Sarasota PC Monitor

Review Chairmans Industry Comments (04/07)

The Computer Buffet

by Herb Goldstein, Review Editor

E-mail comments, suggestions, etc. to Herb Goldstein at: revieweditor@spcug.org

BAD HYPERLINK?? Occasionally for reasons beyond our control, a hyperlink provided here will not work. After carefully checking your typing (needs to be 100% accurate), the only suggestion we can offer is that you go to Google and enter the name of the software. If a more current hyperlink is available, this is the best place to look for it.

Please also note: Most of the software mentioned below is freeware. It is gathered through researching usually reliable sources. I do not personally try most references, time being the obvious factor.

DBPOWERAMP MUSIC CONVERTER. This app is designed to convert your digital music from one format to another. It translates music from audio CD format to WAV or MP3 format, and vice versa. Optional software supports conversion of LPs to digital format, and of audio files to Windows Media Audio v8 or OGG format. The program's volume normalization feature ensures that all tracks play at the same volume; you also get ID-tag preservation, info pop-ups, and the ability to send audio to your portable MP3 player. www.dbpoweramp.com/

TOTAL TEXT CONTAINER. Need a personal information manager that does just about everything under the sun? The free Total Text Container is one of the ultimate tools when it comes to managing your everything! So what does this freeware download do and what does it not do? Here is a little better description of the Total Text Container from the developers: Store information, documentation, notes, passwords, images, bookmarks, contacts, calendar events & tasks, import/export Google iCal files. Powerful multi-layer encryption, portable, XML database, all in one powerful user friendly application. Impressive, and it works! http://mtirnanic.googlepages.com/

TINYSPELL. This automatic spell checker delivers a lot for being such a small download. Here is a little more information about the freeware program from the developers. tinySpell is a small spell checking program that automatically spell checks a selected word that is copied to the clipboard. You can also set tinySpell to check your spelling on the fly while you are typing and alert you by sound whenever it detects a misspelled word. The program runs in the system tray and suggests correct spellings via mouse click menu or hotkey. Additional features include a private dictionary and an auto-replacement feature. Unique and compact, great for quick spell checking. As you can see, it does everything you need and will never let you down. http://tinyspell.m6.net/

VIDEO CENTRAL. You can find all kinds of videos on the Internet. Sites like YouTube and Google Video feature a wide variety. These sites are mostly limited to amateur videos, though. Sure, they can be addictive, but sometimes you want to watch something with a little more polish. That's where AOL's video site comes in. You'll find entire episodes of television shows. You'll have to watch a short commercial at the beginning, but that's a small price to pay. You could spend hours on this site. In addition to the television shows, there are music videos and interviews. Plus, you'll find links to videos on other sites. http://television.aol.com/in2tv

FAX SHEET TEMPLATE. Looking for a quick and dirty cover sheet for the faxes you send? If you use Microsoft Publisher, this template will do the job for you. It's no frills, but it's free-and the results look professional. http://desktoppublishing.com/templ_mspub.html

DRIVERMAX enables you to back up and reinstall all of your Windows drivers. If you need to reinstall Windows, you can easily install all your drivers from the backup without having to insert or search for your original driver CDs. You can choose to back up/install all your drivers or only selected drivers based on several filters or by manual selection. DriverMax can export the drivers to a folder of your choice, and optionally compress them into a single zip file. Free registration required after 30 days. www.innovative-sol.com/drivermax/index.htm

OPENOFFICE.ORG. Want to use Microsoft Office applications without using Microsoft Office? OpenOffice.org is a free, multiplatform productivity suite being developed as an open-source application and project. It is available for numerous operating systems and supports many common file formats, as well as languages. Its files are interchangeable with those of Microsoft Office applications. Note: OpenOffice.org is a sizable download; you can cut your time down by downloading it with BitTorrent. www.openoffice.org

TCLOCKEX. The author of this free program wrote it out of frustration at the taskbar clock for not showing the date. His nifty little freeware program, TClockEx, changes that, and adds more features to it, as well. It lets you change the font size and color of your clock; you can display available memory and system resources; you can even use the program to copy the date to your Clipboard. This update, which includes bug fixes, will give you a warning if the Windows Resource Meter applet is not available. www.rcis.co.za/dale/

MICROSOFT EXTENDS XP SERVICE. Microsoft has added an extra five years support for Windows XP. This extends service on XP through April 2014. Security patches will be free, but Microsoft will charge for customer assistance.

REGSEEKER is a handy tool for managing several popular registry items and searching the registry by keyword. It offers quick access to startup entries, uninstall information, color schemes, history items (URLs, recent documents, etc.) and IE Favorites. The program also includes a registry cleaning feature that finds invalid and unused registry entries, allowing you to delete them. RegSeeker can automatically create a backup before deleting any registry entries. The program comes with an attractive, easy-to-use interface, nevertheless, it is not intended for complete beginners and you should feel comfortable working with the Windows registry before using it. www.hoverdesk.net/freeware.htm

MANAGE YOUR MONEY BETTER. With tax season here, many of us are assessing our finances. And some folks would like to learn more about improving them. This may intimidate some people. But it doesn't need to be difficult. You just need to know where to start learning. MyMoney.gov has plenty of tips on managing money. You can learn more about investments and saving money. The site is divided into a number of different topics. You can click on one and start reading. But you may want to take the interactive quiz first. It will help you decide where to start.

HDCLONE FREE EDITION. HDClone Free Edition enables you to move the content from an entire hard drive to another, larger one. The program installs itself on a bootable floppy or CD, and includes its own operating system so it runs completely independent from Windows. Once HDClone has created the bootable floppy or CD for you, you can use it to boot your computer and copy the drive content to the new (installed) drive, using a graphical interface. The free version is perfectly suitable to upgrade your existing drive to a larger one. It supports IDE/ATA/SATA hard disks and is able to copy up to 300 MB/min. The latest version now supports USB mouse and keyboard as well as USB 1.1 drives. www.miray.de/products/sat.hdclone.html

EASYCLEANER. An accumulation of unused Registry files may be slowing your PC's performance. EasyCleaner is a small program that searches Windows' Registry for entries that point nowhere or are duplicates. The program lists applications and files that seem safe to delete-and you then make the final decision. A useful pie chart shows the amount of space that files are occupying on your hard disk and in individual folders. This program is also available in non-English languages, including Finnish, Portuguese, Italian, and Polish. Note: Deleting entries from the Registry can be dangerous, so you should always back up your Registry before deleting any files or changing settings. http://personal.inet.fi/business/toniarts/ecleane.htm

BELARC ADVISOR. Do you really know what's inside your PC? This little free gem will tell you exactly what you've got on your computer. It takes seconds to run and produces a window of easy-to-read information. You'll get a detailed listing of the hardware and software without the need to crack the computer's case. That's terrific. You also get some software product keys too along with serial numbers. Belarc Advisor offers tons of information about your computer. It also puts the information into an easy-to-read Web page. It will show details of your motherboard, processor, memory, CD/DVD drives, graphics system and Windows version. The data continues with security information, including installed antivirus software and Windows updates (or missing updates). Finally, Belarc Advisor lists the programs installed on your computer. Windows is included in the list along with its product key, which you may need if you ever perform a reinstall. Www.belarc.com

MONITOR STARTUP PROGRAMS. New programs often invite themselves into Windows' list of automatic startups. Sometimes automatic starting programs save time. But most simply end up bogging down the computer.

Windows allows you to inspect programs currently running. But it doesn't offer a way to stop new programs from adding themselves to the automatic startup list. That's where StartupMonitor comes in. It alerts you to any additions to Windows' automatic startup programs. The alerts give you the power to allow or deny the program from starting automatically with Windows. StartupMonitor is free, small and runs in the background. It starts automatically with Windows, which is a little ironic. www.mlin.net VOLUME DIAL ON YOUR MOUSE. Windows includes a Volume Control to maintain speaker volume. However, it is not as convenient as it could be. You have to open up the Volume Control menu. It takes time and a chunk of your screen. Those are two drawbacks you don't need when you encounter blaring Web page music or video.

Volumouse turns your mouse's click wheel into a volume dial. Already at your fingertips, it's both convenient and intuitive. And you don't have to open a menu to use it. By default, you can activate Volumouse by pressing and holding the Alt key. Otherwise, you can use your mouse's click wheel to scroll through Web pages and other documents as normal.

You can also customize Volumouse to activate through other keys. For example, turn the click wheel into a volume dial whenever you hold the right mouse button down. If you don't use the click wheel for anything else, you can even set Volumouse to always-on. Volumouse can also control Windows Media Player volume whenever the player is on screen. www.nirsoft.net

SPAMEXPERTS HOME is a free spam filter that works with any email program and automatically intercepts spam - no configuration or changes to your existing email setup are required! Even though the program does require an initial training phase (you simply need to tell it which messages are good and which are spam), it does not rely on keyword lists to detect spam, but automatically learns from the content of the messages that you accept or reject within a few days. The email that is identified as spam is either tagged in the subject line and can then be sorted into a spam folder (using your email rules), or you can choose to block it completely, in which case it is not downloaded to your email program but can still be reviewed and recovered (if needed) from the SpamExperts cache. SpamExperts Home can also check your email periodically, filtering spam in the background, and maintain a list of blocked and allowed senders. http://tinyurl.com/2vuwb6

VLC MEDIA PLAYER . Need a free media player that does a little bit of everything? With as many audio and video formats that there are out there, it is hard to find a program that does just about everything. VLC Media Player is that "does everything" sort of program. When you run into a video that your usual video program will not run, VLC probably will.

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, etc.) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols. It can also be used as a server to stream in unicast or multicast in IPv4 or IPv6 on a high-bandwidth network." Now if you are not in love with the interface, you can always just keep it around as a backup program. Just in case you run into that one video that has the wacky format you can not play. VLC Media Player is a good alternative or backup solution so you don't have to go hunting for hours for a specific player for that specific format. www.videolan.org/vlc/

GREAT FREE INTERNET EXPLORER UTILITY. Introducing the Bayden IEToys. IE is a powerful web browsing environment, and with a few simple power-ups, it's even better. You can add functionality to IE5, 6, and 7 with these tiny tools that take up almost no disk space, and won't slow down IE. Free of charge and free of spyware.

Supercharge your right-click! This collection of tools gives you new options in the right-click menu, such as hiding all of the images on a page at once for easier reading or for looking up selected text on wikipedia. There's also an option for speeding up broadband page-load times by using additional simultaneous connections. www.bayden.com/ietoys/

  1. Cleanup. Webpage reading tool. You're trying to read a website, but you can barely concentrate because the page is full of unneeded images. Simply right-click the page and choose "Delete Images" to zap non-text page elements.
  2. Define. Web-based dictionary tool. You're reading a website, and you come across a word whose definition you've forgotten long ago. What to do? Grab a paper dictionary? Maybe last century. Simply right-click a highlighted word and click Define. The definition will pop up in a window of its own.
  3. Encyclopedia Lookup. Web-based encyclopedia tool. Like the Dictionary tool, this one looks up the selected term in WikiPedia.
  4. IE7 Clear Tracks. Toolbar button deletes all browsing history, cookies, cache files, etc in just one click.
  5. HTML Source. HTML source instantly lets you view the HTML sourcecode for the currently selected portion of the web page. Select some page content and Choose "HTML Source."
  6. Proxy Toggle. This toolbar button allows you to manually enable or disable the Internet Explorer proxy server whose address is specified on the LAN Settings dialog inside the Internet Control Panel.
  7. ImageList. Easy to use image collection tool. Need to copy an image, but right-click is broken? Right click in the page (not on the image). Choose "Image List". Click on the image to Copy. The screen flashes green as the image is copied. Right-click in your document or desktop and click "Paste."
  8. Highlighter. Select some text, right-click to highlight it. Nice for printouts.
  9. Linkify. Plaintext->Hyperlink. Some webpages contain malformed Internet addresses which aren't in hyperlink form, forcing you to copy the address, paste it in the addressbar, and fix any typos. Linkify solves this problem by opening the currently selected text as a hyperlink. If the HTTP:// at the front of the link is broken (as is done on some web bulletin boards) linkify will fix it. If you select multiple addresses, one per line, a new window will be opened per address.
  10. MSN. Search for selected text on MSN.
  11. Google. Search for selected text on Google
  12. Broadband Tweak. Faster performance for broadband users. This optional tweak can speed up downloads when you have a broadband internet connection. Specifically, IE will download up to 16 files simultaneously from a server, instead of the default maximum of 2 or 4. Use for dialup connections is not recommended.
  13. AccessKeys. HTML Accessibility helper. Some webpages define hotkeys to allow you to more easily navigate the page. Unfortunately, the hotkeys are rarely mentioned anywhere, and you probably don't know they exist. This simple little tool scans the current page and displays any available AccessKeys.

eCLEANER. Easy-to-use eCleaner "cleans up" unformatted text from email and the Web by removing HTML tags, arrow characters, hard returns, and other distracting formatting. http://ecleaner.tripod.com/

CREATING A NEW IDENTITY IN OUTLOOK EXPRESS. You can create a new identity in Outlook Express 6.0 using the following procedure. You can create different identities with different e-mail addresses either for your own use or when sharing a computer:

iDAILY DIARY is a free, page-a-day diary program that offers rich-text formatting, which means you can spice up your entries with fun fonts and colors. iDaily Diary entries will also accept images and hyperlinks. There's no limit to how long your "page-a-day" entries can be. www.splinterware.com/products/idailydiary.htm

IMGBURN enables you to burn most types of DVD/CD images, including .iso, .nrg, .bin, .img and others. The program offers direct support for many of the latest CD/DVD writers. In addition to writing of images, you can also use the software to build your own ISO images from files and folders of your choice. ImgBurn includes a variety of advanced features to deal with dual layer DVDs, create DVD folder structures and more. Very capable, no documentation provided though. www.imgburn.com/

JAP ENABLES ANONYMOUS WEB SURFING with any browser through the use of integrated proxy services that hide your real IP address. The service uses a proxy mix cascade that effectively hides the identity of any one single user among the connections of all the other users - making it impossible, even for the proxy provider, to determine which IP belongs to which user. After installing JAP, you need to configure your browser to use the local proxy server (instructions provided) for web browsing. The provided control panel allows you to turn anonymity on or off, and also dispays the current level of security. JAP comes pre-configured with several free service providers and also supports pay services. The free services are run by universities and other public infrastructures and are free of charge for the user. http://anon.inf.tu-dresden.de/index_en.html

FRESH DIAGNOSE can analyze and benchmark many kinds of hardware, such as CPU performance, hard disk performance, video system information, mainboard information, and many more. Informational features include scanning your system and give you a complete report about computer hardware and software, including mainboard, video system, buses, peripheral and, network information. Benchmark features include testing system performance, such as processor, hard disk, multimedia, memory and comparing your PC with other systems. User friendly interface and well featured. www.freshdevices.com/

XNVIEW is a program for viewing and converting your graphics files. It supports more than 200 graphics formats and offers many additional features. You can apply filters and effects to your images, import from a twain source (scanner, camera) or use the thumbnail picture browser to explore your image collection. Xnview's strongest feature is the support for a huge amount of file formats, and the option to convert among them. It also offers many other features, including customizable screen layout, screen capture, slide show and much more. You can also create web pages from your images, create contact sheets, generate file listings and manage your file by move and copy. Xnview is a well established and feature packed imaging tool. www.xnview.com/

FIRETUNE is a tweaking tool, designed to optimize the performance of Mozilla Firefox. The tweaks are based on a collection of optimization settings, which can be time consuming and difficult for the novice user. FireTune allows you to automatically apply these tweaks based on your computer and Internet speed. It offers a backup and Undo option to restore your original settings as well. We noticed some speed improvements when loading pages after applying the tweaks. We were using a fast (3ghz) PC and DSL connection, the improvements were minor but noticeable. www.totalidea.com/content/index.html

PICOZIP. An easy-to-use file compression utility packed with lots of user-friendly features. You can create archives in 7 formats (BH, CAB, JAR, LHA, LZH, TAR, ZIP), extract files from 17 archive formats (ACE, ARC, ARJ, BH, CAB, GZ, JAR, LHA, LZH, RAR, TAR, TGZ, Z, ZIP, ZOO, UUE, XXE) and create self-extracting archives in 8 formats. Other features: quick backup, batch processing, extensive Windows shell integration, email support, file filtering and archive format conversion. www.picozip.com/download_PicoZipSetup.html

WINTOOLSXP is a freeware application that provides quick and easy access to Windows XP's built-in system utilities such as Command Prompt, Device Manager, Disk Cleanup, Registry Editor, User Accounts, and more - from one convenient spot. www.kinyonsoftware.com/

STEGANOS LOCKNOTE. Everybody has a secret. Keep your passwords and personal information safe from prying eyes with LockNote. This program works like Notepad, but it adds password protection and strong AES 256-bit encryption. To open a LockNote file, double-click in and type in your password. Anyone who doesn't have the password is locked out. If you'd like to lock up your existing text files, you can drag and drop them into LockNote to secure them. http://locknote.steganos.com/

SNEAKERS GET GPS. A new line of shoes will have an embedded GPS chip. They're not intended to track people wherever they go. Rather, if someone is missing, GPS can be used to pinpoint the person. Look for adult versions for about $350 next month. Children's sizes will be out this summer.

ENVISIONEER EXPRESS enables you to easily create 3D home designs using a variety of drag and drop elements including walls, windows, stairs, home furnishings, kitchen appliances, and many other home objects. You can create the initial design as 2D floor plan and the program will automatically render it in 3D, allowing you to do a virtual walkthrough in a fully rendered 3D environment. In addition to the rendered 3D view, the program also offers wireframe and outline views, and even a 3D Stereo Vision display, that you can view with standard 3D glasses. You can zoom, rotate and pan the display, change the camera angle and more.

Envisioneer Express is free and includes a library of common home design objects as well as a variety of building materials, including bricks, carpet, wallpapers, paints, fabrics, and more that you can use to create your personal design. The program can also be used to display and review professional designs created with many popular design programs on the market including: Cadsoft Envisioneer, 3D Home Architect Series (versions 5-8), IMAGINiT Builder 3D, The Home Depot 3D Home Designer, and others. www.envisioneerexpress.com/

PHISHING FILTER IN INTERNET EXPLORER 7. Microsoft has included the Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7 to protect against phishing sites. The Phishing Filter automatically checks the Web sites you visit against a list of sites that have been identified as phishing sites. If the site has been identified as a phishing site, Internet Explorer will warn you of this.

Although not recommended, you can turn off automatic checking of Web sites and check them manually or you can disable the Phishing Filter all together. To disable automatic Web site checking: Within Internet Explorer, click Internet Options from the Tools menu. Click the Advanced tab. Under the phishing filter, select Turn off automatic Website checking. Click OK. To disable the Phishing Filter, complete steps 1 through 3 listed above, selecting the option to Disable Phishing Filter.

MANAGING THUMB DRIVES. Thumb drives have become the new floppy disk. Some people keep a handful of them for backups or archives. Once you start using more than one thumb drive, organization can become a problem. Fortunately, there is free help to keep multiple drives in order. Microsoft's free USB Flash Drive Manager (FDM) puts all the features you need to work with thumb drives in one place. From the FDM, you can give each drive a name. Then you can associate each drive with a folder on your PC's hard drive.

The FDM lists any thumb drives plugged into your computer. Select a drive and you'll have one-click options to swap data with its folder. One click pushes the data either way. You can also drag files into the FDM window to save them on your thumb drive. FDM provides a wizard to help you save network configurations on a thumb drive. This is useful if you use the same laptop with different Wi-Fi networks or hotspots. www.microsoft.com/downloads

PRIMO PDF. Are you looking for a quick and easy way to make PDFs for screen viewing, printing, ebooks, and even prepress use? PrimoPDF will do it for you in a blink, for free, and with some nice extras such as security options. PrimoPDF sits in your printer list, and when you "print" a document to it, the main PrimoPDF window comes up. The options are simply laid out: You can create a PDF for screen viewing, print, ebook, or prepress (which embeds your fonts). You can include document properties like author name and keywords. You can encrypt your PDF using 40-bit and 128-bit encryption - useful if you are publishing a ebook you'd like to protect from free distribution or an internal document you only want certain people to see. Then select the destination for your new PDF and click OK.

After PrimoPDF creates the PDF, the PDF opens in your default PDF viewer (we used Adobe Acrobat Reader 8) unless you set the options to do otherwise. The security feature really is this program's best feature. You can choose whether users can print, copy text and graphics from the PDF, add comments, and make changes to the PDF. www.primopdf.com/

TRAYDEVIL can minimize any window to the system tray and also acts as a quick reboot and shutdown tool. It enables you to simply Shift+left-click on any window (program, folder, Web site etc.) and it will be minimized to the system tray, using its standard Windows icon. In addition, you can use the middle mouse key to quickly close windows, hide the system clock, and reboot your PC by double-clicking the TrayDevil icon. www.jenneboer.nl:80/traydevil/

CATHY is a disk cataloging tool that you can use to index files stored on removable media (CD-ROMs, LS120, Iomega Zip and Jaz disks, or even diskettes) and create searchable catalogs that can be used without having to insert the CD. Searching capabilities are based on file name, date and size, and special support for mp3 file searches. Additional features include filtering options and duplicate search. The program is easy to use and allows searching across multiple catalogs in a matter of seconds. Standalone, no install needed. www.mtg.sk/rva/:

CLEAR TEMPORARY INTERNET FILES FOLDER WHEN BROWSER IS CLOSED. The purpose of the Temporary Internet Files folder is to speed up browsing on the Internet. However, this folder can consume disk space. If you are not too concerned with performance in terms of browsing, you can have the contents of this folder deleted automatically.

You can complete this task in Internet Explorer 7 by using the following steps: Open Internet Explorer; Click Internet Options from the Tools menu; On the General tab, you will see that you can manually delete the files in this folder. Click the Advanced tab; From the list of settings, locate the Security section. Select the option to Empty Temporary Internet Files folder when browser is closed; Click OK.

CCLEANER. Somewhere under the layers of software detritus, your PC is vigorous and eager to work. CCleaner claims to search through several programs and remove useless files. Many cleaners scrub out just your browser cache or your temporary files folder, but CCleaner was developed to go several steps further. It cleans temporary files from a number of applications, including Adobe Acrobat, Firefox, Google Toolbar, Kazaa, Nero, Netscape, and more.

Note: CCleaner includes an optional Yahoo toolbar that you may choose to install along with the program. Installing this toolbar may trigger alerts from some spyware programs. CCleaner's makers assert that CCleaner is spyware-free. www.ccleaner.com/

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Copyright 2007. This article is from the April 2007 issue of the Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc., P.O. Box 15889, Sarasota, FL 34277-1889. Permission to reprint is granted only to other non-profit computer user groups, provided proper credit is given to the author and our publication. We would appreciate receiving a copy of the publication the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For further information about our group, email: admin@spcug.org/ Web: http://www.spcug.org/

The Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc. has 1,100+ members and was established in 1982. We are members of the Assoc. of PC User Groups (APCUG), the Florida Assoc. of PC Users Groups, Inc., and we are members of the America Online Ambassador Program.

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