RichCopy is a visual file copying utility that helps you copy or move files at a much faster rate. It has existed since the days of Windows 95 but (unless you’re working at Microsoft) you may have never heard of RichCopy before as it was an internal tool not for public use.
Microsoft has now removed those restrictions and released RichCopy as a public download though the associated license agreement (EULA) is outdated and still refers to RichCopy as an "internal tool".

There are several reasons why you may want to use RichCopy for file copying operations on your Windows computer. First, it can copy files from multiple places (or folders) into a single location. You don’t have to run multiple copy processes for consolidating files (like music, photos, etc.) that may be spread across different directories.

And unlike the default copy process in Windows that copies files in sequence one after another, RichCopy can copy multiple files in parallel thus speeding the process.

RichCopy is especially useful when copying a large number of files or for moving big files - the tool lets you pause and resume file copy operations so if something bad happens, like a dropped network connection, you don’t have start the copy process all over again.

There’s something for geeks as well who use XCOPY on the command line. RichCopy is not just faster than XCOPY but all features available in the GUI version of RichCopy can be used from command line as well.

As the world witnesses the spectacle of the Pirate Bay trial, a new and quietly growing music torrent indexing site adds albums, listens to user feedback, and provides new functionality. Coda.fm is the best little site for exploring music torrents we've seen since OiNK.cd was shut down in 2007. It's redefining what bittorrent can do for music sharing, and user registration is open.

Coda.fm opened to the public only two months ago, but it already has 5,000 registered users and more than 1,000 indexed torrents. What makes Coda.fm special is its exclusive focus on full album torrents. By narrowing the site's focus, it can optimize its user interface to make music browsing fun exploration rewarding. This also allows site moderators to manually check each torrent submitted to the site for correct metadata and torrent health. As a result, users are significantly more likely to find quality recordings on Coda.fm than by just searching The Pirate Bay or Mininova.

The navigation of the site can be compared to some of the better e-commerce sites, with listings of popular and new artists and albums, and the option to browse through different genres. On top of that, the site has a full-blown recommendation engine that makes it a great tool to discover new music, especially when combined with the album reviews and artist bios. Two RSS feeds cover new album releases and recently added torrents, and the site's Twitter account tweets a steady stream of recently added content. The Twitter account, especially, makes it easy to quickly find desirable content as it is uploaded.

Coda.fm offers a simply beautiful user experience thus far unparalleled by other torrent sites, and even by some big online retailers (Amazon, for instance). If you like music, like free, like technology or hate the RIAA, I highly suggest you create an account, look around and download some albums.

In recent times, Microsoft’s ubiquitous Internet Explorer has fallen behind. Even with it being the default browser shipped on most of the world’s computers, Internet Explorer was losing ground to Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and even Google’s Chrome. The reason for IE’s slip was simple, and that’s because it was lagging behind the competition. Microsoft set out to bring back IE with a vengeance, and today’s the day of the official release of Internet Explorer 8.

"Customers have made clear what they want in a Web browser -- safety, speed and greater ease of use," said Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft. "With Internet Explorer 8, we are delivering a browser that gets people to the information they need, fast, and provides protection that no other browser can match." Early feedback from users of the IE8 beta and RC, as well as Windows 7 testers, is positive. Being that security is one of the top concerns amongst internet users, Microsoft boasts that a study released today by NSS Labs indicates that Internet Explorer 8 blocks two to four times as many malicious sites as other browsers on the market today.

Internet Explorer 8 has several new and improved security features like the private browsing mode, automatic crash recovery, domain highlighting or Cross Site Scripting (XSS) and SmartScreen filters. There are also additional usability features like Accelerators or Web Slices which have been implemented into IE8. Most of these features have already been ported by Firefox users to the Firefox web browser. Microsoft is pushing that its browser now among the fastest, saying that IE8 will beat top browsers in page load time on almost 50 percent of the 25 top comScore web sites. See a chart with speed comparisons here.

Download Internet Explorer 8 (RTW) for: Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Vista 64 Bit.

Nearly two years after acquiring "one telephone for life" service GrandCentral, Google is finally preparing to relaunch the service with new features. GrandCentral has been in private beta for the last two years. Over the next few days Google will be prompting existing beta users to upgrade to Google Voice before rolling out the service to new users in a few weeks.

GrandCentral lets you set up a single phone number that you can give out to anyone. When they call that number, it will ring any phone number you've linked to the account. So you can print a single number on your business card, and people will be able to reach you on your home, work, and cellphones. The service also lets you record phone calls, screen calls, create rules for calls coming from specific numbers, and receive email notifications of voicemail messages.

Google Voice has all those features, plus a few new ones, like the ability to make free calls to US numbers and cheap calls to other numbers, make conference calls, and send, receive, store, and search SMS messages.

You'll also get transcripts of all your voicemail messages. That alone is pretty cool. Google will use an automated method to convert speech to text - a service other companies are charging for. The company admits that the automated transcripts won't be perfect. But the company has been fine tuning its speech recognition software for the last year or two with the Goog-411 service. You can find a more complete list of Google Voice features at the Google Voice homepage.

Skype To Go phone numbers now available for all paying users
Skype To Go is a service that lets you make cheap phone calls over Skype from a regular phone. Here's how it works. You sign up for a Skype To Go phone number that's linked to your Skype account. You can then dial that number from any phone to initiate a phone call to another phone at the same rates that you would pay if you were using Skype on your computer. In other words, if your mobile carrier charges $.99 per minute to call New Zealand and Skype charges $.02, you can just call a local number and pay the Skype rate.

Skype has been offering this service for a few years, but it was previously part of the Skype Pro plan. Now Skype is making Skype To Go available as a free service for all paying users.

While there are some legitimate digital music download sites in China - including 9Sky, Top100 and the recently launched Wawawa - digital music is proving to be a tough sell in the P.R.C, partly because of the market dominance of Baidu’s free mp3 search. There are, however, people making decent profit in this as yet unmeasurable market: the hackers of Apple’s iTunes store gift vouchers and their local agents. In China’s biggest C2C online shopping site Taobao, $200USD iTunes gift cards are for sale at 17.9 RMB (≈ $2.6 USD).

There are thousands of cards for sale at the same time. Choose one seller whose Taobao IM is online, talk to him a little bit, purchase his product and pay money to Taobao’s online payment system, Alipay, which supports most banks in China. All the seller actually sells is the gift voucher code which they send you directly through Taobao’s IM software. You can then redeem the card in your iTunes account. Once successfully redeemed you click ‘confirm’ and Alipay transfers your 18 RMB to the seller and you're free to start downloading.

The owner of the Taobao shop told us frankly that the gift card codes are created using key-generators. He also said that he paid money to use the hackers’ service. Half a year ago, when they started the business, the price was around 320 RMB for 200 USD card, then more people went into this business and the price went all the way down to 18 RMB per card, “but we make more money as the amount of customers is growing rapidly.”

“The hackers are based in China, but I don’t know if they do the same thing in eBay”, the Taobao shopkeeper said.”Most of our customers use iTunes store for music, then Apple applications (bear in mind that the iPhone is only available in the grey market in mainland China) and films. iPod games are least popular.”

It does seem unfair... you paid for those songs and now you can't play them outside of the iTunes environment, on hardware not supported by Apple, or on operating systems not supported by iTunes.

That's because the iTunes tracks that you purchase and download are in a "protected" AAC or M4P audio format. Only it's not you that is being protected, it's Apple, or rather Apple's bottom line. Apple explains this by saying that their proprietary format gives you superior sound quality, but that's a smokescreen. It's all about DRM, and DRM is all about the money.

The ability to make copies of copyrighted materials is seen by the recording industry as a threat to its profitability, and perhaps rightly so. DRM (Digital Rights Management) was created by digital media publishers so they could control the duplication and dissemination of their content. But DRM is actually a misnomer. Because rather than granting rights, DRM actually restricts the consumer from doing perfectly valid and reasonable things with music they own.

There are many ways to remove DRM protection from iTunes music. On Windows OS, you can remove the DRM from iTunes music using the burn-and-rip method or you can turn to programs like TuneClone and DoubleTwist. On Mac OS X, iMovie is the perfect solution to removing DRM from iTunes music. Besides, freewares like FairGame is also a pretty good choice. This article is dedicated to introducing several methods of removing the nasty DRM from iTunes music on Windows and Mac OS X.

1 Install Genuine Product Key (32 Bit and 64Bit) Ultimate Edition
2 Install Genuine Activation (32 Bit and 64Bit) Pre-Beta Method
3 Uninstall Genuine Activation (32 Bit and 64Bit) Pre-Beta Method
4 Install \\ Uninstall \\ TimerNuke \\ PlusPatch
5 Rearm Windows 7 (can be used 5 times)
6 Remove Desktop Watermark 32 Bit and 64Bit
7 Enable DreamScenes 32 Bit and 64Bit
8 Remove SendFeedback 32 Bit and 64Bit
9 Restore SendFeedback 32 Bit and 64Bit
10 Unlock Hidden Themes 32 Bit and 64Bit
11 Tweak Windows 7

- Add "Copy To" and "Move To" options in files and folders context menu.
- Force shutdown of freezing programs.
- Decrease menu show delay time.
- Disable low disk space check.
- Disable searching for non existing programs associated with a shortcut.
- Speed up the Explorer navigation.
- Add "Take Ownership" option in files and folders context menu.

You don’t need an external utility (say WinZip) to uncompress .zip files but unfortunately, the built-in decompressor of Windows Explorer cannot handle other popular zip formats like 7z, RAR, Z or TAR.

If someone sent you an email attachment, or you downloaded a file from the Internet, that is compressed using one of these formats, there’s still no need for you to install a new software to extract the contents - just head over to WobZip, upload the compressed file and you’re done.

WobZip will help you upload a compressed file under 100Mb in size. You may also use the tool to uncompress zipped files that may be protected by a password. Internally, they use the popular 7-zip utility to perform the decompression.

Now what I liked most about WobZip is that it can extract online zipped files as well. So if you happen to come across a .zip file on some website, you can simply pass the web address (URL) of that file to WobZip without having to download the file on your local drive. An online unzip utility like WobZip may be very handy for mobile phones and other situations where you have internet access but no tool to uncompress zipped files.