Most of us back in the day remember when Dashboard was still being developed from Beta 1 to the Final version of Dashboards (Screenshot of Dashboard Beta 1 of Version 1.0 ). It indeed a great sight to see and hear about how many people were using and still are using Dashboard. Till today Dashboard has gotten over 200K downloads and the numbers are still growing.

CPUID.com has released a silent update to CPU-Z. CPU-Z is a freeware that provides some information on your system like Processor name and vendor, core stepping and process, motherboard and memory information.

Thanks to the guy's at CDFreaks.com for sending this in.

User Lenco used their news submit feature to tell about a small maintainance release of DVD2one - Version 1.2.1.

CPUCooL is a program that monitors temperature, fan speed and voltages for many motherboards. It works with all chipsets from Intel, ALI, VIA, AMD and SiS 5595 motherboards.

ZoneLabs has released a new freeware version of their critically acclaimed software firewall solution ZoneAlarm. As of now there is no changelog available. Download

Thanks to Tim at Majorgeeks.com for sending in this new freeware tool.

CPU Burn-in v1.01 by Michal Mienik is the ultimate stability testing tool for overclockers. The program heats up any x86 CPU to the maximum possible operating temperature that is achievable by using ordinary software. This allows the user to adjust the CPU speed up to the practical maximum while still being sure that stability is achieved even under the most stressful conditions. The program continuously monitors for erroneous calculations and errors ensuring the CPU does not generate errors during calculations performed under overclocking conditions.

VideoLAN main goals is MPEG streaming on a network, but it also features a standalone multimedia player. The VideoLAN Server can stream video read from a hard disk, a DVD player, a satellite card or an MPEG 2 compression card, and unicast or multicast it on a network.

MBM-Net is a companion program to Motherboard Monitor 5. It allows you to monitor computers on your network and display information such as CPU temperature, system temperature, and fan speeds. That way you can see the status of your machines in one convenient window instead of remote desktop"ing" into each machine and checking! You can monitor any computer on your home network or over the internet using MBM-Net! Up to 255 machines are supported!

SiSoftware have released their newest installment of their popular synthetic benchmarking program, Sandra MAX3! The updated version has support for a bunch of new hardware including the 64-bit version of Windows and AMD's upcoming Athlon 64 processor!

BSplayer is a Windows player that plays back all kinds of media files ( avi / mpg / asf / wmv / wav / mp3...) and specialises in video and DivX playback. Click on Read More... to see what's new and download links.

XviD is a codec just like DivX. Most new movies and videos are being encoded with XviD. Right now 2 new codec versions have been released:
Koepi's XviD Codec Build 24062003-1 uManiac's XviD Codec Build 26.06.2003.1100 (My personal favourite) Click on Read More... to see what's new and download links.

Asus has just released the latest version of their Windows based utility which lets you view your motherboards BIOS, flash from internet or file, save to file and more. A must have for Asus owners.

PowerStrip 3.42 provides advanced, multi-monitor, programmable hardware support to a wide range of graphics cards - from the venerable Matrox Millennium I to the latest SiS Xabre and Radeon 9800. It is in fact the only program of its type to support multiple graphics cards from multiple chipset vendors, simultaneously, under every Windows operating system from Windows 95 to XP.

Eric over @ TweakHound has written a comparison between a few different XP-Tweaking tools.
He compared tools like X-Setup, NeoTweak, mi-Tweak XP and other, non freeware tools for their usability.

Since I put together my XP Tweaking Guide I've been asked to review several XP tweaking programs. I've also been asked by readers to recommend one of these programs. I'm going to look at several tweaking programs, some free and some not. Each program will have a very brief description (I'm not here to advertise for them!) and a screen shot. Conclusions and recommendations will come at the end. Read the comparison over here.

Latest referencefile for Ad-aware, a free multi spyware removal utility. Included are newly added signatures for: MSConnect Malware, Bay Technologies ltd Dialer, TopPicksIdiumSystems Updater, Premium-Connect "Browser Update" (Dialer), "Clicker" hijacker and several tracking cookies. Updated signatures include: NCase, Whazit Toolbar, Brilliant-Digital Projector, FreeScratchCards, MemoryMeter, Adult-Chat (Dialer), NetPal, PeopleOnPage(POP!), Purity-Scan, ShopNav Hijacker, BroadCast PC, Favoriteman and My-Way Speedbar.

XviD is a codec just like DivX. Most new movies and videos are being encoded with XviD.
Right now 2 new codec versions have been released:
Koepi's XviD Codec Build 19062003-1 uManiac's XviD Codec Build 23.06.2003.1740 Click on Read More... to see what's new and download links.

eMule is a filesharing client which is based on the eDonkey2000 network, but offers more features and improvements than the standard eDonkey client. Its still opensource but under the restrictions of the GPL license.

Driver Cleaner is a program which helps you to remove parts of drivers that are left after uninstalling the old drivers. The program is for ATI and nVidia drivers. First you need to uninstall the drivers from the control panel than reboot and after that run the program.

MetaMachine has released an updated candidate of the popular hybrid P2P file sharing client eDonkey 2000 v.0.49.4. This client is also compatible with the Overnet network. The new release was tested for some weeks now as it includes a new download system called Horde. Read more...

A-tuner is a small tool for changing the following 4 settings on your Nvidia card and should work with Nvidia Detonators 23.11 - 44.65 and Windows 98/ME/2000/XP. Additionally it provides small tweaks to Detonator drivers. Anti-Aliasing (including all unofficial modes) Anisotropic Filtering Vsync MipMap LOD (Level Of Detail) Bias