BackTrack was the winner of our recent Hive Five for best Live CD, so we decided to take it for a test drive and show off a few of the features for everybody else. BackTrack can be installed to a regular boot cd, a USB drive, installed to the hard drive, or even downloaded as a VMware virtual machin...

If Apple knows how to do anything, it's take tech you've already seen and make it flashier and more fun to use. The new Safari 4 public beta is no exception. Apple says Safari 4's 150 features are "leading the way with innovation," but in reality they're all things we've used before in other browser...

Windows/Mac: Postbox is an email client that helps you re-discover all the photos, attachments, and links buried in your email, as well as organize newer mail. Think of it as Thunderbird with a file-managing fixation. In fact, Postbox is based on at least a good chunk of Thunderbird's code, and most...

Windows/Mac: Foxmarks, our favorite way to keep Firefox bookmarks synced across computers, is now offered for Internet Explorer and Safari, giving anyone with multiple computers or browsers a pain-free way to keep it all together. Foxmarks offers basically the same type of background bookmark-syncin...

It may have been a while since you considered using Windows' built-in tools for backing up your data, but for the average user with media and crucial file needs, Windows 7's default backup features look promising. Windows Vista was the first version of Windows to introduce a consolidated Backup and ...

CrunchBang, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution that sports a snappy, low-drag interface and is perfect for thumb drives, live CDs, or speed-obsessed Linux fans. Check out how it looks and runs in our screenshot tour. Getting started is pretty simple. Head to CrunchBang's main site, find the Download...

A week after it was originally announced, Google rolls out a tool to "create iGoogle themes." It can't do everything we'd hope for, but check out what you can accomplish in the screenshots below. To get started, sign into your Google account from any Google service, then head to the ThemeMaker page....

Windows only: Free application Capture.NET calls itself "the Swiss Army knife of PC tools," and while it does offer a wide array of functionality, calling it a kitchen-sink style tool may be more accurate. Capture.NET is a calendar and clock widget, screenshot application, color picker, crap cleaner...

After a small delay, Google released their new and improved Google Mobile for iPhone app yesterday. We gave you our one-word review, but now it's time for a closer look at Google's impressive new voice recognition search app—the one that's going to make typing to search on your phone a thing o...

When you've got your Windows XP or Vista setup running perfectly, you don't want to lose all your painstaking customizations to a reckless tot, an experiment-minded friend or spouse, or a rogue system-lousing program. Windows SteadyState, as we mentioned earlier this week, helps you to create a kind...