We've already mentioned other ways to power up Google Chrome. Before extensions arrived on the developer channel, Userscripts and bookmarklets were your only options. Both are still great ways to add some kick-ass functionality to Chrome. If you're running the stable or beta builds, you may want to stick to them for now.

• 10 handy Userscripts for Google Chrome users
• 15+ handy bookmarklets for Google Chrome (and other browsers, too!)

Now, onto the extensions!

If you have a favorite that I left off, feel free to share it in the comments!
Share

It's become a common practice to defend your PC with a handful of security apps rather than relying on a single program. One lesser-known app worth investigating is WinPatrol.

Just released, WinPatrol 2010 builds on the strengths of previous versions. It's now even lighter on memory use, weighing in at about 5Mb on my Windows 7 x64 system. Scotty's also learned to play nice by tweaking internal behaviors to reduce conflicts with antivirus applications.

The new version's cookies tab now handles Firefox and Google Chrome in addition to Internet Explorer. Users of the WinPatrol Pro will also enjoy improved realtime scanning speed - 30% quicker than the free version.

Winpatrol also scores serious points for its Pro licensing plan. Not only do you pay once for the software and receive a lifetime of upgrades, but developer Bill Pytlovany believes that your license should follow you - not your computer. That means you're free to enjoy your paid WinPatrol on any and all PCs that you personally own and use. Nice!

Both the free and pro versions of WinPatrol 2010 are available for download now, as is WinPatrol To Go -- the portable version, which is also free.

NirSoft has developed a truckload of useful little applications over the years, many of which you're probably carting around on a USB flash drive if you do any admin work.

Now, thanks to the availability of the NirLauncher beta, Nir's applications are easier to download and use than ever. Included with the NirLauncher executable are more than 100 applications including password viewers for various apps, command line utilities, web video tools, and loads more.

As Nir points out on his blog post, at least one of the apps in the suite is probably going to trigger a false positive from your antivirus app of choice.

The inner geek in all of us is constantly curious about what exactly is going on under the hood of our computer; the trusty ol' Task Manager is usually pretty good at letting us keep an eye on things. Sometimes, however, said inner geek needs a little bit more control over their not-always-well-oiled machine.

Process Hacker is an open source application that incorporates all of Task Manager's features while adding a plethora of other functions, charts, and options. Included in Process Hacker's features are things such as a tree view to see where active processes came from, detailed graphs displaying each process's resource usage and statistics, and (my personal favorite) over a dozen different ways to kill a process.

Sysinternals fans may notice that Process Hacker is very similar to Mark Russinovich's Process Explorer utility. The two utilities trade off a few features; Process Explorer is a little more developer-oriented, where Process Hacker is geared somewhat more toward the average power user.

The download link on Process Hacker's home page is broken, but you can download it directly from their project page on SourceForge.

With the rise of social networking profiles and photo sharing sites, people are putting more photos of themselves online than ever. Retouching, Photoshopping and the infamous "MySpace angle" have all done wonders to make people look better in photos, and now we can add PicTreat to that list. It's a fast, easy way to give yourself a perfect complexion ... on the web, anyway.

PicTreat removes red eye and blemishes and adjusts brightness/contrast and color levels. A basic user of Photoshop could do the same thing, but Pictreat does it very quickly, and then gives you the option to upload the photo to several social sites. You can use PicTreat without registering, but you can also get an account, or sign in using Facebook Connect or MySpace.

No, Windows won't ever compete with Linux on price. However, even though Microsoft isn't giving away their RTM operating systems for free, they do offer a lot of great software and services at no charge. Here are my six favorites -- feel free to share yours with us in the comments!

1. Windows Live Writer - If you don't blog, Live Writer probably isn't that useful to you. If you do, though, it's hard to find a Windows application that can compete with WLW. It's got loads of great features including plugin support so I can add things like Twitter integration.

2. SysInternals - There are so many useful apps under the SysInternals umbrella - Autoruns, Process Explorer, Desktops, RegMon - the list goes on and on. There's also live.sysinternals.com to provide easy access to them all when I forget my usb flash drive. Awesome.

This weekend I finished setting up a fresh triple-boot install on my MSI laptop. With my operating systems ready to go, the time had come to start reinstalling applications. While it wasn't a conscious decision, I noticed that the majority of my apps were Open Source - so I decided to keep the ball rolling.

Even if you haven't just gone through a reformat, these are great applications and well worth installing. If you have, then hopefully this list will provide you with a solid base of programs to get you started with your fresh, new Windows install!

Web Browsers: Chromium, Firefox
They excel at different things, so I install both browsers by default. Chromium is great for all-purpose surfing, while I use Firefox and my favorite extensions to tackle my daily web-based work.

Office: OpenOffice.Org, Sumatra, PDFCreator
For lightweight PDF reading and creation from any Windows app, Sumatra and PDFCreator are solid options. OpenOffice.Org, well, it's the name to beat in open source suites.

SysInternals and Nirsoft make a lot of really, really useful applications, but they're all standalone. Keeping them organized for easy access can get to be a bit of a pain, and that's when Windows System Control Center comes to the rescue.

WSCC is a free, portable application designed to centralize and simplify access to these utilities. Think of it as the Swiss Army shell for your "knife blades."

Launch the program and enter the location for your apps. Relative paths are supported, so don't forget to adjust the directories accordingly if you plan on running it from your flash drive. On my drive, I created a WSCC folder in the root placed the other applications in two subfolders (NS and SI). I find it helpful to check the "hide missing items" box since I don't use every app WSCC supports.

The group buttons on the left side of the main program window make finding specific utilties fast and easy. At the top of the window, there's a search box - which is also a great help in quickly locating an app.

Keep in mind, the download is only the WSCC - you'll need to fetch the actual programs from Nirsoft and SysInternals yourself. Save some time, and grab the SI apps in a single file and Nir's from the Web Panel.

It's free for both private and commercial us, and should be a welcome addition to any Window's admin's flash drive.

[ via Freeware Files ]

Reading and writing to a Mac formatted drive from Windows couldn't be any easier than selecting the samba file sharing option in Leopard. This works great if you have 2 physical computers but what if you only have a Mac running Boot Camp? Since Leopard isn't running getting to that document on the Mac partition from Windows would be difficult unless you installed MacDrive.

Once installed, Windows Explorer is able to mount the Mac drives right along side your standard Windows formatted drives. You are free to access them like any other drive.

If you're worried that you may accidentally delete files off your Mac partition just tick the option to mount the drives in "read only" mode, thus preventing any accidents. MacDrive's options can be access by double clicking it's icon in the system tray. But once you have tailored it to your work flow you'll rarely have a need to access the options.

In our testing we found no noticeable performance drops while accessing standard office documents and music files. And even if there were any drops in performance, the benefit of being able to access files created on the Mac partition from within Windows more than makes up for it.

So if you have your Mac set to dual boot you may want to consider MacDrive in order to swap your documents back and forth.

Have you ever created a bunch of CDs to give out to friends and family only to receive some back because they didn't work? Of course they worked since the other ones you sent out were fine. It must be them! But you wouldn't want to start a family feud over a burnt CD so you graciously make another copy. The next time you decide to burn stuff you should double check your work with FileCheckMD5.

So how will FileCheckMD5 help you out? Well part of this is understanding what MD5 is. In the most basic of terms MD5 insures that the copy you made is the same as the source. Often MD5 are used to double check software downloads on the Internet.

Brandon Staggs, creator of FileCheckMD5, developed an application that can recursively scan all the files and folders in your project and create a MD5 file that you can burn onto your CDs. That way, before you start sending out those disc you can double check if all the data made it intact. You can even burn the application along with your files to have the receiver check the integrity of the disc on their end.

Sure you could always just verify that your CDs were burned correctly using the built in checker that came with your burning software but asking your friends to check to make sure the MD5 hash matches sounds much more technical.

If you're anything like us, your music collection is probably a mislabeled mess that you don't have the time to clean up. Getting the job done using TuneUp, which we took a look at a couple of months ago, is probably as painless as it's going to get. The application is available to the public starting today. It's easy to use, efficient, and has a great UI. There were a few kinks here and there the first time we used it. It crashed every time we tried to save the track information for a few songs, although strangely enough, it always happened with tracks we wouldn't admit to owning.

Drag up to 50 or 60 songs from your iTunes library into TuneUp and it automatically starts looking up the track information using Gracenote. You can either save the information for each song individually, or save them all in one go. TuneUp is extremely accurate, but we would definitely advise you to scan through the results as some of the more obscure singers aren't in Gracenote's database. The drawback we highlighted last time hasn't been solved. Even if two tracks appear on the same album, but also on other albums, TuneUp won't necessarily group them together. On the other hand, we were impressed with its ability to differentiate between studio and live tracks.

TuneUp will also dig up the missing cover artwork for your collection in minutes, provide links to videos on YouTube and album recommendations from Amazon depending on what you're listening to, and concert notifications from StubHub depending on what's in your library. TuneUp, despite being in its early beta stages, is already so good, it's worth the hassle of having to use a bloated program like iTunes. The free version of TuneUp limits you to fixing 500 tracks and finding 50 album covers, and an unlimited version of the program is available for an $11.95 annual subscription or a one-time payment of $19.95.

So why not Activity Monitor? Well, if you're just going to use it as a display in the dock, it's using way more system resources than you need. Its Dock readout also isn't as customizable as the one in CPU History, which lets you set the update interval, the width of the bars in the CPU graph, and the size of the icon in the Dock. The latest version also shows separate graphs for multi-core processors. It doesn't really do much, but CPU History gets its very specific job done with minimal hassle.

[via Daring Fireball]

Contrary to marketing hype, Macs do crash and when they do you'll need to do some basic troubleshooting to determine the reason why.

If it appears to be a hardware problem, one thing you may want to remember is, well, Rember.

Rember is a front end GUI for Memtest and while you can certainly run Memtest in Terminal, Rember's GUI version makes it much easier to use.

The interface is broken up into 3 main parts:

• How much memory you want tested
• The number of times you want to run the test
• Preferences

Once you decided on the amount of ram and the number of loops let Rember do the rest. Once completed, review the logs to determine if your RAM is the reason why your Mac is crashing.

Keep in mind that Rember is a GUI app that runs on top of your OS so some of your RAM will be in use and will not be available for testing. Think of it has a small trade off for not having to deal with the Memtest switches.

Knowing the status of your hard drive is a great way to prepare for problems that may potentially arise. And thank to CrystalDiskInfo obtaining this information from your hard drive couldn't be any easier.

CrystalDisk will gather data from your hard drive and will let you know its current temperature, the number of power cycles and even the number of hours the drive has been on. All this information comes in handy when trying to determine the root of a system crash or data failure, especially when you're dealing with an older drive in a crowded system case where cooling may not be optimal.

In our testing, the program was very easy to use and recognized our drive right away. Fortunately for us, we had no issues but if we did, we had no doubt that CrystalDisk would alert us to the problem so that appropriate steps could be taken.

CrystalDisk is a free application available for Windows and is a bit of a must have tool in diagnosing hard drive errors.

You've just downloaded that must have program only to realize that Windows has no idea what to do with it. After an hour of Google searching, forum posting, and being called n00b, you finally figure it out.

If only there was a guide that showed you how to get all those needed programs. We at Download Squad feel your pain and have put together a list of 10 free programs that will take care of those pesky "Windows cannot open this file" messages once and for all.

Note: See a blatant omission or oversight? Please add it to the comments. With your help, we hope to re-post a more complete list the future.

1. K-Lite codec pack
   
   File Types: DivX, XviD, AVI, Mpeg 1-4, AC3, AAC, FLAC, WAV, FLV, OGG, VOB, and tons you've never heard of.
   
   Description: Why there are 85,000,000 different audio and video types we have no idea. What we do know is trying to install codecs one at a time generally ends in a reformat.
   
   Thankfully, the good people from K-Lite (Koors Lite?) have bundled all the software and codecs you need into one executable. Cheers!
   
   
   
2. Real Alternative and QuickTime Alternative
   
   File Types: RM, RA, RAM, RPM, RMVB, RPX, SMI, SMIL, RT, RP, MOV, QT, 3GP
   
   Description: Before the days of Youtube, the Real Player and QuickTime were kings of Internet multimedia. Sure you had to deal with popups, reminders, updates, and bloatware, but that 1" video was so worth it.
   
   Fortunately, the Real and Quicktime Alternatives removed the real in Real Player and restored the quick to QuickTime. Enjoy your 1" video!