I chanced upon an interesting thread over at the Webmaster World forum. At the recent PubCon, Matt Cutts is supposed to have mentioned that there were over 200 variables in the Google Algorithm. This isn’t news actually. We know that are an embarrassing number of factors that determine the position a page on Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page). However, this time there is a list - a partial one, but no doubt, an insightful one.

WinSysClean is a Windows System Cleaner that automatically optimizes your Windows System by optionally removing temporary/unused space wasting files, unused registry locations, invalid shortcut links, and many more. WinSysClean remove specific types of files that common disk utilities, uninstall, setup, defrag, scandisk, and other cleaner type programs will miss, at least according to the publishers.

After staying in beta for last several months, ZoneAlarm, one of the most popular free firewall for Windows, quietly released the first stable version of the product to be used with Windows 7. In fact, the release was so quiet that the publishers have still not updated their download page. The download being offered at the time of this writing is still the earlier version 8 of the firewall.

Microsoft Outlook Personal Folders Backup is a tool for Microsoft Outlook 2002, 2003 and 2007 that provides a quick and easy way to automatically back up the Outlook information of your choice to your hard disk or network server or share.

Two days ago I invited readers to submit their names for Google Wave invitation nominations. Plenty of entries were received, but names of only 8 people were chosen by the draw conducted using Random.org’s true random number generator. Here are the 8 lucky winners.

I have been using Speed Dial from the very first time it was introduced in Opera 9. Anybody who uses Opera invariably uses Speed Dial. Firefox has a Speed Dial extension too. Then Chrome came up with a Speed Dial like start page, and overnight it became a hit. Undoubtedly, Speed Dial is one of the coolest addition for the modern browser.

Handy Backup Standard is an easy-to-use robust backup software that performs automated backup of your computer. It can backup your data to a variety of storage media including DVD, CD, local or external HDDs, network drives and remote FTP servers. A user-friendly wizard guides the user through a 7 step backup process through which even the most novice user can create or schedule backups, restore or synchronize their data.

1. Maggwire: Read articles from over 600 popular magazines online. Plenty of big names like Fortune, PC World, Sports Illustrated, Time, People and so on. One small snag – you can’t read the whole issue, only selected articles.

2. 100+ free games from Microsoft: Small, casual games that can be played online for free. If you want to download, you have to pay. [via Shell Extension City]

Google Docs Viewer is an online tool that lets you open PDF files online without downloading it. With the gPDF browser plugin, viewing PDF files in Google Docs Viewer becomes easier. Upon installation gPDF rewrites all links to downloadable PDF files on a webpage to open automatically in Google Docs Viewer. This makes accessing PDF files on the web a lot faster, since you don’t have to wait for it to download first.

Sometimes after a malware attack or due to installation of some faulty software, Windows might develop certain problems. The Registry Editor gets disabled, thumbnails stop working in Windows Explorer, hibernate button is missing in the start menu and the like.

I have a couple of Google Wave invites to give away. If you haven’t received an invitation yet and desperately want to try out this new platform, just fill the form below and your name will be added to the list of nominations. I will be giving away 6 to 8 invitations for now and winners will be announced next week.

Opera user Rafal has done a great service for the Opera community by creating a User JavaScript Manager for Opera. Atlast! The UJS Manager allows you to add, edit and manage installed User JavaScripts without having to use a file manager like Windows Explorer.

Advanced SystemCare Pro is an automated, all-in-one PC security package with anti-spyware, privacy protection, performance tune-ups, and system cleaning capabilities. This powerful tool fixes stubborn errors, cleans out clutter, optimizes Internet and download speeds, ensures personal security, and maintains maximum computer performance automatically.

Last week Google rolled out a new search page design which was accessible only to a selected few. Now with a short JavaScript code, any user can try out the changes themselves. Simply open www.google.com, paste the following code into the address bar of your browser and hit enter.

One of the tricks every new Photoshop user wants to try out is erase the background from an image and add another background in it’s place. Say you take a picture of yourself standing in your backyard and superimpose it on top of another picture, say the Pyramid of Giza, to make it look like you are vacationing in Egypt. Composite images are used often in magazine covers, posters, advertisements, movies etc. No wonder we have a childlike fascination for them.

Usually, if you don’t want anybody else to use your computer while you are away from your desk, you lock it (Win+L). But if you need to lend your computer to another user but don’t want them to access certain running applications like your email program or calendar application, you will need to use LockThis!.

Zoomcreator is a software developed by a company called Zoomorama that allows you to create slick picture, text and video slideshows in Flash and embed the same in your blog or website, or share it with your friends by sending them your album URL.

miniMIZE is a small application that catches windows that you minimize and puts a thumbnail of the application window on your desktop. miniMIZE has the ability to clear the taskbar of minimized windows and instead put floating thumbnails of minimized application on the desktop. miniMIZE comes handy if your taskbar gets congested.

Dismantlement: Radio is a fascinating game of puzzle where the ultimate goal is to dismantle a radio and reduce it to it’s components parts. You have only one tool at your disposal – a screwdriver.

If Wikipedia is to be believed, millions of meteors hit the Earth's atmosphere every day. That’s impressive. However only a small percentage of these are visible because half of them happen during the day, and many are too small to be seen. The rest are obscured by air pollution and light pollution. Meteors are hard to catch because of the complete lack of predictably when the next one is going to strike and strike bright enough to be visible with the naked eye.

Growl for Windows, as the name says, is a Mac styled Growl-like application for Windows, similar to Snarl which we mentioned in the past. Those who aren’t familiar, Growl is a notification system on Mac that lets users know when things happen like files finished downloading, friends came online, new email has arrived etc. Growl notifications are subtle and it stays out of your way most of the time.

SuperPreview is a tool from Microsoft that lets web developers test websites and debug layout issues across different web browsers, by viewing their pages in multiple browsers simultaneously.

A free, open source application called PosteRazor allows you to print large sized posters on a standard desktop printer. The software takes the image you want to turn into a poster and chops it down into precisely sized smaller pieces which can be printed on standard printer-sized papers. After printing out all the pages, they are then pasted together to create posters of any size you want.

Do you walk out of a theatre as soon as the movie ends and the end credits starts rolling? Many people do that. After all, who wants to know who the makeup artist’s assistant was, or who was responsible for the lights? End credits are like the bibliography at the end of a book – you have to include it but nobody reads it. And they are always like 10 minutes long.

When Windows Vista was released and many of the earlier programs that ran on Windows XP didn’t run on Vista, users made a big face. Microsoft anticipated a similar problem when there were working on Windows 7, and so they came up with a rather novel solution – Windows XP Mode.

A working home surveillance system with motion detection can be easily setup with a cheap webcam and free software such as UGOlog, which we wrote about a while ago. But the problem with such tools, as John Biggs from CrunchGear observed, is that it captures too many blank shots triggered by false alerts like moving leaves or a reflection. Vitamin D Video solves this problem.

Secret Disk is a free software that lets you hide files you don’t want others to see on your computer. This may include your personal emails, financial records, and other private data. Secret Disk lets you have a separate virtual disk on your PC which can be locked and unlocked with a password.

So you just made the switch to Windows 7 from your trusted Windows XP box, but you have trouble finding things and figuring out where different settings and tools are located. Although the system wide search is a big relief, you might still want everything at one place. Then give Windows7 in a Box a try.

Classic Windows Start Menu brings back the classic Windows Start Menu to Windows Vista and 7, while retaining the glassy Aero look that is so popular among Vista and 7 fans. The program has no GUI or settings whatsoever. Just run the executable file and click on the Start menu Orb to see it in action.

Lunascape is the only browser that includes three major rendering engines namely - Firefox’s Gecko, Internet Explorer’s Trident and WebKit (Safari and Chrome), and allows the user to switch from one to the other on-the-fly. The first time we wrote about Lunascape was back in November 2008 when the product was in alpha stage. The latest beta release Lunascape 6 ORION has received a big overhaul.

Today Google announced some major improvements to Google Movies. Never heard of Google Movies? No surprise. It’s one of those cool toys nobody knows about. Google Movies is a movie showtime search engine that displays movie timings from local theatres no matter where on Earth you are. Previously, Google Movies showed just movie timings. Starting today, it began showing more detailed movie information with ratings, genre filters and a new map view.

Amazon today announced the beta release of Kindle for PC, a free ebook reading application for Windows which is capable of opening ebooks made for the Kindle. Customers do not need to own the device to use the software - books can be purchased, downloaded and read directly on the PC.

Soon after Philadelphia developer Nomadio discovered an unfinished Windows 7 feature (Virtual WiFi) that can turn a laptop into a WiFi hotspot, the company exploited the feature and created a free application called Connectify, which we reviewed just weeks ago.

A designer at Mintpass showed off a couple of designs for calculators that look exactly like the calculator applications in Windows and in Mac OS X.

A while back we did a review of an interesting addon for Firefox called InvisibleHand - a tool that compares prices across dozens of different online retailers and displays the best offer available for the item you are currently looking.

A new beta version 1.8 is out and we have 200 invites to give away! To try the beta just go to this page and enter the invite code “invisibleInstant”.

We all know Internet Explorer 6 is a big pain in the ass, especially if you do web design/development. Professional web designers despise IE6, and often charge extra for making websites compatible to IE6 because of the additional effort needed and the time wasted on bug hunting. Here is one way to allay their troubles.

If you frequently use Ctrl+F (the search feature) in Firefox to find inpage text, you will like FindList, a new experimental addon that adds a drop down list to the search box. FindList keeps a history of the last 15 searches in the web page.

PrintBrush is by far the most amazing printer I have ever seen. It fits in your pocket and can print full sized A4 sheets at 600 dpi (black and white only). It uses Bluetooth and rechargeable batteries to print without any wires, although it does carry the optional USB and IRda interface. But PrintBrush’s awesomeness is in the way it prints. Watch the video below.

Opera Software and Garmin-ASUS have organized a contest that offers you a chance to win the newly launched Garmin-ASUS Nuvifone M20 – a sleek and sexy, touch screen, Windows Mobile based, GPS mobile phone, along with other daily prizes.

The PLoP Boot Manager is a very flexible boot manager program that lets you boot different operating system in a multi-OS system. The different operating systems not necessarily be installed on a had disk. PLoP Boot Manager can boot OS from hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB. The boot manager itself can reside on a floppy, CD or on a network.

Keyboard shortcuts are always useful if you want to work fast. Instead of wasting time navigating menus and looking for items and buttons, hit a keyboard combination and you are done. If you are a designer, keyboard shortcuts are an absolute necessity. But memorizing shortcuts is not easy because every program has it’s own set of shortcuts and you probably use more than a couple of products for your work.

Graphics generators are a cool thing. They are useful, they are fun. A while back I wrote about a landscape generator called Terragen. Terragen was a realistic 3D landscape generator capable of creating stunning Earth terrain, vegetation and water bodies that is impossible to tell apart from real photographs. Terragen is often used in games and movies. It was a real thing.

Technology is changing at such a rapid pace that even tech people have trouble keeping up with the latest trend – multi touch screens, OLED displays, ever growing social networking tools and Google Wave. Imagine how a person born before the transistor was invented must feel in this digital age. For them technology is a huge impenetrable wall. It’s a shame because computers and the Internet is such a wonderful thing. FamiliLink helps bridge the huge communication gap that exist between the older generation and today's technology.

Threatened Voices is a new project by Global Voices (a community of bloggers), that maps instances where bloggers and online writers have been threatened, arrested, killed, or disappeared by authorities for speaking out online since 2000. The map is accompanied by an interactive timeline that help visualize the story of threats and arrests against bloggers worldwide. The site also has extensive information and stories about those whose right to free speech were suppressed.

One of the reason why Microsoft attracts so much bad press is their trash talk. If you follow Microsoft’s recent track record you will see a pattern. It begins with Steve Ballmer or any spokesperson from Microsoft making a disparaging comment about something, usually a competitor’s product. Later the product goes on to become a huge success and those blockheaded comments come around to kick Microsoft on their ass. More often than not, Microsoft ends up eating their own words.

ABBYY FineReader, one of the most intelligent Optical Character Recognition software, is now available as an online service.

ABBYY FineReader Online which is still in beta, allows you to take advantage of ABBYY’s OCR technology to convert scanned copies of text, such as those from books or magazines, to editable documents. During the beta period the service will be available for free, although page recognition is limited to 10 pages per day for each registered user.

1. Flickr App Garden: An official repository of unofficial Flickr tools created by developers using the Flickr API. Yeah, it’s about time.

2. Cell Size and Scale: Ever wondered how large a coffee bean is compared to a skin cell, or the X chromosome, or the HIV or a carbon atom? This interactive Flash movie will tell you.

Mindreader is simple browser based mindreading game. The rules of the game is this: the user enters a sequence of 1s and 0s and the computer tries to predict the user’s next entry. The goal of the game is to fool the computer into making the wrong prediction by entering an unpredictable sequence of numbers.

Compare My Docs is a new service that lets you compare multiple Word or rich text documents online to find differences. The service lets you upload up to six versions of the same document and see what's been changed, edit and save the changes.

TimeToGoAppi is a very advanced task scheduler application for Windows that goes beyond the capabilities of the default Windows task scheduler, which is actually rather poor. TimeToGoAppi allows you to automate a wide range of tasks on your computer including but not limited to shutdown/hibernate/restart, launching programs, terminating programs, connecting/disconnecting Internet etc.

Did you know you can browse files on an FTP server in Windows 7 Explorer just like you browse a local drive? I didn’t, until I discovered this trick on WindowsObserver.

In Windows 7 open up a Windows Explorer window and type in the address to the FTP server in the location bar. If the FTP server requires login, it will prompt you to enter the username and password. You can also select Anonymous Log in, if the server allows, and Save Password at the bottom of that dialog box.

Email service providers continue to push the upper limits of allowed attachment size. Currently both Gmail and Yahoo supports attachments up to 25 MB in size, but people want more. Why do email service providers limit the attachment size when everything else such as bandwidth and disk space is virtually free? Because the mail protocol wasn’t created to handle file transmission. As a commenter on Google Operating System explains, sending large files through email is a very bad idea.

Haven’t got your Google Wave invite yet? Don’t worry. Sooner or later you will get it. In the meantime, you can get yourself acquainted with Wave by reading “The Complete Guide to Google Wave” written by Lifehacker’s founding editor Gina Trapani with Adam Pash.

You know what happens when you write long winded articles in your blog or post a verbose comment in a forum? Someone will come in and say “tl;dr”. Well, some Wikipedia articles leave me with the same feeling. Wikipedia writers and editors are so thorough that they like to cram all the information that they can accumulate into the articles. Although that makes Wikipedia a great place for researching on a subject, it’s unsuitable when you need quick information – something which is short and easy to understand.

Most digital cameras today support the RAW image format. Unfortunately, Windows doesn’t. RAW images cannot be viewed in Windows image viewer or Windows Live Photo Gallery, and Explorer doesn’t show thumbnails of RAW images. Thankfully, the Windows Imaging Component for Vista and 7 makes it possible for 3rd party tools to add support for RAW image formats to Windows, complete with thumbnails in Explorer.

What is Svchost?

Svchost is short for “Service Host”. Many components of the Windows operating system are implemented through what are called "services" - programs that run in the background that aren't necessarily associated with whomever is logged into the machine. A fair number of those services are implemented in DLLs rather than in stand-alone executables to ensure reusability. But a DLL is only a library of functions that can't be run on its own. It can only be called by executable programs. Svchost was created to fulfill this purpose.