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Consumers are being warned that they may get an ad instead of a music or video file on several file-sharing sites in what security firm McAfee says is the most significant malware outbreak in three years.

McAfee Avert Labs reported on Tuesday that more than 500,000 detections of a Trojan horse masquerading as a media file have been found on computers since Friday on services like Limewire and eDonkey.

Instead of playing an adult video, the Lion King in Portuguese, or the Girls Aloud theme from the St Trinnians soundtrack, for example, hundreds of rigged MP3 and MPEG files … Read more

An article from earlier today at Download.com about defragging the Windows paging file (Quick Fix: Put your paging file to work) needs some tweaking.

The article suggests that setting the page file Initial Size and Maximum Size to the same number will "avoid serious defragmentation". While this does avoid the paging file growing in size, the file can still be fragmented when it's initially allocated. So, if you're going to do this, you should defrag the hard disk first.

But, not allowing the page file to grow, is a questionable decision. If you make the … Read more

The all-singing, all-dancing embodiment of frustration is when my computer acts sluggish for no good reason. I know I've got plenty of RAM and a decent processor, so why won't the blasted contraption do as it's told? RAM boosting programs just never seem to work as well as they should, and so a few weeks ago I began digging into other possible sources of those embarrassing and annoying computus interruptus moments.

One possible solution is to manually adjust your virtual memory, stored in a paging file.

Why do this? Isn't your onboard RAM enough? Well, don'… Read more

Power Downloader tries his best to help all, but recently his friend Francois Foto approached him with a tricky problem: is there a way to easily convert photos from one format to another? ''Ze emphasees,'' said Francois, ''eez on easy.'' Power had a simple solution, a freeware program called XnView.

XnView is a robust program, an image browser and viewer as well as a converter. For conversions, though, it can handle more than 400 formats from Camera RAW, JPG, GIF, TIFF, and other still image formats all the way through AVI, MOV, MPEG, and a multitude of movie formats. Metadata … Read more

ShareFile is a service for business customers or anyone who wants to transfer small to large files instead of using e-mail and without having to resort to a more difficult solution like FTP or P2P software. While it's aimed mostly at business users, there's also a consumer version that lets people swap files up to 5GB in size. The business memberships throw in additional employee accounts as well as file encryption and larger file sizes all the way up to 150GB.

What makes ShareFile neat is that it's not simply a place to dump your files and … Read more

A recent NPD survey cited by the New York Times' Bits blog confirms what I've suspected for a long time: the record industry's campaign against file-sharing sites is not only ineffective, but misguided. According to the survey, 19 percent of the music in consumers' collections comes from file-sharing networks. That's up 5 percent from last year--in other words, lawsuits and education campaigns have so far been ineffective.

But 38 percent of music listeners' collections come from CDs that they borrowed, then ripped to their hard drive or burned to a CD-R. (I'm not sure why NPD … Read more

Some programs are more trouble than they're worth.

I'm a big fan of the PDF file format. It lets you share files with people using almost any type of computer without worrying about whether they have the right program installed to view it, or whether it will look to them the way it looks to you.

The problem is Adobe Systems' Acrobat, which is simply more software than I need to meet my meager PDF requirements. (It's also more annoying than any two Office apps combined.)

The fact is, you can create, convert, and edit PDF files … Read more

Last week I was working with a group of people on a Microsoft Word document when I noticed that the printout being used by one of the group failed to show the contents of the file's tables. It turns out she uses OpenOffice.org rather than Office, and OpenOffice.org's Writer app missed the table data.

The week before that I had to resend a spreadsheet I had e-mailed to my brother because I inadvertently saved it in Excel 2007's new .xlsx format, and he's using an older version of Office.

Some people would say these … Read more

Rich in Web content, short on cash? Open-source FTP application FileZilla is handy if you're looking for a feature-rich tool for Windows, Macs, and Linux machines to handle transfers and don't want to part with your bucks. The multilingual app caches directories to speed up browsing, and multiple secure connection options ensure that you can move files around without concern.

FileZilla supports all the major features you'd expect from a top-notch FTP client: bookmarking, a site manager, QuickConnect for fast switching on the fly, the ability to connect to multiple servers at once, and a powerful filter. … Read more