"A completely free imaging workhorse"

Looking for a good way to manage your photo collection? Well look no further, for the FastStone Image Viewer is awaiting you.

Here is what the gurus at CNET had to say about it:

For a free program, this multipurpose image tool strikes us as a good find. Although the main window looks too cluttered at first glance, it's intuitive enough after you get your bearings. FastStone Image Viewer for Windows boasts a nice design already, but you can customize it to your liking with several skins. Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. Though its image-editing tools can't compete with those offered by a full-featured suite, there's still enough here to make a decent amount of tweaks to your shots. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast. You'll also find a few simple effects and filters, including Lens, Waves, and Morphs. FastStone Image Viewer for Windows can batch-convert files into a number of popular image formats including GIF, BMP, PSD, and PNG, and the slide-show creator allows you to apply transitions, specify the interval between images, and add your own MP3s as a soundtrack. We can recommend this program to everyone but professional designers.

With a five-star rating from CNET, nearly two million downloads, and sizing in at only 3.27 MB, the FastStone Image Viewer appears to be a winner.

FastStone Image Viewer

Super Bowl Commercials

Ahhh, a fresh batch of Super Bowl ads. Consumers love them. So much that some people tune in to the game just to see the new commercials. In case you missed them or you're just dying to see your favorite one again, the good people at YouTube put together a nice collection for you.

Dubbed "Super Vote", YouTube has compiled 49 Super Bowl ads for your viewing pleasure. You can also rank them in an order of your choice and submit them to the master list which is updated every hour. After a day of tallying votes, YouTube will then crown a winner that will be featured on their homepage tomorrow. At 30 seconds per commercial, you'll manage to kill roughly 25 minutes if you watch them all. If you decide to vote, tack on an extra 10 minutes or so and now you've wasted 35 minutes of your life that you can never have back! But hey, it's the Super Bowl right?

SuperVote

Are you ready for Vista?

So Windows Vista just came out. Think you're ready for it? Might want to run this free upgrade advisor from CNET to make sure your PC can handle it.

It will ask for your permission to run a small download. Tell it yes and you should be good to go. It takes about 5 minutes to complete the analysis, after which you'll see a list of components it checked and how you graded. Personally, my 2-year-old PC failed on 5 out of the 9 component checks. Yeah, major bummer huh? I say yes and no. First off, as we've all come to know the Microsoft monopoly, Vista is going to have more bugs than an overly sentimental entomologist. I'm perfectly fine letting everyone else iron out all of the bugs for me. Secondly, Vista hasn't been getting all that great of reviews. Sure it's shiny and pretty to look at, but is shiny really worth upgrading half the components in your PC? For the same price you could invest in a new 20" widescreen LCD monitor and everything will look shinier!

So if you're considering an upgrade to Vista, run the analysis to make sure your PC is capable. Unless it's fairly new or you bought a high end computer to begin with, be prepared to do a little upgrading.

Upgrade Advisor