It’s not going to win any design awards, but BitMeter 2, a program for monitoring your PC’s bandwidth usage, offers a nice set of features. BitMeter 2’s floating graph with simple text displays for real-time downloads and uploads is easy to follow. You can customize the display’s color and transparency.

Considering its size, BitMeter 2 provides an impressive amount of options and information. You can view summaries of network activity with hourly, daily, and monthly breakdowns, or receive audio notifications that can be set by transfer size and direction. The built-in calculator is useful for computing the speed and size of download and upload activities. You can create automatic or manual backups of the program to easily restore history and settings, and there’s an ISP Restrictions configuration panel that can configured with a minimum of hassle.

This freebie is easy enough for any user looking for a simple and effective tool for monitoring network activity.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free offers strong basic protection from computer viruses, malware, rootkits, and emerging threats. It’s lightweight and unobtrusive, partly because it doesn’t pack on extras like identity and privacy protection that other tools can provide, and partly because it lacks some of the automated features and support options that come with Bitdefender’s premium antivirus solutions.

PROS

Less is more: Bitdefender Antivirus Free is refreshingly free of the “extra” features and tools that make some apps unwieldy and confusing for non-experts.

Easy to use: Bitdefender’s compact main interface is a glorified system tray pop-up. We could toggle the Virus Shield and Auto Scan features, access an optional My Bitdefender account, and open the Logs, which also manage Events and Quarantine lists.

Auto Scan: Bitdefender’s proprietary Auto Scan feature saves time and resources by focusing attention on high-risk areas. You can disable Auto Scan in the interface’s Configuration Area.

Virus Shield: The optional Virus Shield scans files, Web pages, and data in real time to keep malware at bay.

CONS

Incompatible: Bitdefender Antivirus Free doesn’t share power with other antivirus freeware like Microsoft Security Essentials.

Installation issues: Bitdefender’s installer offers to remove conflicting programs, reboot, and resume setup, but we had to reboot and finish the installation manually.

BOTTOM LINE

Plenty of free antivirus solutions offer nearly as many bells and whistles as premium packages. If you just want reliable antivirus protection that doesn’t require a lot of attention, Bitdefender Antivirus Free belongs on your short list.

Ots CD Scratch 1200 is a fun and easy-to-use program that lets users play CDs in a virtual turntable environment. It’s not as complex as some of the DJ software that we’ve seen, which may be a drawback for more advanced users, but this program is a great choice for those just getting started with turntable-style DJing.

The program’s interface isn’t the most intuitive we’ve ever seen, but it gets points for being fun. The design seeks to replicate the appearance of a real DJ deck, with two turntables and various cables and buttons. We do wish that some of the buttons had mouse-over tooltips, but on the whole the program was pretty easy to figure out after a bit of experimentation. Ots CD Scratch 1200 has several really cool features, including the option to play two tracks from the same CD at once. The program can even play one or both of the tracks backward, and they can be sped up or slowed down with a simple slider. The application’s PDF Help file is well-written and thorough. If we have any complaint about the program it’s that it is a CD player and only that; it does not allow users to play MP3s or other digital audio formats. The program does support the use of multiple CD players, though, so it’s a great choice if you want to spin songs that are still stored on CDs.

Ots CD Scratch 1200 is free, but the paid Deluxe version has additional features. The program installs a desktop icon without asking but uninstalls cleanly. We recommend this program to all users.

It’s easy enough to print a Web page by simply going to the File menu of your browser and selecting Print, but what you see on your screen is not always what you get on paper. Free HTML to PDF Converter solves this problem by converting Web pages to PDF or image files. It’s a simple program, but one that has the potential to be tremendously useful.

The converter’s interface is plain and intuitive. Users simply enter the URL of the Web page they want to convert and select whether they want to convert to a PDF with selectable text, a PDF with embedded images, or an image file. There are a variety of other settings that users can tinker with as desired, everything from embedding fonts and including live links to specifying the Web page size and adding PDF metadata. The program also lets users password protect the resulting PDF if desired, and users can choose whether they want the Web page converted as a single page or multiple pages. The program does have an online Help file, but it’s definitely written with advanced users in mind. Fortunately, no advanced knowledge is required to take advantage of most of the program’s features, which makes Free HTML to PDF Converter a great program for users of all levels.

Free HTML to PDF Converter comes as a ZIP file. It’s accessible after extraction with no need for installation. We recommend this program to all users.