Sarasota PC Monitor

Review Chairman's Industry Comments (09/04)

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.

HONDA CAR DEAL

One of our SPCUG members, Saad Hanna, is a sales executive at Honda Cars of Bradenton (HCB). Through his efforts, the owners of this dealership have agreed to provide SPCUG members with a special consideration, employee pricing on Honda car purchases. Consequently, you can buy a car there for the same courtesy that would be given to Saad himself. To explore this further, you can contact Saad at 941-758-7997. You need to identify yourself as an SPCUG member to receive this consideration. HCB is located at 5515 14th Street West (US 41 just South of State Road 70).

Several of our members (including myself) have purchased Hondas at HCB. They are one of the largest Honda dealers in the Southeastern US with a large selection of vehicles. I have personally been highly impressed with their vehicle pricing and their outstandingly friendly and efficient sales and service.

It is widely considered that when car shopping, the three top references for best cars, professional evaluations, owner satisfaction, frequency of repairs, dealer costs, trade-in values and considerable other information are best and most authoritatively available from 3 main sources: Consumer Reports, Edmunds.com and Kellysbluebook.com. Information from these sources originally led me to Honda cars. I have been a loyal fan ever since, having found their quality, economy, comfort and value impeccable and unbeatable. My own current vehicle is a Civic Hybrid that provides 42 MFG in driving around town. Not bad for these times! I usually use about one gallon a week.

Please be aware that neither myself nor SPCUG receives any remuneration of any kind from purchases made by you. This information is provided only and entirely as a service to our members! :

Computer Buffet

PAINT.NET. This surprisingly powerful image editing and manipulation tool includes unlimited undos, special effects, and even the ability to work in layers. www.getpaint.net/index.html 

GNU IMAGE MANIPULATION PROGRAM (GIMP). This Open Source image editor packs a surprising amount of power, and is well-designed, if a bit eccentric in layout. Even though it’s free, it compares favorably to the power of Photoshop, and includes many of the kinds of photo-editing tools that come with that program, including filters, effects, masks, layers, and more. www.gimp.org/ 

TIDY FAVORITES. If you’re not happy with Firefox’s favorites manager, and want a visual way to manage your bookmarks, consider Tidy Favorites. This one download is a Firefox and Internet Explorer add-in, and displays thumbnails of your favorites inside a Firefox tab. You can easily copy, delete, and update them, drag and drop them inside the tab, resize them, rearrange them, and quickly search through them all. www.tidyfavorites.com 

FOXMARKS BOOKMARKS SYNCHRONIZER FIREFOX EXTENSION. If you who rely on the Firefox browser to remember your Web site passwords, here’s something you might like. The latest version of the popular, free Foxmarks add-on now has a feature for synchronizing and effectively backing up the passwords that your browser stores, in much the same way as it does for your bookmarks. www.foxmarks.com/ 

FEEDDEMON. FeedDemon, a longtime favorite RSS reader, no longer costs a red cent. If you never tried this formerly for-charge software, now’s a good time to check out this impeccably organized news feed reader. It’s easy to overfill your plate with the smorgasbord of RSS feeds out there, so you may find yourself using one nifty feature: the Panic Button, which deletes all news older than a certain number of hours or days. www.newsgator.com/Individuals/FeedDemon/Default.aspx 

RECUVA (pronounced "recover") is a freeware Windows utility to restore files that have been accidentally deleted from your computer. This includes files emptied from the recycle bin as well as images and other files that have been deleted by user error from digital camera memory cards or MP3 players. It will even bring back files that have been deleted by bugs, crashes, and viruses! http://majorgeeks.com 

GRIDMOVE. This tiny free app divides your screen into your choice of preset (or user-created) grids and lets you snap your open windows to them for easy, instant organization. Grids for multiple-monitor setups are included, and swapping between grid patterns is as easy as a couple of mouse clicks. If your desktop frequently devolves into a disorganized mess of open apps and windows, let GridMove help you get things back in line. http://gridmove.en.softonic.com/ 

DEXPOT. Dexpot is free for private, noncommercial use, and it allows for the creation of up to 20 virtual desktops, so you can keep separate tasks confined to their own screen. Switch between desktops via the tray icon or hotkeys. The program is intuitive enough for beginners, but it offers enough features and tweaks to please hard-core virtual-desktop geeks, as well. www.dexpot.de/index.php?lang=en 

MPGTUNE.COM This site is great for tracking your vehicle’s mileage. You can see how efficiently you’re using gas over time. And you can compare it with EPA ratings and others’ vehicles. Hang onto your pump receipts. Enter that information into the site. You’ll see exactly how your car is doing.

MONEY MANAGER EX is a free, open-source, cross-platform, easy-to-use personal finance software. It primarily helps organize one’s finances and keeps track of where, when and how the money goes. This software is also a great tool to get a bird’s eye view of your financial worth.

Money Manager includes all the basic features that 90% of users would want to see in a personal finance application. The design goals are to concentrate on simplicity and user-friendliness - something one can use everyday.
http://majorgeeks.com/Money_Manager_Ex_d5410.html 

KNOW WHAT’S RUNNING. Windows runs a lot of background programs than are invisible to you. Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Delete to view) reveals them, but you can learn more with Process Explorer (free, www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals). It spells out XP and Vista processes in plain English.

USE STRONG WORDS. A "strong" password mixes numbers and letters, and not in alphabetical or numerical sequence ("abcd1234" is not strong). Mix the case and throw in punctuation marks. Use an entire phrase if space allows; longer is better. www.PassPub.com  randomly generates strong passwords you can use.

ERASE YOUR TRACKS. Erase your browser history after surfing on a shared PC. In Firefox, go to Options, then Privacy, and under Private Data click "Clear Now." (You might want to select "Always clear my private data when I close Firefox" for extra safety.) In IE7, select Delete Browsing History from the Tools button. Delete All erases everything stored: history, cookies, temp files, and stored passwords.

FEEDDEMON’S easy-to-use interface makes it a snap to stay informed with the latest news and information. You can completely customize the way feeds are organized and displayed. Set up custom news watches based on keywords or use the powerful search to find articles. You can even download podcasts and audio files and have them show up on your portable audio device. In addition, FeedDemon synchronizes with NewsGator Online and the rest of the NewsGator RSS Suite. The software is pre-configured with dozens of feeds, so you can unleash the power of RSS right away. http://majorgeeks.com/FeedDemon_d3958.html 

WINBUBBLE. In just two clicks, WinBubble will help you to customize and tweak your Windows Vista easily. Its features cover customization, security and optimization. Features: Windows customizations: add/edit OEM logo and information, edit owner information, context menu customizations, customize screensaver (bubbles, ribbon, and mystify), customize and remove the arrow on shortcut icons, desktop icons: show IE, computer, network, control panel, user name folder and public folder to desktop, hacking Windows experience score, re-enable hibernation, show Windows Vista build on desktop, enable slow-down animations, enable/disable Welcome Center. www.snapfiles.com/get/winbubble.html 

THE WORLDWIDE TELESCOPE (WWT) is a rich visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from the best ground- and space-based telescopes in the world to enable seamless, guided explorations of the universe. http://majorgeeks.com/WorldWide_Telescope_d5956.html 

PHOTOCOPIER PRO. Got a scanner and a printer? Why not combine the two into a copier? You no longer need a real photo copier if you have Photocopier. This is how it goes: insert a document into your scanner, start Photocopier and press its Copy button. After a few moments your printer produces a copy of the document. That’s it. No difficult settings to make, it’s very user friendly. www.nicocuppen.com/pit/editor/page_detail.phpid=10100 

SIW STANDALONE VERSION. You can ask the SIW tool anything about your PC—it’ll give you a list of regional settings or scheduled tasks, or which DLLs are loaded and which are shared. How about which video and audio codecs you have installed, or details about your network or open ports? SIW has everything, offering lists that you can easily access from toolbar shortcuts or from a panel with a hierarchy list. www.gtopala.com/ 

AUTORUNS, which has the most comprehensive knowledge of auto-starting locations of any startup monitor (a starting list of auto-run locations was obtained from David Solomon’s "Windows Internals" seminar), shows you what programs are configured to run during system bootup or login, and shows you the entries in the order Windows processes them.

Autoruns’ Hide Signed Microsoft Entries option helps you to zoom in on third-party auto-starting images that have been added to your system and it has support for looking at the auto-starting images configured for other accounts configured on a system. Also included in the download package is a command-line equivalent that can output in CSV format. You’ll probably be surprised at how many executables are launched automatically! http://majorgeeks.com/Autoruns_d4686.html 

PASSWORD SAFE. Password Safe is a strong contender in the large field of secure password managers. Password creation and the capability to install in "portable mode" are great features, and strong encryption makes it a worthy choice for keeping sensitive data safe. http://sourceforge.net/projects/passwordsafe/ 

INSTALLEDCODEC. When an online video or audio file won’t work, this helpful little utility might help you out. InstalledCodec lists all the drivers and filters currently installed on your system, but it’s up to you to figure out which ones you are missing. www.nirsoft.net/utils/installed_codec.html 

INFIBIA EASY TOOLS FOR VISTA 2008. If you’re not a fan of the optimization and diagnostic tools that come with Windows Vista, this third-party suite of software can help make things a bit easier. None of the tools does anything that Vista doesn’t, but a friendlier interface can make all the difference. www.infibia.com/ 

SECUNIA PSI. Here’s one of the best ways to optimize your PC: Make sure that all of your applications are patched and up-to-date. That way, they’ll run faster and be more secure, and so will your PC. Unfortunately, visiting the Web site of every one of your applications can be so time-consuming that you’ll never get around to doing it. So instead, get this freebie. It scans your system, lists all of your applications, and then regularly checks if any don’t have security patches. When it finds a patch, it applies it. http://secunia.com/ 

PC WIZARD 2008 can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about your PC’s configuration and performance. Everything, that is, except how to fix it. This free utility looks at your PC’s hardware and software-and everything in between. It lets you see your system in as much or as little detail as you like. For example, you can simply scan a summarized list of all the hardware running on your system, or you can dig deeper and see the level of activity on each of your processor’s cores, as well as the thermal temperature of the computer.

Its software analysis is equally as detailed: You can see which file extensions are associated with which programs, see an overview of all the security applications you have installed (and whether or not they’re up to date), or check the state of your Web browser.

PC Wizard also helps you analyze your PC’s performance. It will gauge the amount of system uptime, and provide detailed statistics on your restore points, shutdowns, and boot ups.

Its benchmarking tools will analyze the performance of your entire system, operating system, installed RAM, global memory, cache, audio playback, video playback, hard drive, optical drives, and more. Results are displayed in easy-to-read graphics that provide plenty of detail. What the program doesn’t provide, though, is recommendations on how to fix any problems that appear.

PC Wizard is a dense, capable program that may be better suited for experienced PC users. It can help pinpoint problems with your PC, but it expects you to fix them yourself. www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php 

VISTA RECOVERY DISC. It looked like Microsoft was finally going to do the right thing. Beta versions of Vista SP1 came with a modern equivalent of the old Windows Boot Floppy—a Start Menu option called "Create a Recovery Disc" that burned a Windows PE-based emergency CD. Alas, Microsoft removed that feature before SP1 shipped, but not before NeoSmart turned the disc into an .iso file and made it available on their site.

Running on the Vista version of Windows PE, the Recovery Disc is basically a Vista installation disc minus the install files. It even has an "Install now" button that asks for a Product Key before failing. You’re better off clicking the Repair your computer button. Among its Vista-only options are a tool for diagnosing and fixing startup problems, a version of System Restore that uses restore points on the hard drive, the restore portions of Vista’s backup program, and a memory diagnostic tool. www.divshare.com/download/3557861-fcb 

OBJECTDOCK. Replace the Windows Taskbar and Quick Launch toolbar with this Mac-like animated toolbar of icons for all your programs. It comes with a few "docklets" for displaying info like the time, weather, and a Web search form. www.stardock.com 

SIMPLED BUDGET. This free budgeting program is ideal for those who like to see their monthly budget at a glance. Enter all of your income and expenses, and then on a single screen you can see it all, graphically portrayed. SimpleD Budget also shows you what percentage of your budget each of your expenses occupies, so that if you need to cut costs, you can quickly see where to begin. http://dsbudget.sourceforge.net/index.php

DRIVE MANAGER is a nice little free utility that becomes more useful the more drives—including USB keys and the like—you use regularly. While Windows has some of this functionality built in, it can be a pain to access (you have to burrow through a good bit of the Control Panel to find it), and it doesn’t include the level of detail you get through Drive Manager. www.alexnolan.net/software/driveman.htm 

COMPARER. Windows Explorer will tell you a lot about the properties of files if you choose to display all the columns—but who wants to browse a hard drive with all that usually unnecessary information cluttering things up? An easier solution for the occasional need to compare two similar files would be Comparer. You drag a pair of tiles to this simple, free utility, which then displays all the pertinent information. Http://fenixproductions.dcmembers.com/index.html  

SAVE2PC, formerly YouTube Downloader, is a free tool that downloads videos from YouTube or Google Video and saves it as AVI or MPEG or FLV files to your local computer. save2pc allows you to easily grab and save desired YouTube videos. The user interface of save2pc is very simple, so you don’t need any technical knowledge to use it. No need to use scripts for Web browsers. Just run save2pc and start downloading. www.save2pc.com 

EUSING FREE REGISTRY CLEANER 2. Installing and uninstalling programs will inevitably leave bits and bytes of discarded data in the Registry that can build up over time, slowing startup times and generally making your system sluggish. Eusing Free Registry Cleaner 2 will do a good job of tidying up your Registry, while making a backup of files before it changes anything. If something does go wrong, restoring your system is as simple as a couple of clicks. Even if you don’t notice an increase in speed, there’s nothing wrong with cleaning some unnecessary code from your computer. www.download.com/Eusing-Free-Registry-Cleaner/3000-2094_4-10521691.html 

GLARY UTILITIES offers numerous powerful and easy-to-use system tools and utilities to fix, speed up, maintain and protect your PC. It allows you to clean common system junk files, as well as invalid registry entries and Internet traces. You can manage and delete browser add-ons, analyze disk space usage and find duplicate files. You can also view and manage installed shell extensions, encrypt your files from unauthorized access and use, split large files into smaller manageable files and then rejoin them. Furthermore, Glary Utilities includes the options to optimize memory, find, fix, or remove broken Windows shortcuts, manage the programs that start at Windows startup and uninstall software. Other features include secure file deletion, an Empty Folder finder. www.glaryutilities.com/ 

FREERAM XP PRO 1.52. Adding more RAM to your system can be one of the cheapest, most effective ways of increasing overall performance. But if your machine is maxed out, or cracking open your case and inserting new hardware is beyond you, FreeRAM XP Pro is a good way to make sure you’re making the best use of the memory you have. Run it at startup, and it’ll do a decent job of keeping your RAM resources in order without you ever having to think about it again. And if you’re the tweaking type, options in the Settings section let you manually free up RAM and display virtual memory and CPU usage. www.yourwaresolutions.com/software.html  

ADVANCED SYSTEMCARE FREE 3.1.1. From the makers of the excellent Smart Defrag, Advanced SystemCare Free is a smartly designed suite of tools for keeping your computer in tip-top shape or nursing it back to health. Like Glary Utilities, Advanced SystemCare includes Registry and disk cleaners that will scan your system for junk files and unnecessary code. But this suite also includes a spyware scanner, a disk defragmenter, a RAM optimizer, and handy tools that will scan your system for available software and driver updates, so you can be sure everything you’re running is up to date. www.iobit.com/advancedwindowscareper.html  

SPYWAREBLASTER 4.1. Once you’ve cleaned your system of spyware, junk files, and Registry errors, it’s a good idea to implement some precautions to prevent malicious code from getting back onto your PC. SpywareBlaster helps by preventing ActiveX-based attacks in Internet Explorer and blocking cookies in other browsers. All settings can be enabled and disabled with a click, and the interface should be easy for even novices to navigate. It’s free to use, but you’ll have to download file-definition updates manually, unless you pony up $10 a year to have them delivered automatically. www.javacoolsoftware.com/spywareblaster.html 

FILEHAMSTER. Vista Ultimate’s Shadow Copy automatically backs up different versions of the files you save, so you can easily revert to one of them. To get the same protection in Vista Home Premium, look no further than the freeware utility FileHamster from Mogware. Each time you save a file, FileHamster prompts you to add a comment to annotate that version and (optionally) to protect it from deletion. www.mogware.com/FileHamster/Downloads/ 

PORTA. If you’d like to create photo albums on the Web, you won’t find a simpler way to do it than using Porta. With a click or two, you’ll be able to create completely formatted HTML-based albums, ready for the Web. To make the album live, upload its entire folder on your hard disk to your Web site. If you use a Web-based photo sharing service, such as Flickr, Shutterfly, or others, you won’t have a need for Porta. But if you have your own Web site, and want to put photo albums on it, this freebie is a great bet. http://stegmann.dk/mikkel/porta/ 

JALBUM. Jalbum is an easy-to-use program that can take folders of images on your hard disk and turn them into a sophisticated, attractive, online gallery with just a few mouse clicks. If you sign up at the vendor’s site, you even get 30 megabytes of space free, with an easy-to-remember URL. http://jalbum.net/ 

BULLZIP PDF PRINTER. Occasionally a freebie surprises me with a feature or two I wasn’t expecting. In Bullzip PDF Printer’s case it was the ability to password-protect PDF files and even watermark them. Normally, you have to fork over a fair amount of cash for these niceties. Both features—as well as the basic PDF printing—worked perfectly. This is best of breed. Uninstall the others you may have tried and use Bullzip.
www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php 

EASEUS PARTITION MANAGER. This plucky little piece of freeware partitions hard drives like a reigning champ. Loaded with features, Easeus runs smoothly and lacks only a glitzy interface. www.easus.com 

JUSTCLOSESOMETASKS. If you often keep many programs running on your PC simultaneously and forget to close some down, which clogs your system, you’ll welcome this freebie. JustCloseSomeTasks gives you an exceptional amount of control over closing tasks you no longer need to run. Most people most likely won’t need this program. But if you wish you could automatically close tasks that you haven’t used in a while, JustCloseSomeTasks is a great bet. www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.phptopic=16018.0 

iHANGMAN. iHangman is a true heavyweight of iPhone and iPod Touch hangman games. It boasts 15 word categories and more than 39,000 words, not to mention a dictionary with far more depth than most such games offer. iHangman is a creative and well-executed offering. It has a clean, intuitive, interface that’s easy on the eyes. There are plenty of options. It even uses the accelerometer in a nifty fashion; when you’re stumped by a word (and you will be), a shake of the iPod results in a pop-up dictionary definition. www.xtremize.com/ 

DISPLAYFUSION makes it easy to customize your desktop wallpaper with your own images. Select pictures from your own hard drive or pull them down from Flickr with this freebie. You can search for and preview shots from Flickr from within the program, and there are nice options for those with multiple monitors. www.binaryfortress.com/displayfusion/ 

JOHN’S BACKGROUND SWITCHER collects images from Web sites like Flickr, Picasa, and more—or pictures from your own folders—and displays them as desktop wallpaper at intervals that you define. You can even subscribe to image sites that use RSS feeds. www.johnsadventures.com/ 

VISTA SERVICES OPTIMIZER. Tweaks Vista services in an easy and a safe way. * When you install Microsoft Windows Vista for the first time, you will notice the low performance of your system. There are many reasons of the performance problems in Windows Vista, one of them that there are many of Windows Vista services that are running in the background that consume a lot of CPU power and take up much space in the system memory (RAM) which we do not really need them at all. So I suggest to tweak Windows services by stopping and disabling unwanted services in order to reduce CPU usage and save some space in the system memory. This problem here is how we can do it in a safe way, because tweaking Windows services in a wrong way may lead to many problems like failure in launching some Windows applications, Performance problems, Security risks or in some cases a total system crash.

Vista Services Optimizer is a free and perfect tweaking utility that can improve your Windows Vista Performance and security with a simple mouse click, by tweaking Windows services in an automatic and a very safe way according to the way you use your computer and which software are installed on your system.

Vista Services Optimizer also enables you to tweak Windows Vista services manually for advanced users who need more control over Windows services in an easy and safe way. It provides you with detailed information about certain services and enables you to query some services information using Google or Yahoo search engine to help you identify some of Windows services function.

Vista Services Optimizer can inspect your system performance and security status according to your current Windows services configurations and the way you use your computer, and give you report about the optimized and unoptimized services.

It is a very safe tweaking utility which can optimize Windows Vista Performance and Security without causing any harm to the system. If you face any problem after services optimization, you can with one click restore your system default settings using Smart Rescue Center.

Product Features:

  • Tweak It Easily

  • Vista Services Optimizer is an easy-to-use utility that enables you to improve your Windows Vista performance and security with simple mouse clicks without the need of any other software.

  • Tweak It Safely

  • Vista Services Optimizer is a very safe tweaking utility that can optimize Windows Vista performance and security in a safe way without causing any harm to your system. You can also undo any changes Vista Services Optimizer has made to your system using Smart Rescue Center.

  • Automatic Optimizations * Vista Services Optimizer can tune up Windows Vista Services by stopping and disabling unwanted Windows services in an automatic way according to the way you use your computer, installed hardware and installed software with a single click.

  • Manual Optimizations

  • You can use Manual TuneUp to optimize Windows Vista services in a manual way which you can specify the services you want to optimize.

  • Services Diagnostics

  • Vista Services Optimizer can inspect your system performance and security status according to your current Windows Vista services configurations, how you are using your computer and what software you use. It also provides you with solutions for certain performance and security problems.

  • Services Profiles * Vista Services Optimizer includes a new feature called "Services Profiles" that enables you to save your services optimization options into a file called "Windows Services Profile" that helps you apply your different optimization options in seconds.:

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Copyright 2009. This article is from the April 2009 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.

See http://www.spcug.org  for all reviews from the Sarasota PC Monitor, go to the Newsletter Section.