I always wondered how it is possible for Firefox to eat a huge amount of memory and up to 60-70% of a decent CPU without browsing 10 Flash sites at once, and today I found a possible answer - it may be the prefetch feature!

This feature does nothing more than downloading various pages that you may open by clicking the links located on the page you are currently visiting, trying to predict your browsing behaviour. Anyway, we're here to disable it, not to get to know it better, so let's get down to business, shall we?

- If Firefox is not open already, open it and type "about:config" in the address bar, followed by the Enter key.


- Type "network.prefetch-next" into the Filter bar, so that we can see only the option we need to change.


- Double click the highlighted field to change its value from "true" to "false".


This is it! As easy as it gets, don't you think? Try this for yourselves and don't forget to let us know if this trick improved your Firefox experience or not. Anyway, if you're not happy with the changes, simply go through the steps above once more to get back to the default setting.

If you want to grab content from YouTube, Myspace or Google video and other similar websites, there are a bunch of applications that can help you do it, but none that I heard of has the power of Easiest Utils' YouTube FLV to AVI Suite Enterprise. Since these guys released the last version of this application today, I think it's a good idea to tell you a few words about it...


YouTube FLV to AVI Suite Enterprise, as its name says, is a software suite that converts FLV files to the more flexible AVI format. Apart from this, you can also use it to grab the FLV files right from the web, so no other tools are needed!

The included download manager supports "Turbo" mode, multithreading, and even resuming of broken downloads. The file converter supports all FLV file types, video and audio, and the Enterprise version comes with a lot of built in sites, ready to use.

The minimum system requirements of this program are pretty low, since a computer running Windows 98 and above, with a Pentium III 500MHz CPU or equivalent and 64MB of memory should be enough.

If you are interested in using this program, the shareware version can be downloaded from here, while the licensing price is $39.95.

In the last decade, I have seen too many good programs fading out, and each time this happens, I feel like a part of me is dying. WinAce is not as old as RAR, ZIP or the ancient ARJ (that one is still around, it seems), but its last version was almost 2 years old, and I was beginning to think this is the end. Since version 2.65 was released in July 2006, it's great to say that today, on the 23rd of November, WinAce 2.69 became available!


According to the official site, WinAce now has a new option for licensing it. Instead of paying 29 bucks, you can freely use this powerful archiver as an adware application, because you have to install and run AdVantage as long as you want to have your WinAce copy run as a fully registered version.

Unfortunately, I didn't see any information about support for Vista, multi-core CPU optimizations and other things that would be really useful for someone interested in buying this program, or at least trying this new version.

It's sad to say it, but I think that WinAce just took one step closer to the edge, and if the next one is going to be the same, it may be their last...