageViewer that serve as great alternatives to Windows 7 Photo Viewer. AI Picture Explorer is another Windows app that provides you with a two-window interface to manage and view your images. It features batch image editing, fixing and conversion, while allowing you to extract images from archives without having to use another tool. Moreover, you can create file and folder lists, and view the images in a slideshow with up to 173 transition effects. The tool also supports playing some common audio and video formats, in addition to images of resolutions exceeding 80 megapixels. Read More

TurboSR Is A Text Search & Replace Tool With Extensive Format Support

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Replacing text in a single file is easy; you just open a file, find the text, and replace it with the required text. This works fine when you have just one or a few files to replace text in, but what if you have to do it in a whole bunch of files? Consider there are 500 files that need to be edited; opening each one of them one after the other, replacing text wherever required, and saving them one by one would be a huge waste of time and a major annoyance due to the monotony involved. Fortunately, you can simply use a software that allows you to find certain text in multiple files and replace it with text of your choice in one go. We have covered several find & replace utilities including a plugin for Notepad++. TurboSR Search and Replace is a portable utility that performs the same job but in addition to TXT files, it supports a wide variety of formats, including HTML, LOG, JS, PAS, CPP, XML, XSL and many more. Read More

Create GIF Animations From Multiple Videos & Images With KickMyGraphics

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GIF or Graphics Interchange Format image is the most popular file format for simple animated images. It supports a separate palette of 256 colors for each frame, and you can use GIF animation tools like the portable AnimateGIF to create flawless GIF animations with custom frame delay and option to run the animation once or in a loop, or even combine multiple GIF images into a single file. However, if you want to create GIFs from videos, you will need a different tool that can extract the frames of a video for you, and KickMyGraphics does just that. It is a basic tool that allows you to create animations from video frames, while giving you some simple editing options such as resizing the frame size, choosing the speed of the GIF animation, and cutting out unwanted frames. Other than supporting a lot of video formats, it also lets you work with images files as well as existing GIFs. More on KickMyGraphics after the jump. Read More

Hokrain Is A Light, Portable Music Player With Massive Hotkey & Format Support

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Listening to music during work or other activities is a common habit of regular PC users including myself. Windows Media Player that comes built-in with Windows takes up a lot of system resources, which can be overkill if all you want to do is play songs. Several third party alternatives such as iTunes and MediaMonkey also face the same memory-hogging problem. Other options such as the open-source Stealth Player offer a much more lightweight experience. However, while consuming lesser memory, most of the lightweight tools face the problem of not offering many useful options such as playlist creation, search, and navigation. Hokrain is a portable and lightweight audio player that allows you to play songs without interfering with your work, while providing you with several useful options related to playlist creation, navigation and hotkeys. Other than the usual MP3, WMA and WAV audio formats, it supports a large number of unusual ones allowing you to use one audio player for all your music needs. Keep reading to find out more about Hokrain. Read More

Securely Share Files With Specific Permissions & Recipients Using SmartRM

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There are a lot of file sharing application available on the internet, but many of them don't provide you with a lot of options when it comes to the amount of control you have over who can view the file. Using various services, you can share a file via email, social media, or a URL. Most of the times, anyone can view the files using their direct links, for instance, someone with access to an image URL can easily view it by pasting it in the browser. SmartRM is an file sharing service with an open-source application for Windows that allows you to overcome that problem and lets you share files only with people that you intend to. Other than directly sending the files using any online method (email, IM, social networks), you can also share it using a USB drive or even Dropbox. Once received, only people with proper permissions can access the file, that too only during a limited time frame specified by you. Read More

Have Your PC Auto Capture Screenshots At User-Defined Intervals

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AddictiveTips is all about finding newer tools to help you get more productive and get more things done in lesser time. We always emphasize the importance of screenshot capturing utilities and how they can help you explain system problems to your friends or an expert. Screenshots are used in several situations; from a creating a manual to getting help on a forum, screenshots act as a visual aid to the issue under discussion. If you are a blogger, you likely know the importance of screenshots in explaining things in your blog post already. Mostly screenshot tools provide you with three modes for capturing screenshots: region capture, window capture and full screen. Auto Screenshot Capture is a screenshot app with a difference - it lets you take screenshots in succession after a custom interval, allowing you to capture ongoing screen activity. Read More

Unblock Websites Or Accelerate Web Browsing On PC & Android With Hola

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Internet censorship is becoming more and more serious everyday. Many governments block access to certain websites or online services within their country. In other cases, many online services don't offer some or all of their content in certain regions; many of us have click a YouTube video link to land on a message saying the selected video is not available in our region. Same goes for many other services that are being provided in the US only. While finding out the reason why these services aren't accessible in your part of the world is probably something beyond your control, what you can still do is actually access the website using a VPN, though most free VPN services have a catch: low speed or advertisements. Hola is one of the newest entries in the free VPN services scene with clients for Windows and Android that accelerate internet browsing and allow you to access blocked content without compromising the speed. Moreover, it allows you to browse the internet while maintaining complete anonymity, and supports major internet browsers including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari. Keep reading to find out more about Hola. Read More