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I originally review BatteryBar back in Feb 2009 in the article “BatteryBar – Ultimate taskbar battery management“. Essentially, BatteryBar adds a slick looking battery life meter to the Windows taskbar. It comes with detailed battery life information and some gorgeous eye candy in a mouse over dialog. My original review covered the standard “FREE” version of BatteryBar and outlined the additional features you get with BatteryBar Pro. The developer was kind enough to provide me with a license key so I could evaluate BatteryBar Pro. Unfortunately, I’d sold my personal laptop and only had an Asus Eeepc. At that time BatteryBar did not work with the Asus netbook. However, since that time Osiris Development has overcome the issues with the Asus Netbooks and I’m please to say it works awesome!

BatteryBar Free version use is as as easy as could be. Simply right-clicking on the taskbar and choosing Toolbars -> BatteryBar from the menu. The meter button changes from blue to green when you are on battery power, and clicking on the meter button switches the display between actual time remaining or a percentage view. The percentage meter is calculated using a statistical prediction that keeps a history of how quickly your battery usually drains to more accurately predict battery life—so the time remaining may seem a little odd at first.

BatteryBar PRO

The PRO version of BatteryBar adds some additional functionality.
Features in the Pro version:

Customizable themes to change the look and feel of BatteryBar

BatteryBar Pro ships with several additional themes that allow you to customize the look of the application in your taskbar. EVERY skin shipped looks amazing. More often than not applications that offer “additional skins” provide you with some janky looking addons. Not the case with BatteryBar Pro. Every skin looks great and offers a wide variety of looks. You can also create your OWN skin. BatteryBar Pro takes an easy approach to skinby using a simple to use XML definition file and a set of images. You can read up on how to create your own skin on the documentation site. The author is also looking for user submissions to distribute with the application (my guess is that you’d better make it look slick, in line with the rest of BatteryBar or it won’t make the cut).

Low battery and critical battery notifications and audio alerts

BatteryBar monitors your battery life and when your battery power gets low, BatteryBar will notify you with a popup window and a sound. A second notification window appears when your battery reaches critical level.

A sample of the low battery warning popuperbium doped fiber

A sample of the critical battery warning popup

Customizable settings

BatteryBar Pro provides you with the ability to change 20 different settings so that you can customize BatteryBar to your own needs. Some available settings are font, low battery warning levels, popups, etc.

BatteryBar Pro Preferences window

Change the current Windows power scheme by right-clicking on BatteryBar

This feature is just a handy addition, and honestly something you’d expect out of an application as well made as BatteryBar. It’s a simple as it sounds… right click on BatteryBar Pro and change your current power scheme.

The developer also promises that additional features will be released in future versions that will only be available in the Pro version. Since BatteryBar is obviously in active development (I was SOOOO pleasantly surprised to see Asus netbook support added) I can’t wait to see what additional features are coming down the pipe.

Can you do without the “PRO” features? Sure… but for the incredibly low price charged for the Pro version I cannot imagine why you would not want the additional features provided by BatteryBar Pro? BatteryBar has always been a free application. On it’s own it’s an incredibly useful and attractive addition to your notebook. However, for $9.95 you can upgrade to BatteryBar Pro and get all the additional features listed above. This is an example of a great application, one that’s actively being developed, being sold for an extremely fair and attractive price. In fact… if you order before June 1, 2009 you can get BatteryBar Pro for the low price of $7.95!

Checkout the developers site for more information and grab your copy of BatteryBar Pro!

The legendary L0phtcrack password cracker is returning and in the form of a new version 6. L0phtCrack disappeared from the market after @stake, a company which was formed by L0pht Heavy Industries and others, was taken over by Symantec. At the beginning of this year the original L0phtCrack team bought back the software rights from Symantec and have now upgraded the tool.

L0phtCrack 6 is packed with powerful features such as scheduling, hash extraction from 64 bit Windows versions, multiprocessor algorithms, and networks monitoring and decoding. Yet it is still the easiest to use password auditing and recovery software available. Available in in L0phtcrack 6 is:

Password Scoring
L0phtCrack 6 provides a scoring metric to quickly assess password quality. Passwords are measured against current industry best practices, and are rated as Strong, Medium, Weak, or Fail.

Pre-computed Dictionary Support
Pre-computed password files is a must have feature in password auditing. L0phtCrack 6 supports pre-computed password hashes. Password audits now take minutes instead of hours or days.

Windows & Unix Password Support
L0phtCrack 6 imports and cracks Unix password files. Perform network audits from a single interface.

Remote password retrieval
L0phtCrack 6 has a built-in ability to import passwords from remote Windows, including 64-bit versions of Vista, Windows 7, and Unix machines, without requiring a third-party utility.

Scheduled Scans
System administrators can schedule routine audits with L0phtCrack 6. Audits can be performed daily, weekly, monthly, or just once, depending on the organization’s auditing requirements.

Remediation
L0phtCrack 6 offers remediation assistance to system administrators on how to take action against accounts that have poor passwords. Accounts can be disabled, or the passwords can be set to expire from within the L0phtCrack 6 interface. Remediation works for Windows user accounts only.

Updated Vista/Windows 7 Style UI
The user interface is improved and updated. More information is available about each user account, including password age, lock-out status, and whether the account is disabled, expired, or never expires. Information on L0phtCrack 6’s current session is provided in an “immediate window” with a reporting tab providing up-to-the-minute status of the current auditing session.

Executive Level Reporting
L0phtCrack 6 has real-time reporting that is displayed in a separate, tabbed interface. Auditing results are displayed based on auditing method, risk severity, and password character sets.

Password Risk Status
Displays risk status in four different categories: Empty, High Risk, Medium Risk, and Low Risk.

Password Audit Method
Displays the completion of all four methods L0phtCrack 6 uses: Dictionary, Hybrid, Precomputed, and Brute Force.

Password Character Sets
Reports the completion of the various character sets being audited, including, Alpha, Alphanumeric, Alphanumeric/Symbol, Alphanumeric/Symbol/International.

Password Length Distribution
Reports the overall length of the discovered password by account.

Summary Report
Password Statistics as Locked, Disabled, Expired, or if the password is older than 180 days. Audit Summary
Number of Accounts cracked and the number of Domains audited.

Foreign Password Cracking
L0phtCrack 6 supports foreign character sets for Brute Force, as well as foreign dictionary files. Pull down menus change for language and character set. L0phtCrack 6 ships with several foreign dictionaries.

Visit L0phtcrack to read more or download the latest version. You can also read my previous article “Ophcrack Live CD – Crack Windows passwords in minutes“.

Google announced today a new, experimental idea aiming to reshape the future of communication on the web. It’s called Wave, and if you believe its Google, it’s “what email would look like if it were invented today.” Oh ya… and the whole thing is Open Source; the protocols will be available to anyone. Wave is about jazzing up real-time communication on the web.

What is a wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

According to Google Wave will allow:

• Real-time collaboration – Concurrency control technology lets all people on a wave edit rich media at the same time
• Natural language tools – Server-based models provide contextual suggestions and spelling correction
• Extensible – Embed waves in other sites or add live social gadgets, thanks to Google Wave APIs.

If you have an hour and twenty minutes to burn you can watch the entire thing explained by the folks at Google.

Microsoft has finally given the public Service Pack 2 for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 (final build is 6.0.6002.18005). You can download the installer from the Microsoft Download Center: 32-bit (348.3MB), 64-bit (577.4MB), and IA64 (450.4MB). There’s also an ISO image (1376.8MB) that contains these installers.

The installers will work on English, French, German, Japanese, and Spanish versions of either Vista or Server 2008. Other language versions will arrive later. Those interested in slipstreamed versions of Vista and Server 2008 with SP2 will need to get an MSDN or TechNet subscription.

There are a few significant additions that are included in SP2: Windows Search 4.0, Bluetooth 2.1 Feature Pack, the ability to record data on to Blu-Ray media natively in Vista, Windows Connect Now (WCN) is now in the Wi-Fi Configuration, and exFAT file system supports UTC timestamps. The service pack contains about 800 hotfixes.

More details on SP2 are available on TechNet. According to this document, SP2 is scheduled to begin arriving via Automatic Updates on June 30, 2009. If you don’t want to download the massive files from MS Download Center, try checking manually for updates on Windows Update this weekend.

I’ve been pretty excited about the entry of the Chrome browser into the browser wars. For starters it has the full force of Google behind it. Secondly, since they essentially launched the AJAX revolution with GMail Google is keenly aware of JavaScript performance. Let’s put it this way… very fast JavaScript only makes sites which make heavy use of JavaScript more useable. Read that as “Google wants to web-enable everything”. Back in March of this year Google released a faster beta version of Chrome that boasted some performance enhancements. However, since Chrome is not your typical stay-in-beta-forever Google product (I’m looking at you GMail!!!!) it wasn’t something most users downloaded. Well, with their 2.x release you now get their 25-35% speed increase in benchmarking tests, along with a few other pluses (most of which other browsers have had for some time now). Seriously though, the real story here is the V8 JavaScript engine and it’s performance… which in a word is… SICK!

Ok so let’s look at what else you get first:

• Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.
• Full Screen Mode: If you’ve ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.
• Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you’ve previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that’s easy to do from the Tools menu.

Cool… most of that other modern browsers already have. But how much faster is it? Well, hit up the V8 Benchmark Suite – version 4 in your favorite browsers and see. You can get the full scoop on what each of the tests mean by visiting the site, but here’s the results on my system:

Chrome 2.0.172.28:
Score: 3759
Richards: 3475
DeltaBlue: 3925
Crypto: 3112
RayTrace: 4104
EarleyBoyer: 5980
RegExp: 1342
Splay: 7590

FireFox v3.0.10
Score: 287

Richards: 257
DeltaBlue: 314
Crypto: 163
RayTrace: 253
EarleyBoyer: 352
RegExp: 197
Splay: 692

As you can see Chrome’s v2.x release spanks tha pants off FireFox v3 in raw JavaScript performance. Of course, Chrome doesn’t offer the full experience of FireFox. Namely, it’s lacked extensions. While I appreciate the speed provided (and yes… GMail IS faster in Chrome) I don’t know that I can live without Adblock or Better Gmail 2. However, if Chrome gets extensions prior to the latest beta of FireFox making out of the door then it could be a serious contenter.

Read more about Chrome on it’s features page and if you feel so inclinded grab a copy for yourself from the download site.