Review Chairman's Industry Comments (09/01)
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.
TOR. When you browse the Web, your life is an open
book. Web sites can track your online activities, know what operating
system and browser you’re running, find out your machine name, uncover
the last sites you’ve visited, examine your history list, delve into
your cache, examine your IP address and use that to learn basic
information about you such as your geographic location and there’s more
as well.
How to protect yourself? Use Tor, which protects your
anonymity as you surf and use the Internet. When you use Tor, all your
communications, (not just Web surfing, but also instant messaging and
other applications) are essence bounced around a giant network of Tor
servers called "onion routers," until it’s impossible for sites or
people to be able to track your activities.
When you download Tor, you get other software that works
in concert with it, including Privoxy, a proxy program. All the software
is self-configuring, so you won’t need to muck around with port settings
or the like. Tor runs as a small icon in your system tray. To start Tor,
right-click it and choose Start from the menu that appears; to stop it,
right-click it and choose Stop. Once it starts, simply use the Internet
as you normally would. If you’re somewhat paranoid, you can regularly
change your Tor "identity," to make it even harder for anyone to track
your travels. Tor also includes a nice bandwidth tool that graphs your
bandwidth use. www.torproject.org/
FREE INTERNET WINDOW WASHER. Worried that Web sites
are snooping on your Internet activities, or that someone else who uses
your PC can see where you’ve been and what you’ve done? If so, you need
an Internet washer of some kind, a tool that will delete your Internet
Explorer browsing history, recently typed URLs, autocomplete history,
and so on.
That’s what Free Internet Window Washer does — for free.
Click Wash Settings, then click Browsers, and select what you want the
program to clean. Back on the main screen, click Wash Now and the
program cleans everything you’ve asked it to. If you prefer, click Test
Now, and you can instead see a preview of what the program will do.
In addition to cleaning Internet Explorer, Free Internet
Window Washer also cleans traces from instant messengers, including AIM,
ICQ, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, and MSN Messenger. And it cleans traces
from a wide variety of other programs as well, including Microsoft
Office and Adobe Acrobat.
Www.eusing.com/Window_Washer/Window_Washer.htm
DOWNLOAD ACCELERATOR PLUS (DAP) is the popular
download manager with over 159 million users worldwide. DAP leverages
patented technology, easy management of downloads and rich features and
includes an enhanced search tab, improved download mechanism for faster
downloads, and ZoneAlarm download security.
www.speedbit.com/
YOUR ONLINE MEDICAL GUIDE. There is nothing more
frightening than being diagnosed with a serious illness. In these
circumstances, your physician is your best resource. He or she can tell
you about causes and your treatment options. Of course, you’ll probably
want to do some research, too. Fortunately, there’s a wealth of medical
information online. But you may have trouble finding trustworthy
information. In that case, visit Merck’s site. You can access the Merck
Manual for free. This is what doctors use. You can learn about
prognoses, treatment options and more. Hopefully you don’t have an
illness. But what about that pain in your stomach? Could it indicate
something more serious? The Merck Manual can help answer that question.
It may just convince you to set up an appointment with your doctor.
www.merck.com
SHOW STOPPER. Show Stopper gives you eight ways to
shut down your PC, including Suspend, Hibernate, Restart, Power Off, and
if you’re not concerned about closing apps, Force. The tool also has a
way for you to schedule events, such as a reboot or shutdown, or launch
another program at a specified time.
www.karenware.com/
CLICKSTER. Everyone loves getting something for
free. With Clickster you get a double dose: This free program searches
the Web for free MP3 music files from your favorite artists, and
delivers them to your desktop. Clickster’s developer, Robert Palmer,
insists that there’s no copyright issues to worry about, since the MP3s
that Clickster accesses are free files stored on Web sites. As long as
you don’t share the files, you’re safe.
www.remlapsoftware.com/clickster.htm
KEYSCRAMBLER PERSONAL. One of the greatest dangers
you face online is the theft of your user name and passwords for logging
into Web sites, such as banking and financial sites, and Web-based email
accounts. If someone steals that information, they could potential empty
your bank account, and pose as you using your email address. This add-in
to Internet Explorer and Firefox promises a simple way to keep you safe.
As you type in your password, KeyScrambler Personal scrambles it so that
the information sent out over the Internet doesn’t match what you type.
That way, someone won’t be able to steal your private information.
www.qfxsoftware.com/
F-SECURE BLACKLIGHT ROOTKIT ELIMINATOR. One of the
more esoteric but dangerous pieces of malware that might infect you is a
rootkit. This software uses tricky techniques to shield itself from many
anti-spyware, anti-malware, and anti-virus programs. A rootkit hides
deep in your system, and allows someone to take complete control of your
PC without your knowledge. Rootkits typically are spread online in a
variety of ways, such as riding along on another download. So you’d do
well to download, install, and use F-Secure Blacklight Rootkit
Eliminator, a freebie designed to do one thing, and one thing alone:
detect and kill rootkits. The program looks inside your PC’s folders,
files, and hidden processes, looking for signs that you’ve been infected
with a rootkit. It then tells you whether your system is rootkit-free,
or possibly infected. It lists every possible sign of infection.
www.f-secure.com/security_center/
PITASCHIO is freeware designed to give you more
control over the use of Microsoft Windows. Whether you want to use
smaller icons, snap a window to another for ease of access, or disable
your keyboard while you’re cleaning, Pitaschio can do these simple but
useful tasks and more!
http://pitaschio.ara3.net:80/
EASY PICTURE2ICON is a tool for converting images or
digital photos into Windows icons. Easy Picture2Icon makes it possible
to use any graphical editor to produce icons because it has the ability
to convert digital pictures in the formats BMP, GIF, JPEG, JPG, and PNG
to Windows icons (ICO).
www.picture2icon.com:80/
SPYWARE TERMINATOR. If you’re looking for a
straightforward and simple-to-use anti-spyware tool, give Spyware
Terminator a try. Not only does it scan your system for spyware and
remove it, but unlike some other free anti-spyware software, it also
stops you from getting infected in the first place. Scans are fast and
easy to customize, and you can create ignore lists, and can put
potential infections into a quarantine before deleting them. The
real-time protection includes a variety of shields for protection
against several types of dangers, including Browser Helper Objects. It
even includes protections for files such as .ini files.
www.spywareterminator.com/
PERFORMANCE MONITOR. Performance Monitor tracks your
use of RAM, CPU, the Internet, and your hard disk, and displays the
information in four small colored boxes on your desktop. The information
is displayed in somewhat hard-to-read graph form on four small colored
boxes. To get details, hover your mouse over a box, and you’ll get
actual usage statistics, such as the percentage of your CPU currently
being used. The program is well-thought out; for example, if you have a
multi-core CPU, it shows you the usage of each core individually.
Considering that Performance Monitor is free, if you have a need for a
system monitor, it’s certainly worth the download.
www.hexagora.com/en_home.asp
FREE INTERNET WINDOW WASHER. Worried that Web sites
are snooping on your Internet activities, or that someone else who uses
your PC can see where you’ve been and what you’ve done? If so, you need
an Internet washer of some kind, a tool that will delete your Internet
Explorer browsing history, recently typed URLs, autocomplete history,
and so on. That’s what Free Internet Window Washer does — for free.
Click Wash Settings, then click Browsers, and select what you want the
program to clean. Back on the main screen, click Wash Now and the
program cleans everything you’ve asked it to. If you prefer, click Test
Now, and you can instead see a preview of what the program will do. In
addition to cleaning Internet Explorer, Free Internet Window Washer also
cleans traces from instant messengers, including AIM, ICQ, Skype, Yahoo!
Messenger, and MSN Messenger. And it cleans traces from a wide variety
of other programs as well, including Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat.
www.eusing.com/Window_Washer/Window_Washer.htm
MONITOR YOUR PC. It’s easy for a computer to become
clogged with programs. Some programs run processes you don’t need. These
can slow your computer. This free program can show you what changes are
occurring on your PC. It starts by taking a snapshot of your machine.
Then, it alerts you to subsequent changes. Tiny Watcher will inform you
when suspicious items are detected. Then it will provide options to
disable them. Tiny Watcher runs in the background of your computer. It
runs a quick scan each time your computer boots. Otherwise, you won’t
notice it unless it discovers a problem.
www.donationcoders.com
SENDSHIELD. Office documents contain plenty of
private information you’d rather the world not see, such as hidden text,
names of author documents, revision history and markup, hidden cells,
and hidden spreadsheets.. People can easily find all that information
without much work. What to do? Get SendShield, an excellent,
simple-to-use freebie. Whenever you send a Microsoft Office document
using Outlook, SendShield looks inside the document for private
information, and shows you what it finds. You can then delete all the
information. It will only delete the information from the copy of the
document you’re sending; it leaves the original file intact on your PC.
www.sendshield.com/home/index.php
FOTOTAGGER. FotoTagger is a free tool for annotating
JPEG images. Add easy-to-hide searchable notes pointing to individual
elements on the image. Upload individual images, whole folders or
selected photos to Flickr and download them back to FotoTagger. Publish
to blogs. Create Web slide shows from folders with annotated images or
manually selected images. Edit images in external editors without losing
annotations. Organize images directly from FotoTagger.
www.fototagger.com/
AVIRA ANTIVIR PERSONAL - FREE ANTIVIRUS is a
comprehensive, easy to use antivirus program, designed to offer reliable
free of charge virus protection to home-users only. Avira offers:
Extensive Malware Recognition of viruses, Trojans, backdoor programs,
worms, etc. Automatic incremental updates of antivirus signatures,
engine and entire software. Permanent virus protection, with Virus Guard
real time monitoring.
Install and configuration in just a couple of steps.
Virus protection against known and unknown threats, using an advanced
heuristic system.
Scheduler where you can set the scanner to make
automatic virus scans or updates on your system. Forum and phone
support, Knowledge Base with virus descriptions available on Web site.
Rootkit Detection and Removal. Version 8 adds an enhanced interface, a
modularized AV-search engine for improved scan performance, an
integrated failsafe security system, SMTP support for AntiVir MailGuard
and a new Fast Activation Tool (FACT).
www.avira.com
FLOOLA. Lightweight and full-featured, Floola is a
comprehensive replacement for Apple’s iTunes software, capable of
performing virtually all of the functions of the official management
utility. The program, with versions available for Windows, Linux, and
the Mac OS, can even run from a thumbdrive or the iPod itself—it doesn’t
require any installation.
www.floola.com/modules/wiwimod/
CUSTOMIZE GOOGLE. If you’re a big user of Google
(and face it, who isn’t?), you’ll want to install this add-on. It
customizes Google in just about any way you can imagine, and no doubt in
many ways you’ve never imagined. For a starter, it will block Google’s
ads as well as Google analytic cookies, which some people believe
invades their privacy. Additionally, it anonymizes your Google userid.
www.customizegoogle.com/
BITMETER is a bandwidth meter that allows you to
visually monitor your Internet connection by displaying a scrolling
graph that shows your upload and download speed over time. Features
include: Graphical and numerical displays of historical data, Web
interface, alerts, stopwatch, calculator,
transparent/float/click-through modes, 36-page help file, audio
notifications, configurable color-schemes and many other options.
http://codebox.no-ip.net/controller?page=bitmeter2
VIDEO DOWNLOAD HELPER. Video sites such as YouTube
and others are certainly entertaining, and at times even useful. But
there’s one problem with them: you can’t download videos to your PC to
play them later. You’ll have to keep visiting the site each time you
want to see one. That’s where this add-on comes in. It will let you
download videos from YouTube and many other sites and store them on your
hard disk, so you can watch them whenever you want. When you’re on a
site, all you’ll have to do is click the Video DownloadHelper icon and
save the video. You can also do the same for graphics and audio clips.
www.downloadhelper.net/index-vt.php
MEGA DISC is a free program for cataloging and
locating your CDs. It has many features for managing music CDs, DVDs,
MP3s, and data discs. It catalogs your music CD collection using
information from the Gracenote CDDB music recognition service (the world
s largest music database), so you don’t have to type. Any kind of CD
your computer can recognize can be added to the catalog.
In addition to being a full-featured disc cataloger,
Mega Disc has unique capabilities for tracking and locating your discs.
Mega Disc organizes your loose discs into a library of viewable storage
units, making it easy to find and retrieve them. It lets you see what is
in a container of discs, making it more convenient to keep your disc
library in high-density storage cases or binders (without jewel cases).
No matter what you store your CDs in, with or without jewel cases, they
can be organized into a real library. It is freeware, there is no
advertising or spyware.
www.zdnet.com.au/downloads/0,139024478,10258201s,00.htm
SECURE LOGIN. If you often log into Web sites and
forget or lose your password, Secure Login will be a great time-saver.
It directly integrates with Firefox’s password manager, and will log you
into any Web site without you having to remember or look up the
password. When you’re on a page that requires a login, simply click the
icon. Better yet, use a hot key combination to log in faster. The
program also helps keep you safe by preventing hackers from stealing
your passwords by halting malicious JavaScript code. It also prevents
against other password dangers, such as cross-site scripting (XSS)
attacks.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4429
ANYPASSWORD is an easy-to-use tool that lets you
store all your passwords, user IDs, and related information together in
a safe place. The program supports tree-type data structure, password
generation, incremental search, import and export of data.
www.anypassword.com/
IMAGIC FREE BROWSER. A stripped-down version of the
full Imagic 4.0 photo management utility, Imagic 4.0 Free Browser lets
you rapidly catalog your photo collection, then quickly search for
photos using database features. Not content to function merely as an
organizer, this version of Imagic also permits users to tweak and touch
up photos using a variety of features: Most people will use the
enhancement wizard that steps you through the process. Imagic can also
make nondestructive modifications to RAW image files, letting you
massage your photos into high quality artworks without changing anything
about the original file, preserving all the raw data. And the program is
able to stitch together photos into panoramic images automatically,
sorting and excluding photos that don’t match the adjoining image.
www.stoik.com/imagicfree/index.html
ROHOS MINI DRIVE. The Rohos Mini Drive utility
protects files on a USB drive by creating an encrypted and
password-protected partition, or section of drive space. You can save or
copy files into the partition as per normal, but if you happen to lose
the drive anyone would have to know the password to decrypt your
protected files. After a quick download and installation you can choose
a size, encryption type (AES256 or Blowfish) and drive letter to use for
the encrypted partition. When you connect, or mount, the encrypted
partition, it will show up in Explorer under the drive letter you
choose. You can access the remaining, unencrypted space on the drive
like you usually do, under the drive letter usually used for USB drives
on your PC. www.rohos.com/
OMZIFF. To encrypt a single file, it doesn’t get
much more straightforward than Omziff. Point it at a text file, choose
an encryption type, and tell it what to call the resultant encrypted
file. Choose a password if you want, then click the Encrypt button. To
decrypt the file, you’ll need to reverse the process. Point it at the
encrypted file and click the Decrypt button. It’s a basic process that
could benefit from a small frill or two, such as remembering the
original filename and auto-filling that name when you want to decrypt a
file (you have to provide a name for the decrypted file). But the
utility doesn’t even require installation—just double-click the .exe
file—and it can easily run from a USB drive.
www.xtort.net/xtort-software/omziff/
MINIMEM. Does your PC slow to a crawl when you’re
running certain programs? Minimem can help you put memory hogs—and only
memory hogs—in their place. Unlike most memory-freeing utilities,
Minimem lets you select which programs to optimize and which to leave
alone. Some programs—notably Web browsers, and especially Firefox 2.0,
for which Minimem was designed—"leak" memory as they stay open. Minimem
was designed to stop the leaks by removing unneeded memory pages. In
theory, it would also help with programs with very large memory
footprints.
http://minimem.kerkia.net/
PASTE MULTIPLE BLOCKS OF TEXT INTO A WORD DOCUMENT.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could collect multiple blocks of text and
then paste them into a Word document when you are ready, as opposed to
continuously flipping between windows? It is possible to do with
Microsoft Word. In fact, Word 2002 and 2003 let you copy up to 24 blocks
of text to the clipboard and then paste the text into your document.
This feature is referred to as Collect and Paste. Once you have copied
the blocks of text to the clipboard, you can paste them into your
document all at once or individuals. To see the items currently in the
clipboard, click Office Clipboard from the Edit menu. To paste all items
at once, click the Paste All button. Otherwise, hover the mouse over an
item, click the drop down arrow and click Paste.
DEFRAGGLER. Piriform Defraggler will remove those
pesky, tailed, Muppets from your hard drive once and for...oh wait.
Well, it won’t do that, but it will defragment your hard drive, and it
offers some features that the free defragmentation utility including in
Windows does not. First off, it’s faster and prettier. The latter is
important since, with large hard drives, you’ll be staring at it—or any
defragmentation tool—a while. Second, it has a number of nice features
which can make disk maintenance ...well, not fun, but easier and more
focused. www.defraggler.com/
HOTKEYZ. You can work faster and more efficiently by
using your keyboard instead of your mouse. HotKeyz is a keyboard utility
that will boost your productivity and it is really fun to use! HotKeyz
lets you easily create and maintain a categorized list of your hotkeys.
Each hotkey, a key combination on your keyboard, will launch a command.
You decide which commands go with which hotkeys.
www.skynergy.com/hotkeyz.html
OPENOFFICE.ORG. Not happy with the idea of a
Web-based office application? Then you want the downloadable
OpenOffice.org, the free competitor to Microsoft Office. It’s a full
suite, with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program,
database, and drawing program—and, for ubergeeks, a "mathematical
function calculator" (if you have to ask what it is, you don’t need it).
No need to worry about compatibility with Microsoft Office formats,
because it handles all of those, as well as Open Source formats as well.
Each of the programs in the suite offers just about all the power you’ll
need. www.openoffice.org/
BUSINESS FUNCTIONS. Looking to use Excel to run your
business? Then you’ll want this free add-in, which has 500 new functions
to help with just about any business analysis, budgeting, or tracking
you need. Need functions specifically for real estate, such as a variety
of functions having to do with rent? It’s there. So are functions for
other specific industries, as well as hundreds of general-purpose Excel
functions as well. There’s no need to run Business Functions separately
from Excel; it integrates directly within it, and is available as menu
options. No matter what you need for your business, there’s probably
something for you, including a nifty time chart creator, and much more.
www.businessfunctions.com/
GREENFISH ICON EDITOR PRO. Greenfish Icon Editor Pro
has a simple, straightforward interface, and it’s free. These are two
big points in its favor.
With all the typical paint tools (like Wand and
Eyedropper) and the ability to pull icons from executable files,
Greenfish Icon Editor Pro is a fast, easy way to edit or create custom
icons.
http://greenfish.extra.hu/index.php
EXCEL CALENDAR TEMPLATE. This program’s name says it
all: It’s a template for Excel that lets you create a calendar. Included
are the years 2008, 2009, and 2010, as well as several past years. The
calendar includes popular holidays, and is elegant and easy to read.
Each month gets its own tab. It’s great for printing, or using right
inside Excel. You can customize the look of the calendar by changing the
color scheme. In addition to a month-by-month calendar, you also get a
year at a glance, including a space for notes.
www.vertex42.com/ExcelTemplates/excel-calendar-template.html
OUTLOOKTOOLS. Often, Outlook options are hidden
beneath many levels of menus. Worse still, there are some features of
Outlook you may simply never find. OutlookTools aims to make configuring
Outlook far simpler, and it does an excellent job of it. You’ll be able
to quickly get access to all of your Outlook settings and file folders,
as well as run troubleshooting tools, such as one to fix corrupt .pst
files. You can also solve one of the more annoying problems with
Outlook—the way the program blocks many file types, because it considers
them insecure. OutlookTools will unblock any file type you want. In
addition, it will let you start Outlook with any one of numerous
switches, and let you customize when and how Desktop Alerts appear
telling you that you have new mail. You can change the transparency of
alerts, as well as determine how long they should stay visible.
www.howto-outlook.com/products/outlooktools.htm
RENAMER. Renaming one file is easy. Renaming a dozen
is tedious. Renaming a thousand...get someone else to do it, or get
ReNamer, a wonderful free/donationware program which allows you to set
up fairly robust rules for renaming files in a batch. ReNamer has a
simple, straightforward, interface. You set up some rules—such as
"Replace the file extension" or "Delete the last 4 characters"—and then
select files to which to apply the rules. A very useful preview option
allows you to see what you’re going to get before you execute the
process, saving unending amounts of grief and encouraging
experimentation. Once you’re satisfied with the results, ReNamer goes to
work, renaming all the input files according to your rules.
www.den4b.com/projects.php
KOPF OUTLOOK ATTACHMENT REMOVER. Outlook stores all
of its data, including emails and attachments, in a single .pst file,
and that file can quickly grow to gargantuan proportions—especially if
you’ve got plenty of attachments. That can make Outlook load and run
more slowly, and if your .pst file gets too big, you’ll be prone to
crashes. What to do if you want to keep your attachments, but don’t want
the .pst file to get too big? Get the clever Kopf Outlook Attachment
Remover. It saves your attachments to your PC, and gets them out of
Outlook, so deletes them from your .pst file. It then links your email
directly to the attachment. So in Outlook it appears as if the
attachment still existing. You still see the attachment icon. the file
is actually on disk, not in Outlook, so when you click it, you’re
loading it from disk.
www.kopf.com.br/outlook/
EBOOKSWRITER LITE. This free e-book creator lets you
compose masterworks of up to 20 pages in length, for a maximum file size
of 1MB. Your e-book is saved as a self-extracting file that installs the
reader software, then opens the e-book. It’s not as straightforward as
opening a PDF file in Acrobat Reader or an equivalent program, but it
works. EBooksWriter Lite does what it says it does: It creates e-books
for free. If you’re interested in creating your own e-books for friends
and family, and willing to embark upon a steep learning curve, you
should give this program a try.
www.ebookswriter.com/?down-ebw
PREVENT RESTORE. Many users don’t realize that when
it comes to files, deleted doesn’t equal gone. When you delete a file,
it’s removed from a table or directory, but the physical sectors that
comprised the storage area for the file still contain its data. That’s
why you can recover deleted files if you haven’t written anything else
to the hard drive. To make sure sensitive data is truly erased, you need
a program like Prevent Restore. Simply put, Prevent Restore overwrites
any currently unused sectors on a partition with spaces, random
integers, or random characters. It’s a simple as that—and though you may
have heard rumors that the government has some super sophisticated
methods of recovering overwritten data, the average Joe or corporate spy
sure won’t. It’s pretty much gone.
http://privacyroot.com/_free/prevent-restore.php
PHOTOWIPE. Have you ever taken what you thought was
the perfect photograph, only to find that something partially obstructed
your subject? Now you can "erase" objects or obstructions from digital
photos merely by "painting" over the object, and letting the program
recreate the lost detail. PhotoWipe is essentially a front-end to a
complex set of formulas that perform what’s known as image
regularization. One of the fringe benefits is that a program like
PhotoWipe can use some of these formulae to make an educated guess as to
the color of pixels next to areas you specify in a photo. You just use a
tool like one of Photoshop’s brush tools to color in the portion of the
image you want to remove from view, and the program’s algorithms do the
rest.
www.hanovsolutions.com/index.phpprod=PhotoWipeiv :
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Copyright 2009. This article is from the January 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
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the reprint appears in, please send to above address, Attn: Editor. For
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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
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See http://www.spcug.org for all reviews from the Sarasota PC Monitor,
go to the Newsletter Section.