Soft District

With PhotoDirector 2011, CyberLink advances to photo management and processing from the video area they are good at. Cyberlink is known for its PowerDVD and PowerDirector software. This software is a convincing debut in which they were inspired by Adobe’s PhotoShop Lightroom. It is really a well thought out photo processing tool for semi professionals.

The interface of this software looks very similar to Cyberlink’s video editor. The interface is very attracted and user friendly that it can get you started right away. The main menu consists of three points which mark the working steps during photo management. Under ‘Library’, photos can be imported and organized or tagged in projects, collections and albums. Moreover, an access to the metadata of a photo is available here. During import, PhotoDirector supports many RAW formats with focus on the camera of the two market leaders, Canon and Nikon. Using the filter and search function, you can quickly find the desired images. ‘Smart Albums’ helps sort the images automatically as per the individual criteria, for example date or file name or file type.

Photos can be properly tuned and processed in the Adjustments section. Using parameters, the complete image and masked ranges can be adjusted, retouched and improved. A batch mode offers options to make changes by clicking on several photos at once. Advanced users can save their manual settings to use them as a macro in the future. The software allows you to edit your photos via various sliders. As you keep moving the sliders, the photo changes to show the effect applied to it. For ease of use, similar settings a grouped together, such as sharpness, brightness and saturation are grouped together.

The good thing about this photo editing software is that it uses non-destructive editing, which means that it will always keep the original photo even if you create several edited versions of your photos. You can also view the log of all changes made on a photo in depth. The software also lets you do a side by side comparison of your photos before and after editing, thereafter letting you see how your photos are gradually evolving. The multi-monitor support is also very handy as it lets you see and edit photos over two computer monitors.

The best way to be able to assess the effects of different functions on a photo is to place a virtual copy of it. These copes requires space on the hard disk only if exported. Using the ‘Adjustment process’, you can access all the changes that are mad and can get back to any processing time period. Under the ‘Slide Show’ menu, photos can be exported as an automatic image gallery. A slide show can be displayed as H.264, MP4 or WMV formats and can also be uploaded on YouTube immediately. Moreover, individual photos can be exported in the library as a file or stored on photo websites such as Flickr or Facebook.

When you share your computer with other members of your family, where each member has a different user account, you may want to prevent others from accessing your account by repeated attempts of cracking your password. Here are some tips that will help you prevent other users from cracking your password and blocking the user account after multiple incorrect logins.

To be able to edit the account blocking policies, click ‘Start’ and type “Local” as the search term. Windows shows the search results directly in the start menu. Double click ‘Local security policies’ under ‘Programs’.

If you work with a user without administrator rights, right click ‘Local security policies’ and select the context command ‘Run as administrator’. You will then have to authorize the command by selelcting an Admin account and entering the password.

In the local security policies dialog, click the small triangle to the left near ‘Account Policies’ to open the structure below the entry. Then select ‘Account lockout policies’. On the right side of the tool, you will now find three points with which you can define the locking of an account in case of repeated incorrect password entry attempts. First double click ‘account lockout threshold’. Here define the number of permissible invalid login attempts. For instance, enter a 5 n the input field of the following dialog if Windows should block the account after 5 invalid login attempts. This prevents accidental lockouts when you mistype the password yourself. If you enter a zero, windows will never block the account. As soon as you enter a value under ‘Account lockout threshold’, Windows fills the remaining values that you can change.

The operating system understands the ‘Account lockout threshold’ as the time period during which Windows blocks an account. At the end of this period, the operating system removes the block. If you enter a zero in the ‘Account blocking period’, a computer administrator will have to explicitly remove the block.

Lastly you can also enter the “Reset account lockout after’. Here you can define how many minutes must pass in all before Windows resets the counter for unsuccessful login attempts after an invalid login attempt. This value must be smaller than or equal to the account blocking time. If you still do not define an ‘Account blocking period’ and leave the task of releasing a blocked account to the administrator, it can be done in ‘Computer Management’ under ‘Program Files’. Start the application by double clocking the entry under ‘Programs’.

Now open ‘Computer Management ->System -> Local user and groups’ under Computer Management in the tree structure on the left. Then double click the entry of the blocked user in the right hand pane. In the next dialog , remove the tick mark against ‘Account is blocked’ and confirm your action with OK. The user can now log in to the system again.

For private computer systems, an ‘Account lockout period” other than zero is recommended. If you exceed  the number of invalid login attempts for all accounts including the admin accounts and lock yourself out completely, you will have no way of accessing your computer again. At least one admin account should thus remain accessible at all times.

Earlier, people used to buy laptop for browsing internet or sending emails, but now the scope of a PC is wider. People buy laptops and PC especially for gaming. Gaming industry has started bringing more gaming options for PC users; features that exceed the limited use of computer thereby giving it a new character.

Game Booster 3 is free downloadable software that puts your PC or laptop in gaming zone on a single click. Once you are done with your gaming session, you can switch back your PC to normal mode with just one click. Apart from helping in gaming area, this booster software helps in analysing and diagnosing essential areas of your PC. Using Gaming Booster, you can add many gaming effects to your laptop. It stops unnecessary services, deactivates automatically updates and clears clip board. If you are not satisfied with the changes made by this software, you can restore all the changes to the initial state and it will not affect your computer in any way. Gaming booster will analyse all the essential areas of the system that affects gaming performance and saves all such reports that can be viewed later so that one can improve.

Gaming Booster has an option using which you can speed up the performance of games by defragmenting the folder where games are stored. This feature increases the loading speed of the games. There are some key features of Game Booster that has to be known by everyone computer user. Very first feature is slide to enter game mode. Using this feature you can close all the background running applications on your computer. This will help in increasing the loading speed of the game and will avoid all kinds of incompatibility that may occur due to background running applications. It detects unnecessary services running on the computer and closes them automatically. Game booster installs and updates all the gaming drivers automatically so that you can enjoy your gaming period without any drivers defect. It defragments folder containing game in order to increase the loading speed of the game. Game booster is fast, easy to use, secure and free to use.

Latest version of Game Booster that is Game Booster 3 has some important and enhanced features with it. Its diagnose function will report for any kind of error in games and also highlight the weakness to improve your gaming experience. Game Box has been redesigned that automatically shows available games on the computer with just one click. It has a new and easy to use interface. Game Booster 3 comes in 13 different languages (French, English, German, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, Czech, and Danish) that make is usable worldwide. In order to use this game enhancing software, your system should have minimum of 300 MHz processor, at least 256 MB of RAM, 30 MB of free hard disk space and of course CD-ROM drive.

There are few features that have been added in Game Booster as per users demand. After checking out all the features of Game Booster software if you want to give a trial to it, download its trial version from the internet to check what it can do to enhance your gaming experience on your PC.