Zap Zilden

With this software you can download videos from YouTube, save them to your hard drive and convert FLV videos to the SWF (Shockwave Flash) file format. In addition, you may convert downloaded videos to MP3 audio files as well. View your downloaded videos and SWF files with the built-in player. This software is licensed FREE of charge. http://www.flvplucker.com

Having trouble getting that printer or webcam to work? Chances are, its a driver issue. Even if your computer appears to be recognizing all your peripherals correctly, ask yourself this: Does my PC run slower or quirkier than it used to? I bet it does. If it didn’t than roughly 80% of the world’s computers wouldn’t end up in the land fills within the first 2 1/2 years. I know computers get outdated quickly but come on, 2 1/2 years? For the average user? Not that fast! The reason for this huge buildup in our land fills is that computers slow down or break from everyday use. No, I’m not talking about the hardware breaking, even though it does happen on occasion, I’m talking about the software. Okay so how does software break when there are no moving parts?

There are about five main ways a computer can become a boat anchor because of software issues. I’ll be discussing the other four in upcoming posts, but for now lets talk about device drivers. What is a driver? Well there are two types of drivers. The first type we should all familiar with. This is the type of driver that brings us our pizza, packages, takes us where we need to go, and picks up our trash. To those hard working individuals, all I can say is… thank you! The second type is a driver that is found on a computer.

So what is a computer device driver, who’s its daddy and what does it do? I’m not going to bore you with a bunch of technical mumbo jumbo so here’s the short version. A device driver is a program that allows a person or another program to interact with a hardware device. Here’s a quick analogy, think of it as a transmission in a car. A car transmission takes motive input from the engine and translates that motion into something that can be used to turn the wheels. Now here’s where the trouble starts, get the wrong transmission and you have problems, get a transmission that has flaws and you get problems, get a transmission that is inefficient and you get a slow car or burn too much fuel, get a transmission that has…well i’m sure you get the idea. Imagine if the average person had to choose which transmission to use in his or her car, what a pain. Welcome to computer driver land. You may only have one printer but there may be many different drivers and selecting the right one is just as important as having the right transmission in your vehicle. Even if you have selected the right driver at some point, a vendor might find that there is a flaw in the code and release an update. How would you know? In the automobile world this is what is known as a recall and typically you would receive a letter in the mail instructing you to take your car into the dealership for a part upgrade or see something about it on your favorite TV news channel. Unfortunately when it comes to computers, it is not as easy to find out there has been a “recall” so you are stuck using something that is flawed until after it breaks. Or even if its not flawed, just like automobile transmissions, most software is being continuously redesigned and improved upon to function more efficiently. Now in the case of automobiles, we have the news, auto shows, dealership advertisements, etc. to let us know that there is something better out there, but when it comes to computer drivers, unless you’re a “geek” how would you know?

What if there were someone or something that could keep us on top of all this driver stuff? Help us know that we had the very best drivers we could possibly have so that our computer functioned “as good as new” and our printers, web cams, and games “just worked”? Best of all what if we didn’t have to even think about it anymore? Well sometimes wishes do come true. Meet Driver Robot…The world’s best driver update utility.

Best of all you can get to know him for free. Get to know Driver Robot here and see what a great friend this little guy can be.

Here’s a screenshot of Zap Zilden being played.

Zap Zilden in 3D Mode!

More screenshots are available on the Screenshots page.

Zap Zilden has returned!