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Filed under: Audio, Utilities, Macintosh

Song Sergeant whips your music library into shape

Song Sergeant is an OS X app that cleans up problems with your iTunes library. Duplicate songs, orphaned files in your iTunes folders, and missing songs are no match for Song Sergeant. It scans and fixes your library, allowing you to manually decide what to do about each individual file, or just taking quick, ruthless automagical action if you prefer.

If you don't make any manual decisions, and just let Song Sergeant make every change it suggests, your library will probably end up significantly tidier than before. Where Song Sergeant really shines is in the details, though, like the clever way it handles duplicates. Song Sergeant treats song metadata and audio separately, so when you have a duplicate, you can keep the audio from one file and the song info from the other.

I was quite happy to apply Song Sergeant's fixes for inconsistently-named songs, albums and artists. When there's a conflict - I had both "Eels" and "The Eels" in my lbrary, for example - Song Sergeant suggests which version of the name is probably correct, and does a pretty good job of it. Out of 30-ish inconsistencies in my library, it only picked the wrong version once. Although Song Sergeant doesn't have the flashy features of some other music-cleaning apps - like cleaning up album artwork - it competently completes its assigned tasks.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Clean your cache, browser history, etc with CleanAfterMe

CleanAfterMe
NirSoft has released an updated version of CleanAfterMe, a free Windows system cleaning utility. The program lets you select from a list of locations where Windows tends to store a ton of files. Cleaning these files out can both free up some disk space and protect your privacy, since you can delete things like your browser history, cookies, and recend documents folders.

Version 1.10 adds support for Firefox and Opera web browsers, meaning you can clear your browser history, cookies, cache, download history, and other files. The latest verison also features a resizable dialog box and support for cleaning the last logged-on user name.

The program is portable, which means you can throw it on a USB flash drive and run it on any Windows system. You can also show a cleaning report before actually running the cleaner, which lets you see if you're about to delete anything you might want to hang onto.

If you're looking for a cleaner with a few more features, we'd recommend checking out CCleaner. It does pretty much everything CleanAfterMe does and then some, and also runs a bit more quickly. But unlike CleanAfterMe, CCleaner is not portable, which means you have to install the application before you can use it.

Update: As several readers have kindly reminded us, CCleaner 2.0 has been portable since last year.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware, Troubleshooting

RegToy: All-purpose utility for Windows

It used to be that you would need four or five different programs to optimize your system, clean the registry, rename files, capture screens, etc...

That was before RegToy.

RegToy is a freeware utility that is basically a collection of utilities. The program sidebar is broken up into three main categories: System, User, and Others.

The System section allows you to perform seriously arcane apothecary, such as enabling a large system cache, forcing Windows to unload DLLs from memory, setting prefetch and MFT settings, tweaking your video card settings, and more.

In the User section, you have a whole screen dedicated to tweaking Windows Explorer, as well as different customization options for your Taskbar and Start Menu, Icon settings, Logon settings, and more.

In fact, if there's a statement that best personifies RegToy, it has to be "and more."

We'll let you search out what else RegToy has to offer, but if you're looking for a window manager, registry cleaner, file renamer, screen capturer, memory and disk cleaner, and more...then you should give RegToy a shot.

One warning: the home page loads very slowly. But trust us: it's worth the wait.

Filed under: Security, Utilities, Productivity, Freeware, Troubleshooting

Advanced WindowsCare v2: Repair, protect, and optimize your PC

Advanced WindowsCare PC running sluggishly? We know the feeling. Enter Advanced WindowsCare v2 Personal, another new entry in the "one-step scan and optimization of your PC" arena. Similar to CCleaner (though lacking a few of CCleaner's extras), Advanced WindowsCare v2 will scan your machine for spyware, incorrect registry entries, browsing history, and junk files, with the ability to delete said files quickly and easily.

Our initial scan took about five minutes, and found a bevy of things to fix on our test machine. Advanced WindowsCare Personal allows you to look into the gritty details of each problem and repair them with a single click.

You can also check out Advanced WindowsCare v2 Professional, the always-on upgrade to the free Personal edition. For a limited time, you can get the Professional version for "free" (with the completion of one of 100 "free" offers; we'll let you decide whether it's worth it).

Advance WindowsCare is designed for Windows Vista, XP, and 2000.

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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