From the developer, “Calibre is a one stop solution to all your e-book needs. It is free, open source and cross-platform in design and works well on Linux, OS X and Windows. calibre is meant to be a complete e-library solution and thus includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion, as well as e-book reader sync features and an integrated e-book viewer.

* Library Management
Calibre manages your e-book collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e., a single entry in your library that may correspond to actual e-book files in several formats.

* E-book conversion
Calibre can convert from a huge number of formats to a huge number of formats. It supports all the major e-book formats.
The conversion engine has lots of powerful features. It can rescale all font sizes, ensuring the output e-book is readable no matter what font sizes the input document uses. It can automatically detect/create book structure, like chapters and Table of Contents. It can insert the book metadata into a “Book Jacket” at the start of the book.

* Syncing to e-book reader devices
Calibre has a modular device driver design that makes adding support for different e-reader devices easy. At the moment, it has support for a large number of devices, the complete list of which is here. Syncing supports updating metadata on the device from metadata in the library and creation of collections on the device based on the tags defined in the library. If a book has more than one format available, calibre automatically chooses the best format when uploading to the device. If none of the formats is suitable, calibre will automatically convert the e-book to a format suitable for the device before sending it.

* Downloading news from the web and converting it into e-book form
Calibre can automatically fetch news from websites or RSS feeds, format the news into a ebook and upload to a connected device. The ebooks include the full versions of the articles, not just the summaries. calibre has over three hundred news sources and the news system is plugin based, allowing users to easily create and contribute new sources to calibre. As a result the collection of news sources keeps on growing!

* Comprehensive e-book viewer
Calibre has a built-in ebook viewer that can display all the major ebook formats. It has full support for Table of Contents, bookmarks, CSS, a reference mode, printing, searching, copying, customizing the rendering via a user style sheet, embedded fonts, etc.

* Content server for online access to your book collection
Calibre has a built-in web server that allows you to access your ebook collection using a simple browser from any computer anywhere in the world. It can also email your books and downloaded news to you automatically. It has support for mobile devices, so you can browse your collection and download books from your smartphone, Kindle, etc. ”

Calibre

From the developer, “Toolwiz Time Freezefree is an effective Instant system restores software to keep your system safe and protect your computer from unwanted changes. It puts the actual system under protection and creates a virtual environment for system partition, on which you run applications and surf the internet. It provides higher-level security to computer protection, and greatly improves the efficiency of virtual system.

What’s new in this version: Version 1.2.0.120 has added float toolbar to show protection mode.”

Toolwiz Time Freeze

From the developer, “From the developer, “Chasys Draw IES (formerly known as Chasys Draw Artist) is a suite of applications including a layer-based image editor with animation, icon editing support and super-resolution via image stacking (Chasys Draw IES Artist), a multi-threaded image file converter (Chasys Draw IES Converter), a fast image viewer (Chasys Draw IES Viewer) and a RAW camera file processor (Chasys Draw IES raw-Photo). The whole suite is UAC aware and is designed to take advantage of multi-core processors, touch-screens and pen-input devices.

What’s new in this version: Version 3.65.01 includes the following changes:
* Brush Engine 2.4 + new brushes
* Improved Razor tool
* Improved PCX, PPM and GTX support
* Fixed bugs in Adobe Brush/Pattern plug-in
* FastExternals 2.31
* Power Management for all apps
* Improved Picker-Palette interaction”

Text to speech program.

From the developer, “Balabolka is a Text-To-Speech (TTS) program. All computer voices installed on your system are available to Balabolka. The on-screen text can be saved as a WAV, MP3, OGG or WMA file. The program can read the clipboard content, view the text from DOC, RTF, PDF, ODT, FB2 and HTML files, customize font and background colour, control reading from the system tray or by the global hotkeys.

Balabolka uses various versions of Microsoft Speech API (SAPI). It allow to alter a voice’s parameters, including rate and pitch. The user can apply a special substitution list to improve the quality of the voice’s articulation. This feature is useful when you want to change the spelling of words. The rules for the pronunciation correction use the syntax of VBScript.

What’s new in this version: Version 2.2.0.509 adds the option “Use system default voice” to the window “Settings”, the tab “Voice.”
In Russian, “Balabolka” means “chatterer.”

Author’s FAQs page.

Balabolka

System cleaning and optimizing tool.

From the developer’s site, “Toolwiz Care is a free tool kit designed to speed up your slow PC. With multi-functional optimization suite, this Windows system optimizer provides a collection of tools which includes System Checkup,System Cleanup,System Speedup,and 40+ powerful tools to enhance your PC performance, local and network security, and optimize the start-up procedure. Toolwiz team guarantees users that Toolwiz Care will stay free forever. This tool kit is designed for all levels of PC users from beginners to experts.

Features :
* The Disk Cleaner tool will clean out all junk files.
* The Registry Cleaner tool will make the PC system more stable by cleaning out the bad Registry entries.
* The Registry Defrager rebuilds PC’s Registry, making the entire system run quicker and smoother.
* The History Cleaner protects the user’s privacy by deleting all activity history and surfing traces.
* The Fast Defrger will de-fragment the hard drive with it’s smart engine, keep the PC running efficiently and prevent the formation of other fragmented files.”

Toolwiz Care

From the developer’s site, “EMDB is a small utility to keep track of your DVD collection. With an automatic import from the database of IMDB, export to csv, text or complete website, thumbnail cover preview, a loan tracker, search function and multi-language user interface. EMDB is written in C++ using Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and doesn’t need a .NET framework or any other external libraries.

EMDB is available in several languages: English, Dutch, Danish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Slovak, Spanish, Hungarian Croatian, Swedish, Greek, Catalan, Czech, Norwegian, Japanese, included in the setup.”

EMDB

Allows otherwise “locked” files or folders to be deleted.

Some examples of errors that otherwise would not allow deleting a file or folder :
* Cannot delete file: Access is denied
* There has been a sharing violation.
* The source or destination file may be in use.
* The file is in use by another program or user.
* Make sure the disk is not full or write-protected and that the file is not currently in use.

Unlocker

Note : During installation you can choose to optionally install the Bing toolbar (see below).

UnLocker install options

From the developer,”Convert video free to AVI, MP4, WMV, MKV, MPEG, SWF, 3GP, DVD, MP3, iPod, iPhone, PSP, Android, rip & burn DVD, convert FLV & online videos from 50+ sites, burn Blu-ray, and upload to YouTube with our free video converter!

200+ Input Formats
Input any video files: AVI, MP4, MKV, WMV, MPG, 3GP, 3G2, SWF, FLV, TOD, AVCHD, MOV, DV, RM, QT, TS, MTS, etc. Import music (MP3, AAC, WMA, WAV), and photos (JPG, BMP, PNG,GIF) to turn them into video free and easily! All supported formats

Unique! Convert Online Videos Directly from 50+ Sites
Freemake is the only free video converter that rips online videos through direct URL copypaste from YouTube, Facebook, MTV, Vimeo, Dailymotion, ComedyCentral, 50 more sites, downloads YouTube to iTunes, and converts them to any format or device available. All supported sites

Output to AVI, WMV, MP4, MKV, FLV, SWF, 3GP, MP3
Convert video free to the most popular video formats. Rip DVD movie (unprotected) to AVI, WMV, MP4, MPEG, MKV, FLV, SWF, 3GP. Convert video to Flash and embed it directly to your web page. Convert video and audio files to MP3 with our free video converter.

Convert Free to iPod, iPhone, iPad, PSP, PS3, Android
Optimize videos for Apple, Sony, and Android devices. Convert videos free to iPod Classic, iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPod 5G, iPhone, iPad, Sony PSP, PS2, PS3, BlackBerry, Xbox, Apple TV, Android mobile devices, smartphones, etc.

New! Fastest Video Converter with CUDA and DXVA
Freemake is the only free video converter that features integrated both CUDA and DXVA technologies for the fastest ever video conversion and less CPU usage. The software automatically detects the optimal conversion parameters and switches on/off CUDA and DXVA for better conversion results.

Burn Blu-ray Video
Convert your movies to video Blu-ray format and burn high-quality BDs for free. Create Blu-ray discs out of any input content: video, audio, photos, URLs. Burn multiple Blu-ray copies and save the resulted Blu-ray video to HDD as an ISO image or Blu-ray folder.

Unique! Burn DVD – up to 40 hours!
Unlike other software, our free video converter doesn’t have a two-hour limit and can burn DVD video up to 20h to a Standard DVD or 40h to DVD-DL. With our free video converter, you can make multiple DVD copies and save the output DVD video to your PC as an ISO image or DVD folder.

Free Video Converter with Subtitles Support
Convert DVD, MKV, MOV with embedded subtitles to any video format or device for free. Add SSA/SRT/ASS external subtitles to any video with our free video converter.

Advanced Preset Editor
Take total control of the output result by customizing conversion parameters. Create your own presets by establishing video and audio codecs, frame size, etc. Choose an icon, and save you custom preset for further usage with our free video converter.

Unique! Upload Photos and MP3 to YouTube
Upload videos, photo slideshows, MP3 to YouTube with our free video converter. Upload AVI, WMV, MP4, 3GP, JPG, BMP, GIF, MP3 to YouTube. The program will cut videos (if required) into 15-minute parts and insert them into one YouTube playlist.

Make Slideshows and Visualizations
Turn photos and MP3 into slideshows with background music for free. Edit your slideshow: add, delete, and shuffle photos, enable panorama effect. Create music visualizations and upload photos to YouTube for free!

Cut, Join, Rotate, Limit size, Adjust to aspect ratio
Cut video parts from your file. Flip or rotate video. Join several videos into one file, add transitions between parts. Fit the output file size to any limit (e.g. 700 Mb, 1.4 Gb, 4.7 Gb). Adjust output video to the established aspect ratio: add black bars, stretch, zoom, auto-adjust.

Freemake Video Converter

Editor’s note : As illustrated below, you are given the option to install additional items (Facemoods toolbar) and alter your search provider.

Freemake Video Converter setup

Thunderbird – email client, newsreader and so much more.

Mozilla Thunderbird is a free, open-source and cross-platform mail client and news reader for most modern operating systems including, but not limited to, Windows, Linux and Macintosh. It offers some advantages over other mail clients, including junk mail classification. Built from Mozilla code, Mozilla Thunderbird uses Gecko, the most standards-compliant rendering engine in existence.

Editor’s Note:
If the above download link for Thunderbird isn’t working, try the author’s page here.

Mozilla Thunderbird

NirLauncher is a package of more than 100 portable freeware utilities for Windows, all of them developed for NirSoft Web site during the last few years.

From the developer :
NirLauncher Features
* NirLauncher can be used from USB flash drive without need of any installation.
* NirLauncher and all the utilities in the package are completely freeware, without any Spyware/Adware/Malware.
* NirLauncher package includes variety of tools that you may need for your daily computer use, including utilities to recover lost passwords, to monitor your network, to view and extract cookies, cache, and other information stored by your Web browser, to search files in your system, and more…
* For every utility in the package, you can easily run it, view the help file, or jump to the Web page of the utility.
* When using it from USB flash drive, the configuration of every utility is saved into .cfg file on the flash drive.
* On x64 systems, NirLauncher automatically run the x64 version of the utility, when there is a separated x64 version.
* NirLauncher also allows to add more software packages in additional to the main NirSoft package..

NirLauncher

Note from the author of NirLauncher : False Positive issues: Many Antivirus programs display false alerts, saying that the utilities are infected with Trojan/Virus/Malware. For more information about false positive problems, read this.