Friday is Free Day – FileHippo Update Checker

Updating third-party Windows applications is one tedious task for me since I’ve got lots of freewares installed. Running these apps one by one and clicking their update buttons or visiting their sites to see if there are new versions really is time consuming.

The Update Checker from FileHippo eases up this problem. Once installed, the Update Checker will scan your computer for installed softwares and their current versions and send the information to FileHippo to check for updates. Your browser will open with a list of detected updates, including betas, with download buttons for every app. Although FileHippo is one large app repository, not all applications are supported.

This freeware works on Windows XP to 7 (even Windows 98) but requires .Net Framework 2.0 to work. You may download the Update Checker from the FileHippo website.

Friday is Free Day – Freemake Video Downloader

Download videos from 40+ video websites using Freemake Video Downloader. YouTube, Comedy Central, MTV, Vevo, Facebook are some of the sites supported by this free app. The app can also extract audio losslessly from videos. It can convert them to formats like MP4, AVI, MKV, MP3 and to other formats supported by mobile devices like the iPhone, PSP, and Android.

Freemake Video Downloader would also let you download videos in High Definition or any quality you want to specify at a fast download rate. Learn more about this free app and download it from Freemake’s website.

Friday is Free Day – Orbit Downloader

Third-party download managers makes the process of downloading files from the web faster. They also provide you options to pause and resume the task. On today’s Friday is Free Day, I’ll feature Orbit Downloader and share other tasks it can do.

Orbit Downloader

Orbit Downloader is a free download manager for Windows. Just like any other download manager, Orbit splits the file into chunks and downloads the segmented file in parallel – making the download faster compared to built-in download managers of web browsers. Once installed, the “Download by Orbit” task is added on your browser’s context menu. This app works with browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Netscape, Safari, Opera, and Maxthon. It supports the following protocols:

1. HTTP
2. HTTPS
3. FTP
4. MMS
5. RTSP
6. RTMP

Grab++ is another feature of Orbit. It enables users to grab streaming music and videos from YouTube, Metacafe, Pandora, and MySpace. Just hover your mouse pointer on a video and a “GetIt” menu will appear.

One problem with Orbit is that it hijacks certain browser settings after you install – like changing the homepage and search engine. This may be avoided by doing a customized installation where you can specify if the app will override your browser settings or not.

You may download Orbit from it’s website.