HTML Editor you would like to have!

This is one of my most requested items but up until now I've not been able to give any product my hearty endorsement. There have been any number of contenders: Amaya for example, impressed with its standards compliance but was incomplete while Selida looked slick but had too many bugs. Finally a worthy contender has arrived on the scene in the form of the Open Source Nvu.

In reality Nvu is nothing new but rather a reworking of the old Netscape Composer. Composer was always a solid product and the revamp has lifted the product into another class. Here is an HTML editor and site manager that's easy enough for beginners to use but powerful enough to build large sites. It's closer in concept to Microsoft's FrontPage more than any other product but unlike FrontPage it, thankfully, produces standards compliant code. Its easy-to-use WYSIWYG editor will delight HTML newbies while HTML honchos can simply click a tab to switch to code view. Multiple tabs can be kept open to allow simultaneous editing and there is excellent support for forms, tables and templates. An internal spell-checker is included. CSS is handled through the CaScadeS editor from Mozilla Composer. Nvu also has the handy ability to call W3C's HTML validator from within the product. It's also extensible via XUL.

Nvu can upload files to your site via FTP and has some basic site management features but this is not its strength. Indeed the FTP side of the program has proved so problematic for some users that they have switched to using an external FTP client for uploading their sites. Overall it's an impressive product; no, it's not a replacement for commercial products like DreamWeaver but those looking for a competent, free, easy to use, WYSIWYG HTML editor need look no further.

If you want an editor that puts you closer to the code then you might consider 1st Page 2000. It's a free, earlier version of Evrsoft's [2] excellent 1st Page 2006 editor and while lacking many of the features of the latter, is still an excellent product. It's not the best choice though for HTML newbies. Note: The download seems to have been removed from the vendor's site. It is available elsewhere though [3].


[1] http://www.nvu.com/ Free Open Source, Windows 98 and later plus Linux, 6.57MB
[2] http://www.evrsoft.com
[3] http://www.voodoofiles.com/4836 Free, Windows 98 and later, 5.2MB

Talking Panda iRocker will teach you playing the guitar!

* The good: Talking Panda's iRocker teaches you how to play guitar chords and scales in a clear, easy-to-understand fashion; plus, tunings, chords, and scales have actual audio samples. The software also includes five basic songs to get you started playing with others.
* The bad: Talking Panda's iRocker costs $30, and it's somewhat limited by the fact that it runs within iPod's Notes feature.
* The bottom line: Talking Panda's iRocker won't turn you into a guitar-shredding virtuoso overnight, but it can teach you enough to start writing your own songs.

Apple's iPod and iTunes spawned a purchasing frenzy in the digital music world. Now it's time to give something back. Talking Panda's iRocker can teach you how to make music yourself, using the rocker's instrument of choice: the guitar. If you or someone you know feels like picking up the guitar, iRocker is a good way to learn the fundamentals, although it won't do your practicing for you.

Like most manufacturers, Apple doesn't allow third-party companies to write their own software to run on its line of iPod MP3 players, but Talking Panda uses the same loophole as many other software programs designed for the iPod: the Notes feature, which can be used to present rather complex text documents with navigational links and links to audio samples. Installing iRocker takes over your iPod's Notes directory completely, although we're happy to say that the installer does create a backup folder with your old Notes in it. Once installed, clicking Extras > Notes on your iPod takes you to iRocker's menu. There's no technological copyright protection, so once you unzip the installer, you can put iRocker on any additional iPods you might own in the future (the license agreement prohibits redistributing the software).

When you first launch iRocker, you get an instructional text introduction to the program, which teaches you how to read tablature notation so that you'll be able to play the chords and scales covered in further sections. Then it's time to tune your guitar. The Guitar Tuner feature gives you accurate tones for the standard guitar tuning, plus eight alternate tunings. You click each open string on your iPod's screen to hear an acoustic guitar play that note through your headphones or your speakers (whatever your iPod is connected to). Then you can tune each of the strings on your guitar to match those--fairly self-explanatory.

Virtual Chordbook is the meat and potatoes of the iRocker app. Using a clever ASCII-ish depiction of a fret board (don't worry, it looks good--see the image below), iRocker shows you where to put each finger in order to create each chord. It doesn't take you into upper positions but includes 12 chords for each note: major, minor, seventh, suspended, diminished, ninth, and so on. That makes 144 in all, although Talking Panda counts them as "more than 200," probably because it counts A sharp as different from B flat, even though they're the same.

Clicking the iPod's center button plays an audio sample of the chord displayed on your iPod's screen. iRocker first plays the chord one note at a time, then as one full strum, which is helpful. Miss it? Just click the center button to hear it again. Our only gripe here is that you have to wait a second or two before the sample plays.

If you haven't understood all of this talk of chords, don't worry--once you start learning them, you'll soon figure out which ones go together. String a few chords into a repeated progression (the Ramones famously never really needed more than three), and you're a songwriter.

Playing melodies or soloing as a lead guitarist requires a grasp of scales, and iRocker comes through, offering clear instructions on how to play scales in five modes: major, minor pentatonic, blues, major pentatonic, and minor. An audio sample of each scale is provided here as well so that you can check whether your version of the scale sounds right.

Once you've mastered the basics, you're ready to jam along with the five included full-length rhythm-guitar tracks, which are labeled by style and starting chord. You can either follow along with the chords or, more likely, try to solo over the backing track. For practicing the timing of your picking and strumming, iRocker also includes a metronome that plays a click track at 10 preset tempos, from 40bpm (beats per minute) to 160bpm.

Talking Panda's iRocker runs on any iPod with a Notes feature (third generation and later). It requires 47.5MB of your iPod's disc space, as well as some commitment on your part. If you're going to use the program only a couple of times, $30 is too much to throw away on iRocker, as it's more than you'd pay for an equivalent beginner's guide at your local music store. That said, paper guides can't play chord samples over your stereo. If you're willing to put in the necessary time to learn the basics, Talking Panda's iRocker is worth the money.

Comprehensive Protection from Malware

In a way, a Windows PC can be a lot like a glass of tap water — everything may look normal on the surface, but a closer examination can reveal all sorts of hidden stuff inside. Often that stuff may be benign, but some of it can also be quite harmful. In water the contaminants may be microbes or chemicals, but on a PC it's malicious software that you need to worry about.

The Cleaner Professional Screenshot

These days there are countless unpleasant programs floating around the Internet looking for systems to infect, and it often seems as if there are almost as many programs that you can employ to help rid your computer of these infections.

The Cleaner Professional from MooSoft is one such program that tries to protect your system against a variety of threats, from spyware to keyloggers to trojans and worms. Like many similar utilities, The Cleaner Professional aims to not only ferret out existing infections but to prevent new ones as well by monitoring the changes that are made to your system. We found that The Cleaner Professional could be helpful in locating, removing, and thwarting infections, but it also suffers from a poor interface design that in many cases requires too much effort from the user.

The Cleaner Professional actually consists of three separate programs. There's the main application that scans your system for problems, and then there are two additional modules called TCActive and TCMonitor, which monitor processes in memory and the Windows Registry (respectively) in the hopes of blocking unauthorized changes and arresting damage before it occurs.

Each piece of the The Cleaner Professional is a stand-alone application that is accessed independently (both TCActive and TCMonitor have their own Windows Tray icons), and while we certainly appreciate The Cleaner Professional's thoroughness, a more integrated interface would be easier to work with than having to go to three different places to use or view the various aspects of the overall program.

System Scanning

We installed The Cleaner Professional on two Windows test systems we knew to be infected and performed a complete scan. The scans identified multiple infections on each system and offered the option to quarantine or delete them, each of which it was able to do successfully. The time necessary to scan the entire system (including hidden files and inside compressed archives) didn't seem inordinately long, though the estimated time remaining counter is too inaccurate to be helpful. (In addition to complete system scans, you can also scan any individual file via a right-click context menu option.)

Unlike some spyware cleaning tools, The Cleaner Professional doesn't flag tracking cookies, which can be troubling but usually doesn't pose a serious risk to a system.

If you want to learn more about a malicious program you just uncovered, you can consult a Trojan database accessible from within The Cleaner Professional. Alas, although the database contains what looks to be hundreds of entries, most of them offer very little information other than the specific category (i.e. adware, dialer, backdoor, etc.) the malware falls under.

Each entry also has a link to MooSoft's online database, which often contains a bit more information, but it's usually nothing more than a cursory description of what the malware does. Ultimately the database isn't as informative as it could be, and there are better resources on the Web for researching the nature of a suspicious program.

A more useful capability is The Cleaner Professional's Stealth Mode, which can randomly change the name of the program's executable files (and removes the program names from Window titles) so that they won't be recognized by malware programs that try to identify and deactivate any defensive programs you have running on your system.

System Monitoring

The first step for a malevolent piece of software to get its hooks into your system is to modify the Registry (behind your back of course). To guard against this, TCMonitor runs in the background and keeps an eye on things, flagging you whenever a Registry change is attempted.

When a change is detected, TCMonitor pops up a warning accompanied by a rather jarring siren sound that plays over and over again until you dispense with the warning. (Only one alternative sound effect is offered, though you can substitute the .wav file of your choice or dispense with the audio altogether.) TCMonitor can also notify you via e-mail, which is nice.

With TCMonitor running in the background, we set out looking for some spyware. Before long we found some, and luckily, so did TCMonitor. We also ran some of the tests available at www.spycar.org, which, among other things, attempt to modify your Registry, change your browser settings, and execute programs the way a malicious program might. In this case, TC Monitor flagged every attempt at a Registry change, but it didn't prevent many of the browser changes or program executions.

But there's another catch: While adept at detecting Registry changes, TC Monitor makes responding to them more difficult that it should be. It's initial warning tells you which Registry key is being changed, but to examine the actual change you must click a button to open another window. Moreover, since TC Monitor displays two columns that list the key's entire contents before and after the change, the potentially damaging modification isn't always immediately obvious.

If you decide that the change is unauthorized your recourse is to click a button to launch the Windows Registry Editor, which you must then use to manually delete the modification yourself. We would much prefer a single dialog that warns of the modification, displays all the relevant information, and then offers the option to accept or reject the change.

The Cleaner Professional lets you schedule your scans and even the downloading of program updates, but here too the interface leaves something to be desired. You can create a new scheduled scan or update from within The Cleaner Professional, but the program then drops you into Windows Task Scheduler to configure the day/time along with any other options.

Conclusion

The Cleaner Professional works with most versions of Windows (98, Me, 2000, XP, Vista). (There's no Mac or Linux version, but who attacks those operating systems anyway, right?) You can download a fully-functional version of The Cleaner Professional to use for a 30-days. Registering the software after the trial period will set you back a $49.99 (plus an additional $4.99 and $10.95 if you want extended download rights or a CD, respectively). The welcome dialog box offers a link to purchase the software at a 10% discount, but no such discount was applied when we followed it.

It's hard to recommend a program that requires users to jump through so many interface hoops as well as interact with standard Windows tools like Registry Editor and Task Manager. When you add that with the software's uneven performance and relatively high price tag, the final verdict is clear: There are simply more effective, user-friendly, and lower-cost options in the never-ending quest to keep malware at bay.

Your Spam Filter

This is a difficult category as ordinary users need products that are easy to use and frankly, most free spam filters are way too complex to set up and use. The best products in this class are in fact, shareware not free. That said, MailWasher [1] is for most folks, the best free option.

MailWasher is an email preview utility that allows you to check your email on your mail server before you download it to your PC. The advantage of this approach is that you can kill unwanted messages including spam, viruses and large attachments before they get anywhere near your computer. MailWasher flags for you any messages containing possible spam and viruses for you to quickly check. It's a simple idea but quite effective and one which average users find easy to understand.

At the Mailwasher site you can download a free or "Pro" commercial version. The former lacks quite a few of the features of its commercial cousin. the most limiting of which is the ability to a access multiple accounts. However the last free version of MailWasher before it went commercial is still floating around the web [2] and it will handle multiple accounts. It too lacks many of the advanced spam detection features of the current commercial version but is still very effective. Alternatively, try XTerminator [3] which works much the same way as MailWasher and is totally free. I must say though, I prefer MailWasher's user interface.



[1] http://www.mailwasher.net ( 3.05MB)
[2] http://www.321download.com/LastFreeware/page2.html#Mailwasher (1.57MB)
[3] http://www.artplus.hr/adapps/eng/xterminator.htm (1.87MB)

Adondo Personal Audio Link - you must have it!

Personal Audio Link, or PAL, is a fascinating program that puts you in control of all the information on your computer and more! In this age when information is so valuable, this is a program you'll want to look at and try.

Keeping Up

It seems like we constantly have more information to deal with and more ways to obtain it. First there were the Personal Digital Assistants or PDAs. Then cell phones. Then cell phones combined with PDAs to create "smartphones". There are also pagers, instant messengers, and "Skype" phones. Just carrying some of these things around, and the gear that goes with them, can be a challenge. Chargers, power cords, car chargers, batteries, carrying cases, and more.

Beyond carrying all the gear is trying to use it. Try looking at the weather forecast on your "smartphone" while driving 70 mph and you may end up in a wreck. Trying to read your email on your smartphone may sound cool, but it's not really fun. I have big hands and it's no easy task to "type" on a keyboard that's maybe 3 inches wide. The folks who created PAL have realized this and their solution is nothing short of brilliant.

Getting Information From Your "PAL"

Using PAL you get the information you need right from your computer. All kinds of information. Personal Audio Link installs on your computer and PAL asks if you want a VoIP phone number (at no charge) during the 45-day trial. If so, a private 10-digit phone number is auto- provisioned right into PAL, on the spot. It's fast and easy. There is no waiting. Now, your computer has a phone number and it's a gateway to lots of information.

You train PAL to recognize your voice. You can communicate with PAL while sitting at your desktop or from any phone. For that reason, you can do a voice profile for "local" use and one for "remote" use. To do both only takes about 5 minutes. Right from the beginning you can get a wide range of information, plus you can customize the information that PAL has available.

From sitting in front of my computer OR from a thousand miles away calling in from my cell phone I can have Adondo Personal Audio Link do things like:

* Read my email
* Send audio email replies
* Tell me the weather in Denver
* Tell me the traffic on I-25 North or E-470 West
* Read me CNN news
* Read me my favorite blogs
* Tell me the weather in Boston
* Tell me my upcoming appointments
* Call any contact in my address book
* Tell me what Ford Motor Company is trading at
* And lots, lots, more!

I can drive in my car and deal with email, check on appointments, and get the latest news all without touching a button. I call my Personal Audio Link "Friday" after the character in Robinson Crusoe. Yes, you can rename it to something you like. I can be sitting here at my desk and get the same information, which means I can write this article and hear the latest news. It makes me more efficient and it saves time.

I believe that Adondo Personal Audio Link is a wonderful way to get by with fewer gadgets. It's a great way to get information while doing other things, like driving or writing an article. Is it perfect? No, and "Friday" will even tell me that. Ahh, but it's been carefully thought out and beautifully done. I use it all day long, to get information, to check email, to hear the news, and more, while I'm doing other things. It makes my day easier. This is the wave of the future and Adondo Personal Audio Link is truly a program you have to try. Download it and see what I mean!

Spiceworks: Manage Your Network on the Cheap

For some people, an application named Spiceworks might sound like an adult-oriented business productivity suite. But behind its slightly lascivious name lies a product designed to handle something decidedly dull: IT network management.

Network management software has earned a reputation as being both costly to buy and complicated to set up and use. As a result, many smaller organizations tend to forgo it, filing it under "nice to have, but not worth the expense or hassle". But network management can be a lot like a visit to the dentist — while you can put it off, in doing so you risk letting a potential problem go unnoticed, or even grow worse over time.

Spiceworks (from a company of the same name) hopes to convince more small businesses to embrace network management by addressing the price and complexity obstacles. The easy-to-use Spiceworks application, which is still in public beta but scheduled for a late October release, can inventory your network's systems and software (along with various other devices) and also includes monitoring and reporting capabilities too. But what's most noteworthy about Spiceworks is its cost — or more to the point its lack thereof — because it's entirely free (though there is a slight catch that we'll get to shortly).

Starting Out

Spiceworks is a relatively small download (about 7MB) that's available on the home page of the company's Web site . The software runs on either a Windows XP Professional (with SP2) or Windows 2003 Server system, but it can detect Windows 2000/XP, Mac OS X and Linux/Unix machines.

Spiceworks will please those who aren't read-the-manual kind of people because it doesn't have (or need) one. In fact, the sole product documentation is an FAQ that consists of a couple dozen entries.

Many network management applications also require you to install software agents on every system to provide control and query capabilities. One of the nice things about Spiceworks is that it doesn't rely on such agents. Instead, the software gathers its data entirely though the remote administration capabilities of the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) interface that's built into Windows 2000/XP. (In the case of Linux or Unix-based systems, it uses SSH, or Secure Shell.)

You need to install software on only one system, which makes configuring Spiceworks fairly simple in most cases. During setup you're prompted to answer a few questions such as which IP port you want the software to communicate through and what administrative account you want to use to log into remote systems.

Within a few minutes of downloading and running the software, Spiceworks is ready to scan the network. The initial scan can take up to 45 minutes depending on how many devices you have (While Spiceworks is designed for networks with 250 or fewer devices, the company says it will also work on larger networks, albeit at reduced performance).

Gathering and Viewing Data

Spiceworks displays all of its information within a simple browser-based interface. Its default setting presents an overview of your network that's organized by category, displaying how many workstations, servers, printers and miscellaneous devices it detected (along with other network information). The program offers lots of ways to view your network data, allowing you to browse for particular items or to drill down through a particular device, selecting different device categories via a tabbed interface.

Spiceworks also reports all of the Microsoft software, services and operating system updates (a.k.a., hotfixes) present on each of the systems it finds, and we especially like the supplemental information it provides in these areas. For example, each hotfix record contains a link to the corresponding knowledge-base article on Microsoft's support Web site, and when looking at services you can click to automatically conduct a Google search on them. Software entries include a link to the manufacturer, assuming Spiceworks recognizes the application.

Spiceworks successfully located and identified most of the devices on our test network (which included a Windows Server, network printer, and multiple Windows and Linux clients), although it failed to recognize a couple of non-PC devices — namely, a wireless print server and a NAS drive. If all of your systems use the same administrator account username and password, specified during initial setup, they should all be identified without any additional configuration. If your systems use a variety of administration accounts, and the account you provided is invalid for a particular system, Spiceworks will flag it as unknown. You can correct this condition by specifying additional accounts for your network.

By default, Spiceworks scans the entire subnet of the system it's installed on, but you can add additional address ranges or individual IP addresses to be included in – or excluded from – the scans. A current limitation of the interface is that there's no way to edit entries in any of these categories, so modifying an entry involves deleting it and then creating it anew. (The company says it's in the process of remedying this.)

Monitoring and Reports

One of the trade-offs of not using agents is that Spiceworks isn't equipped to remotely modify systems, only to poll them for data. This means you can't use Spiceworks to modify or install an update to a remote system, for example, but for most small companies this probably isn't high on the shopping list.

The lack of agents also precludes keeping in constant contact with systems, so real-time monitoring isn't an option. Nevertheless, you can configure Spiceworks to scan the network at regular intervals ranging from daily to as often every 30 minutes. You can also choose from among three different scan speeds. While slower scans obviously take longer, they use fewer system resources, which can be helpful if you're running Spiceworks on a client system and want to also use the system for other tasks.

Spiceworks also helps you sift through lots of network information with a built-in report generator. You can choose from a handful of pre-defined reports (i.e. find systems with low disk space or find all printers) or design your own report by using any of the roughly two-dozen parameters. The software lets you save reports as either Excel or PDF files. It also lets you define network monitors to notify you in case of certain network events, such as when a system's running low on disk space, its anti-virus definitions aren't up to date, or a particular application has been installed or removed.

Would You Like Ads with That?

These days whenever a product is available for free it's usually a safe bet that some sort of advertising is subsidizing it, and that's certainly the case with Spiceworks. Simply put, the company offers its product at no charge since it plans to earn revenue from another source — specifically, the Google Adwords text advertisements that occupy the right-hand side of every Spiceworks page. SpiceWorks actually makes no mention of this on their site, so you don't know about it until you've installed the software.

As is typical of Adwords, the ads embedded into Spiceworks are context-sensitive and are based on the information Google has gleaned from the page data (you'll likely see an ad for ink or toner when looking at the printer page, for example), so they change from page to page. (In at least one case, however, the ads were bizarrely irrelevant, all having to do with apartment rentals and florists in Harrisburg, Penn.)

In any event, the Google ads don't dominate the page and are no more intrusive than they'd be on any Web site. Although some business owners may not be entirely comfortable with ads being generated from their network information, most people shouldn't find the ads overly distracting, and some may even find them useful. (The company says that it has no plans for a paid version of the software that's not supported by ads.)

As far as your network data is concerned, Spiceworks says that it's all stored on a local database, as are all the account credentials you provide (the latter in encrypted form) and none of it is uploaded to Spiceworks or any third-party.

The Bottom Line

Spiceworks seems to have successfully applied a new business model to an old problem with a product that's free, capable, and easy to use. The product does have a few rough edges (after all, it's still in beta), and it won't give you the bells and whistles of a conventional network management application, but if you're looking for a way to take stock of your network with a minimal time (and no financial) investment, Spiceworks is the way to go.

Hamachi: Roll Your Own VPNs the Fast and Free Way

Prior to the existence of the Internet as we know it today, if you needed a secure connection between two systems on remote networks, your choices were essentially to use a dedicated high-speed circuit like a T1 line or to rely on a slow modem, with both options often getting quite expensive.

These connection methods were largely supplanted by the advent of virtual private networks (VPNs), which have made connecting remote computers significantly cheaper by setting up an encrypted and "tunneled" connection across the Internet, allowing multiple computers or networks to communicate securely across an inherently insecure medium.

The catch with VPNs, however, is that they can be hard to set up. By contrast, Applied Networking, Inc. rather confidently calls its Hamachi software a zero-config VPN application. We found that Hamachi does in fact make setting up a secure connection between systems a relatively simple affair that could easily be performed even by someone without significant networking expertise.

How Hamachi Works

There are several reasons that conventional VPN configuration can be so difficult. For starters, differences in implementation between manufacturers of routers, firewalls, and client software can and often do cause interoperability problems. And even if you're using the same equipment or software on both ends, a VPN can be a pain in the neck when you're trying to connect two networks using network address translation (NAT).

NAT is used on countless networks these days and lets multiple systems on a private LAN communicate with the Internet using a single public IP address. The problem is that in order to translate the addresses between the private and public networks, NAT must modify the address information within network packets. This usually prevents VPNs from working because the modified packets are interpreted as having been compromised.

To get around the various obstacles to a successful VPN connection, Hamachi borrows a technique used by peer-to-peer applications such as instant messaging (IM) software. It employs a external server it calls a mediation server that servers as a sort of directory and matchmaker for Hamachi clients. The mediation server authenticates clients through the exchange of encryption keys, tracks clients so they can locate each other behind routers and firewalls, and helps facilitate the setting up of secure connection between systems.

Applied Networking claims that once the mediation server has successfully established a connection between Hamachi clients, the secure connection is solely between the peers and no encrypted traffic passes through Hamachi servers. (The server does send regular keep-alive signals to clients, however, in order to keep idle connections up and running.)

Installation and Setup

Hamachi uses a very minimalist interface that's extremely simple and easy to use. The first time you run the software a brief tutorial takes you through a tour of the interface, but it's almost unnecessary since there are a mere three buttons on the client — the power button activates the Hamachi interface, the network button lets you create or join an existing network, and the gear button is for configuring application settings, of which there are only a handful.

When you install Hamachi, it creates its own virtual network interface on your system that has configuration parameters separate from those of your regular wired or wireless adapters. This Hamachi interface can be found alongside the others when you view your network connections in Windows, but it remains disabled until you turn on Hamachi using the aforementioned power button.

To create or join a Hamachi network, you click the network button and are prompted to supply a network name and password. As the connection is established, the Hamachi network interface is assigned its own IP address in a range separate from the one you're already using. For example, our test system's physical network adapter was configured with an address in the 192.168.1.x range, but our Hamachi adapter's IP address was assigned 5.40.88.144. (Although this address is technically a public IP address, in this case it's accessible only through the Hamachi network.)

Making Connections with Hamachi

Other systems can join a Hamachi network provided they know the network's name and have the password. If our experience is any indication, users ought to have little if any difficulty connecting to each other via Hamachi. In fact, we were easily able to connect to a colleague's Hamachi network across the Internet even though both networks were using different routers and NAT address ranges.

Connecting via Hamachi worked equally well irrespective of which end initiated the connection, and even more impressive was the fact that the link was established without the need to open ports or perform any kind of router/firewall configuration on either end. Since most software firewalls will recognize the Hamachi adapter as a separate network connection and block traffic on it, you may need to configure that firewall to allow the kinds of traffic you want over the Hamachi interface.

We were able to use Hamachi for a variety of tasks, including running Windows File and Printer sharing, an FTP server, and several games. You can have multiple Hamachi networks active at one time, and all the clients that are members of a given network are listed in the interface (they're grayed out if not currently connected). When you right-click on a network member you can ping the user's system or send a text message, and if you're the owner of the network, disconnect a system and prevent it from reconnecting in the future.

As mentioned earlier, Hamachi offers very little in the way of configuration options. That's probably a good thing because the software unfortunately lacks documentation, a built-in help system, or even a readme file (though there is evidently a support forum available at the company's Web site). Most of the configuration options that exist are self-explanatory and concern how the software displays information or behaves during startup or shutdown.

The Bottom Line

Hamachi is currently available for Windows (XP and 2000 only) and Linux, with a MacOS version also under development according to the company. Hamachi is currently available free of charge for unlimited use, but given that it's a pre-1.0 copy it wouldn't be surprising if the next version had some restrictions and/or a registration fee.

So exactly how secure is Hamachi? That's hard to say definitively, since we're neither cryptographers nor experts in network security. One thing to be aware of is that unlike most commercial VPN products, Hamachi authenticates only systems and not individual users (since all users connect using the same network name and password). Therefore, anyone that knows this information could potentially become a member of your secure network.

Given that the trust most people put in a product ultimately depends on the trustworthiness of the company that made it, the fact that Applied Networking is for the most part an unknown quantity may be enough to give some pause for concern. And although the company's .cc domain denotes a Cocos (Keeling) Islands registration, it's actually located in Vancouver, BC, Canada — the .cc domain is commonly used by large companies worldwide.

For its part, Applied Networking states that Hamachi communications are secured using 256-bit AES encryption; it also publishes a detailed description of its security architecture on its web site. For what it's worth, the company also pledges that Hamachi doesn't include any kind of spyware, and we didn't detect any after installing the software.

We probably wouldn't be quite comfortable transmitting truly sensitive information over a Hamachi connection right now, and we would only use it with someone we trusted to keep the network name and password private. Nevertheless, it's hard to argue with Hamachi's impressive ease of connection, so if you're looking for a simple VPN for gaming or similar purposes that won't make you pull your hair out, Hamachi is definitely worth a look.

Choose your download manager!

You have several good choices in this category. To me a good downloader is one that does the job, is well integrated into your browser and is not intrusive.

That's why my top recommendation for some time has been Star Downloader [1]. Unfortunately the freeware version has been effectively frozen at version 1.44 with future enhancements restricted to the shareware version. It is however, still a fine choice.

After trying half a dozen other products, I've settled on "Free Download Manager" [2] as my current top selection. It's fast, stable and integrates well into both Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox though the later works best with the free FlashGot extension installed. "Free Download Manager" offers simultaneous multi-part downloads, easy restarting and recovery, a powerful scheduler, downloading from mirrors and just about everything else you need in a download utility. Additionally, there is no embedded adware or nag screen.

After using it for a couple of weeks, I've decided that it's actually just as good as Star Downloader with the advantage that it's still being actively developed. Indeed, version 2 released in April 2006 adds even more features to this already impressive product.

If you are looking for another option the commercial FlashGet [3] program is now available for free. It's certainly full featured and nicely integrated but I find it overly complex to use. The product has a bit of a history of bundling in other products with the install but when I tried V1.72, it was totally clean.

A final (and excellent) choice is the time-proven LeechGet [4] program which is free for personal use. Again it's got pretty well everything that you want in a download manager. Some folks find its colorful graphical presentation attractive, I find it a little gaudy and intrusive. Looks aside it certainly does its job well. Note that the indicated download rates are a tad optimistic so don't mistake this for superior performance. There is a separate plug-in for Mozilla/Firefox, Netscape and Opera integration.

[1] http://www.stardownloader.com/downloads.php Freeware, All Windows versions, 2.34MB
[2] http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/download.htm Freeware, All Windows versions, 1.66MB
[3] http://www.flashget.com/index_en.htm Freeware, all Windows versions, 1.43MB
[4] http://www.leechget.net/en/ Free for personal use, All Windows versions, 2.9MB

Broadcast Clipboard

This is a simple little app that monitors your clipboard, sends the contents (text only today, sorry - someone will mod it) via UDP multicast to the specified group multicast IP, and puts the data in the remote PCs clipboard. In summary, when you copy from one pc, you can paste on the other. It works great - and I know plenty of people who will use this at the office.

There are other apps like this, but they tend to be point to point instead of multicasting. The point to point apps whine when one client or the other go down, and take extra configuration. Plus, this one is good for any number of PCs.

The only issue I've had with it is that my WIFI router, and Daemon's, seems to not send UDP multicast packets over the waves to clients. The other direction works, the wireless NIC in the pc does send the packets, and they get to the router and broadcast. Thus a machine on WIFI seems to be able to send the clipboard, but not receive. I'm unclear on whether this is per spec, or just a "feature" of our routers.

No special key combos are needed to use the app - it monitors the existing keyboard and broadcasts it. Double click the systray icon and you can set the group IP, the port, and the TTL. If you don't know what these mean, tinker only with the port to separate yourself from other clients on your network.

No configuration is needed unless you want to seperate yourself on your LAN from others that may be running this. Just start it on both PCs, and it takes over from there!

SimpleCenter is your best choice!

If you have a hard drive full of digital media--photos, videos, and music--and you have the need to sync to a portable device, Universal Electronics' updated SimpleCenter may be right up your alley. The software, which has just been updated version 4.1, boasts a variety of new and updated features that digital media mavens will appreciate.

SimpleCenter is a Windows software package that works with a variety of devices, including the Sony PSP, the Nokia N80 and N93 smart phones, and most USB mass storage and Plays For Sure devices. In addition to being able to sync your media to those devices, SimpleCenter can also transcode files to compatible formats (particularly useful for getting video files onto the PSP and the iPod, for instance). The software can also act as a UPnP server and stream media to other devices on your home network (it's compliant with version 1.5 of the working draft DLNA standard). There's an option to access and share your photos and movies online via the Web.

For those keeping score, quite a few of those features are not available on iTunes and Windows Media Player. There's a catch, of course: most of the good stuff is available only if you pay $30 to upgrade to SimpleCenter Premium. But Universal Electronics offers the Premium version as a free 30-day trial, and the basic media management and playback functions remain enabled even if you choose not to upgrade. In other words, if any of those features pique your interest, you should download SimpleCenter and kick in the tires to see if it's the right media manager for you.

BitDefender: Comprehensive PC Protection

Not content to tackle security issues from just one vantage point, European software maker SOFTWIN has come to market in recent months with a trio of products meant to safeguard computers from a range of threats.

Sold as BitDefender AntiVirus 10, AntiVirus Plus, and Internet Security, the products range in price from $40 to $70, with free trial evaluations available for download as well.

The BitDefender line comes with a serious pedigree, having won the European IST Prize, the #1 Best Buy ranking from PC World, the PC World "Best 100 Products of 2006," and most recently top billing in Consumer Reports' "Best Tools to Stop Viruses, Spam and Spyware" report.

What makes the BitDefender trio so great? The big sell here lies in the breadth of functionality, starting with B-HAVE (Behavioral Heuristic Analyzer in Virtual Environments). This BitDefender proprietary technology emulates a virtual computer-inside-a-computer, a place where software is run in order to check for signs of potential malware. The manufacturer touts this as a new kind of security layer, one that safeguards a system by detecting malicious pieces of code for which signatures have not yet been released.

BitDefender's Antivirus protection includes the ability to scan and disinfect infected files on access, and will allow infected documents to be recovered, rather than deleted. A new feature in BitDefender Antivirus sniffs out and remove rootkits.

An antispyware feature watches for spyware threats in real time, based on a broad database of spyware signatures. To keep things secure, BitDefender monitors numerous potential hotspots where spyware might attack a system, thus lessening the likelihood of a successful attack.

The "Plus" version of Antivirus enhances functionality by integrating antivirus and anti-spyware functions along with firewall, antispam and other features.

Meanwhile, BitDefender Internet Security offers up a sturdy array of defenses against outside invaders. The slightly more expensive security suite ($59.95 for one PC and one year of protection, or $69.95 for two years and two PCs) offers tools that can tackle viruses, spyware, spam, rootkits, phishing and even objectionable Web content.

A Web scanning capability filters traffic in real time, buffering potential trouble before it reaches your browser. Port scan detection detects and blocks port scans, which can create vulnerabilities. A privacy guard monitors HTTP (Web) and SMTP (mail) traffic to safeguard personal data such as credit card and Social Security information. Filters can be used to keep out incoming mail that contains unwanted words or to block Web pages that contain specific words or phrases.

For Peer-2-Peer and IM junkies, BitDefender includes filters against viruses and worms that spread via instant messaging and file-sharing applications.

Here's a nifty one: An anti-dialer that prevents the baddies from running up a huge telephone bill at your expense. Will they never run out of creative ideas, those wacky felons?

BitDefender passes the ease-of-use test. It's just as simple to set it and forget it as it is to monkey around endlessly. You can leave the defaults in place, micromanage protection levels against spyware or spam, or set parental controls. A desktop indicator shows how many files have been scanned lately. Regular reports detail the findings of each completed scan.

The software is especially efficient in the realm of updates. At the user's discretion updates will occur every hour or can happen at user-defined intervals. Automatic hourly updates can be loaded into the system immediately or else at a time specified by the user.

Why pay for protection when there are so many well-regarded freebie products available? In a few words: advanced protection and support. BitDefender offers 24/7 live support along with email help and online responses to FAQ.

Overall, we give BitDefender strong marks for being comprehensive. With each BitDefender product we see an effort to address a broad range of threats, coupled with a extensive suite of defensive tools. This ought to make a powerful combination in the ongoing effort to keep things locked up tight.

Ten Windows Explorer alternatives which were compared and reviewed

Windows Explorer, the default file manager for Microsoft Windows, hasn’t really changed all that much over the years. Below you’ll find reviews and links to download 10 11 12 different alternatives.

Name	Cost	Trial?	Rating (x/5)
A43	free	n/a	***½
Ac Browser Plus	$21.00	yes	**
Directory Opus	AUD $85.00	yes (30 days)	****
ExplorerXP	free	n/a	***
Far Manager	$25.00	yes (40 days)	***½
FileMatrix	€ 24.00	yes	***
freeCommander	free	n/a	****
PowerDesk Pro/Standard	$39.95/free	n/a	**¾
SpeedCommander	€ 37.95	yes (60 days)	***
Total Commander	$34	yes (30 days)	***½
XPlorer	free	n/a	***½
xplorer²	€ 19.95	yes (21 days)	***

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A43

Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP
Download: http://www.primitus.us/a43/
Features:

Integrated text editor with unlimited size. Dynamic highlighting for the web.

Integrated zip/unzip features. Simply drag-n-drop files or click a button. You can also turn your zip archives into self-extracting archives the same way.

Integrated file search to quickly locate and jump to those lost files.

Integrated quick launch area for fast access to the programs you use the most.

Favorite buttons to quickly open those often used folders.

Dual-pane view for those that demand speed in file management.

Requires no installation, no data is written to the system registry. A43’s configuration information is saved in a local .ini file.

Keep it on your pen/jump drive and take it where ever you go.

Thoughts:
A43 took up about 18mb of RAM after using it for 5 minutes. It dropped down to 3mb of RAM after 15 seconds of not using it. Its response time was very quick while renaming, moving and copying files. The drag-and-drop zip/unzip and rar/unrar feature is pretty neat - if I made zip files often I would find this very helpful. Also, you can fit A43 on a floppy and take it with you to use on any PC (doesn’t require an installation). The built-in text editor was easy to use, as was ‘quick launch’ section. The ‘file filter’ feature (use wildcards to sort files) is well located and works exactly as you’d expect. Between the features and the price, this is a file manager that I won’t delete right away.

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Ac Browser Plus

Requirements: Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP
Download: http://www.konradp.com/products/acbplus/
Features:

ACFAT - find a file in a second! This service can index a chosen drive, and so you can query this index in a second, more: drive indexing.

Quick viewers.

Editorial Renaming. Rename files with ease, just like in a text editor.

Zip as folders, packing, unpacking with ease

Adding comments to files and directories

Script templates. You can write scripts (visual basic scripts, batch scripts- .bat, or anything else), which can be executed in the context of currently selected files or folders (thanks to the script templates).

Multi Window Interface.

Smart Renaming.

The font color, and other font specifications can be defined by the user, separately for every file’s extension.

Hot Point – a small red rectangle on each file shows you the file properties, and quick view (images, text and multimedia).

File Finder

Thumbnails’ view

Ability to follow the links while searching files.

Quick Access Bar – Displaying most frequently used folders and allowing you to filter out items from current file browser window

Keyboard shortcuts known from Norton Commander and Windows Explorer.

Thoughts:
Lots of features, but the interface feels very “Windows 95″ at times. If it was free I would consider leaving it installed and maybe try it out for a while longer. Because some of the other file managers are as feature-rich (or more so) and have a more consistent (and at times much more attractive) interface, I can only give it two stars out of five.

Directory Opus

Requirements: Windows 95/98/ME or NT4/2000/XP
Download: http://www.gpsoft.com.au/DScripts/Download.asp
Homepage: http://www.gpsoft.com.au/Index.html
Features:

Powerful File Manager & Explorer Replacement

User-definable File Display Views

User-definable Toolbars, Menus, File Types

Advanced built-in Image and File Viewers

Built-in ZIP and Advanced FTP

Visually Synchronize Files & Find Duplicates

Advanced Search and Rename Functions

More Configurable than any other program

Easy Slideshows…and much more..

Thoughts:
Directory Opus is a great File Manager. There are a lot of features and options, and nearly every aspect of this program is customizable. It really is an Explorer replacement, and it offers to do so during the installation - so when you open any folder, Directory Opus will launch. The built-in FTP client works exactly as you’d expect. The many different view options are easy to access and just “make sense”. While in use, Directory Opus took up 28MB of memory on my system. The instant that it’s minimized, its memory use dropped to 1MB. If I used Windows more often, I would gladly pay the $85.00 to purchase this software. In fact, the next time I have a day job that requires Windows use, I will.

ExplorerXP

Requirements: Windows 2000, Windows XP
Download: http://www.explorerxp.com/index.html#download (scroll to the bottom)
Homepage: http://www.explorerxp.com/
Features:

Tabbed interface

Easy access to My Computer, Recycle Bin , My Documents & Desktop

Drag & Drop with Explorer, the tab bar and special folders on the main toolbar.

Multy rename tool - allows to rename multiple files in one step.

Displays folder size information and the real size of compressed files & folders.

Folder Size Cache - greatly improves the speed of the folder size calculations between sessions.

Advanced copy/move.

Unicode support.

USB devices support.

Clean - recursively removes files that match given list of extentions or wildcards.

Groups - A group is a collection of folders, which users are able to access quickly or drag & drop files to them.

Configurable keyboard shortcuts.

Small download size - only 410 KB.

Thoughts:
Pretty straight forward Explorer-like File Manager. While it doesn’t have as many features as many of the other reviewed file managers, it is free (for non-commercial use) and makes a great “first” upgrade for beginners. Anyone who has used Windows Explorer for more than 5 minutes will feel right at home using ExplorerXP.

Far Manager

Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, 2000 or XP
Download: http://www.farmanager.com/download.php?l=en
Homepage: http://www.farmanager.com/index.php?l=en
Features:

Far Manager is a program for managing files and archives in Windows operating systems. Far Manager works in text mode and provides a simple and intuitive interface for performing most of the necessary actions: viewing files and directories, editing, copying and renaming files and many other operations.

Customize it - Far Manager has a multi-language, easily configurable interface. File system navigation is made easier through the use of color highlighting and file sort groups.

Your task - your way. The functionality of Far Manager is greatly extended by external DLL modules - plugins (made possible by a special set of interfaces - the Plugins API). For example, archive support, the FTP client, the temporary panel and the network browser are all implemented as plugins included in the standard distribution of Far.

Thoughts:
Far Manager is a pretty old-school File Manager. Mouse support is provided, but this is a File Manager for keyboard commandos. Very cool plugins add great extra features (FTP, email, Winamp control etc). I’m not sure that I’ll pay for this File Manager, but I will be using it until the 40 days is up before I decide.

FileMatrix

Requirements: Windows 98, ME, NT4 SP6, 2000, XP or Vista
Homepage: http://www.gardenerofthoughts.org/ideas/filematrix/index.htm
Features:

Basic. Extensive integrated help (configuration and help wizard, hints), between 1 and 10 columns for navigation in directories, 30 sets of columns called boards for organizing sets of directories, directory tree navigator, thumbnail pictures, drag-and-drop between columns and boards and to / from other applications, skins, special graphical effects.

Advanced. 20 containers (which are lists of files that can store, for example, the results of a search), picture converter (including the ability to normalize pictures to a specified size), media player (with the possibility to resume playing later), mouse gestures with a user interface called mouse menu, file hover information (which includes a thumbnail and a played media clip), text search with ranking (like an online search engine), steganography integrated with the viewer / editor (noise management included).

Thoughts:
FileMatrix is quite unique among all of the other File Managers reviewed in this article. The interface is much different than the typical explorer-style manager. The use of “boards” and “containers” makes viewing and grouping files a snap. If you’re tired of the same-old-file-manager, give this one a try. And be sure to make use of the included Wizards and help files - they will really come in handy.

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freeCommander

Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, NT (from version 4.0), 2000, XP, Vista (?)
Download: http://www.freecommander.com/fc_downl_en.htm
Homepage: http://www.freecommander.com/

Features:

Dual-panel technology - horizontal and vertical

Optional tree view for each panel

Built in file viewer to view files in hex, binary, text or image format

File viewer inside archives too

Built in archive handling: ZIP (read, write), CAB (read, write), RAR (read)

Nested archive handling

Easy access to system folders, control panel, desktop and start menu

Copy, move, delete, rename files and folders

Wipe files

Create and verify MD5 checksums

File splitting

File properties and context menu

Calculation of folder size

Folder comparison / synchronization

Modification of file date and attributes

Folder / program favorites

File searching (inside archive too)

File filters for display

User defined columns for detailed view

Support for Tortoise icons

DOS command line

Multiple language support

Thoughts:
‘Easy access to system folders’ is one of the features that first jumped out at me. My immediate thought was “why isn’t that in all file managers?” I may have overlooked it in some of the others, so I certainly won’t say that this is the only one that has this feature. “Size of folders” (not enabled by default) does slow things down - as freeCommander calculates and displays the folder size. With that said, it’s very handy to try and figure out where your hard drive space has gone, and easy to get to when you need it. The image preview was a bit slow for me compared to most of the others. The screenshot feature allows you to chose between image types (bmp and jpg) and even adjust the quality. I think the biggest drawback to freeCommander is the lack of built in FTP support, and I suppose it’s not that big of a deal. This program, though free, is donation-worthy.

PowerDesk Pro/Standard

Requirements: Windows 98, ME, NT4, 2000, XP, or 2003
Download: http://www.shop.avanquest.com/usa/trial_form.php?pid=686
Homepage: http://www.v-com.com/product/PowerDesk_Pro_Home.html
Features:

Dual pane operation

Layout Manager

Add Notes to Your Files!

Customize Your File Folders with Color

File Info column

MP3 Collection Management

Thoughts:
OK here’s my beef.. It’s not a bad File Manager at all. It’s very customizable, has all of the features you’d expect, but the ones you really want to try (add notes to files, ftp, sync folders) are only available in the Pro version (which there’s no trial for). The Standard version is free, but has a ‘nag’ bar that takes up too much screen real-estate. I would much rather a 10 day fully-functional demo version before I decide to lay down $40. Also, they added me to a mailing list when I specifically said I did not want to join (you must provide an email address to download the demo).

SpeedCommander

Requirements: Windows 95/98/98SE, Windows ME, Windows NT 4, Windows 2000, XP, 2003, Windows XP/2003 x64 Edition
Download: http://www.speedproject.de/enu/download.html
Homepage: http://www.speedproject.de/enu/speedcommander/index.html
Features:

Proven Two Window Technology

Extensive Archive Support

Add-In Interface

Macros

Enhanced FTP Functions

Native 64-bit Version for Windows XP/2003 x64 Edition

Thoughts:
Lots of features (built in browser is cool) and very snappy response times. Macros are simple to use. Worth checking out, but the price is a bit steep. If I had an x64 version of Windows I would be anxious to try out this app.

Total Commander

Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, Windows NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and Windows XP. 16bit version available for Win 3.1. Another for Windows CE and the Pocket PC.
Download: http://www.ghisler.com/download.htm
Homepage: http://www.ghisler.com/
Features:

Direct access to Network Neighbourhood

Supports Drag & Drop with Explorer/the Desktop etc.

Command line for starting of programs with parameters, simply by typing the program name or by pressing ctrl+enter or ctrl+shift+enter.

Configurable button bar and Start menu (User-defined commands) to place your frequently used DOS or Windows programs into a drop-down menu. The actual directory and/or the file under the cursor can be delivered to the application.

Configurable main menu.

Built in file viewer (Lister) to view files of any size in hex, binary or text format, using either the ASCII- (DOS) or the ANSI- (Windows) character set. The line width and font size can now be changed. You can even view files inside archives! New: Support for Unicode UTF-8 format.

Bitmap viewer in Lister, additional formats through Irfanview (see addons).

HTML- and Unicode-Viewer in Lister.

Parallel port transfer function (direct cable connection), works between Win95/98/NT/2000/3.1 and DOS!

Thumnbails view shows preview images in file lists.

Custom columns view allow to show additional file details.

Total Commander comes in the following languages: English, German, French, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, Spanish, Czech, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, and now also Hebrew, Greek, Afrikaans, Catalan, Turkish and Ukrainian

Built-in FTP client supports most public FTP servers

Archives are handled like subdirectories. You can easily copy files to and from archives.

Extended copying, moving, renaming and deleting of entire trees (Enables deleting “full” directories).

Thoughts:
Having only used it for about 30 minutes total (so far), take these comments with a grain of salt. Total Commander appears to be the fastest file manager in terms of response times. I asked it to calculate the size of 14 folders (that contained a couple hundred files) and it immediatley gave me the answer. The hard drive didn’t clunk away trying to count files, it just happened. As the screenshots below demonstrate, Total Commander looks very old school (though there are many options to customize the look and feel). As the name implies, it’s styled after Norton Commander, and as you’d expect it can be completely controlled via the keyboard. At $34 USD I’m curious to compare it to Free Commander (see comments at the bottom). I reserve the right to bump this up to 4 stars after I look at Free Commander

XPlorer

Requirements: Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista
Download: http://guti.webcindario.com/static.php?page=XPlorer (scroll to download section)
Features:

True multitabbed interface with independent combo, tree and list for each tab.

Blazing fast program execution.

Small footprint, can be run from floppy disks, USB devices, hard disks, …

Quick startup time.

High productive interface, almost every command is accessible optionally by keyboard.

Internal file viewer.

Internal file editor.

File toucher.

Command prompt here feature.

Split files in fragments.

Join fragment files.

Clean unneeded files.

Select files by wildcard selection.

Show files by filter.

Thoughts:
Arguably the most Windows Explorer-like of all the reviewed File Managers, XPlorer is certainly better than the default Windows Explorer. Here’s my only real complaint - when you delete a file, it remains ‘visible’ in the list of files until you refresh the screen. And you can only refresh by hitting F5 on your keyboard (no right-click, no Edit > Refresh etc). That one annoying ‘feature’ is enough for me not to use it (I replicated this problem on 3 different Windows XP machines). If that kind of thing doesn’t bother you, by all means check this one out because it’s not bad otherwise.

xplorer²

Requirements: Windows 98, ME, NT, 2000, XP, 2003
Download: http://zabkat.com/x2down.htm
Homepage: http://zabkat.com/index.htm/
Features:

Shell namespace explorer

Tabbed dual-pane interface

Instant preview of files

Browsing flexibility

View & edit text files

Extended file information

Search for files everywhere, using arbitrary criteria

Find text within office, Adobe PDF and other documents

Manage files from many folders simultaneously

Compare and synchronize folders

Discover and cleanup duplicate files

Execute DOS commands and scripts

Customizable user interface

Help and assistance where you need it

Individual folder settings

Visual filters and selection engine

Advanced file management

Robust file transfers

Throughts:
The ability to search for files everywhere, with Omni-Finder, is actually very cool/powerful. The built-in Help is very useful, as it explains all of the features (and how to use them) clearly, with illustrations. At first glance xplorer² appears fairly average, digging deeper shows it to be a powerful File Manager.

Paint.net: Like MS Paint, But Useful

Most small businesses need to use a photo from time to time, be it for a Web site, brochure, or presentation. But most businesses don't have an in-house art department to handle tasks like image editing, or the budget to spend a lot of money on a professional-level image-editing package like Adobe Photoshop.

But take heart: We found two downloadable applications and one online service that deliver the basics (and often more), with no money or previous experience required. Granted, these choices aren't as powerful as many of the pro-level packages, but they are usable, approachable and, best of all, free.

Paint.net: Like MS Paint, But Useful

Everyone's school project should turn out half this good: Paint.net began life as an undergraduate senior design project at Washington State University. Originally mentored by developers at Microsoft, the software was originally intended as a free replacement for the woefully underpowered MS Paint applet that comes as part of Windows.

Paint.net, now at version 2.72, is maintained by some of the alumni who originally wrote it. Designed to work with Windows 2000 or XP (and reportedly with the upcoming Windows Vista), this free download offers a wealth of painting and image-editing tools. Since there's no user manual, people familiar with other editing programs will be at an advantage. But even newcomers should be able to figure things out quickly enough to get basic jobs done.

As the name implies, the utility requires that Microsoft's .NET framework be installed on your PC. If it isn't, or if you aren't sure, the download page offers a choice that delivers both the program and .NET 2.0. Downloading the 48MB file takes just a few minutes over a broadband connection, after which you'll be prompted to install .NET (which takes five minutes) and then Paint.net itself (a two-minute install).

Paint.net offers a good range of image-editing tools, though more contextual help would be useful for the non-artist types among us.

The user interface is clean, though nothing revolutionary: Launch the program and you're presented with a blank rectangle surrounded by floating tool palettes marked Tools, History (which will list all of the actions you performed on an image), Layers and Colors (with a color wheel and grayscale bar). Hovering the mouse pointer over a tool gives the fairly descriptive tool name, but not a more complete description of how to use it as we've seen in other image-editing apps.

It was at this point we yearned for a quick-start guide or some piece of documentation. But it is the digital age, after all, so we opted for the good ol' Help choice from the top menu. A Tutorials choice led to the Paint.net forums, where people have posted instructions on how to create all sorts of nifty effects — glass orbs, glow effects, drop shadows, 3D text and much more. So we simply opened a photo and dove right in.

As in Paint, you can use the drawing tools to create a new image file, with various brushes, fill options, shape tools and so on. Or you can open an existing art or image file to edit (the program supports PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TGA and TIFF formats). One annoyance shared with Paint: There is no "Close" choice in the File menu. To close a file you are working on and move to another, you choose "Open" and are then prompted to either save the current file or not.

When working with photos, there are plenty of canned effects to jazz up your images. For example, there are four different blur effects, four distortion effects, embossing, a frosted-glass effect and even an adjustable effect to make a photo look like an oil painting. You'll find cropping tools, naturally, as well as an effective red-eye removal tool. And unlike other entry-level editors, Paint.NET support layers, which lets you compose one final image from a "stack" of images that are blended together.

Novices will need a lot of trial-and-error to get the effects just right, as most let you choose the degree to which the effect will be applied. As you play with these, you'll come to appreciate the unlimited undo levels in the History palette, which makes it possible to undo recent changes sequentially (or scrap them all and go back to the original image).

While we would have preferred to see more contextual help, we were still able to get the results we desired with just a little playing around. Given the number of tools Paint.net delivers and the non-existent price, we won't complain.

File Manager

Windows Explorer is fine for simple file management activities but when you have some serious work to do, you need a two pane file manager. I use Directory Opus which is without doubt the best product in this class but costs $59. A good free alternative is xplorer² [1]. It offers a good part of the functionality of Directory Opus and is totally free. As a bonus, its user interface is very similar to Windows Explorer, so most users will find this tool easy to learn and use.

XYplorer is another strong contender. It uses a tabbed view rather than a two pane view which is better when working with multiple folders though not quite as efficient as the two pane approach when working with only two. XYplorer is packed with features included one of the best file-finders I've seen. It's one of those products that impresses more with use. In fact I suspect that if you use it for a month, you'll end up using it permanently. Until the 21st March 2006 it was freeware but has now morphed to shareware but the last free version is still available from the vendors site [3] and various freeware sites [4].

[1] http://zabkat.com/x2lite.htm Free for private use, Win 95 and later, 899KB
[2] http://www.xyplorer.com/ Free for private use, Win 98 and later, 623KB.
[3] http://www.xyplorer.com/download/xyplorer_full_lfv.zip All Windows versions, Free for private use, 633KB
[4] http://www.pricelesswarehome.org/2006/PL2006FILEUTILITIES.php#FileManager

Rootkit Scanner/Remover

Rootkits are a special kind of software tool used to hide trojans, viruses and other malware from your anti-virus scanner and other security products. Unfortunately, they are extremely effective which means that some of you reading this will be infected even though you believe your PC to be totally clean. Thankfully there is a new class of security product now available called rootkit detectors that use specialized techniques to detect these dangerous intruders.

Most of these detectors require quite a bit of technical skill to interpret the results but one of the simplest to use is also amongst the most effective. It's called BlackLight [1] and is currently available as a free beta from F-Secure. The beta will expire on the 1st of January, 2007 but you can use it freely up to then. I suggest everyone download this product and scan their PC. The chances of you being infected are small but for five minutes work it's not worth taking the risk.

BlackLight will detect most rootkits missed by AV scanners but is can't provide perfect detection; no rootkit detector can. That's why its' advisable to use more than product.

If you are an experienced user you should check out SysInternals RootkitRevealer [2]. It uses a totally different different technique to BlackLight so by using both products together you'll be getting excellent overall detection. RootkitRevealer is however, harder to use than BlackLight and is a bit prone to false positives so take care before deleting detected items. If in doubt, consult the SysInternals RootkitRevealer forum. [3]

Another useful rootkit detector for experienced users is GMER [4] though please read the documentation carefully before using. If you are the type that simply likes to press the "scan" button then stick with BlackLight ;>)

Currently one of the biggest guns in the rootkit detection war is a free Chinese product called IceSword. It's not really a detector like the other products rather it offers a set tools that can help reveal the presence of a rootkit. These tools include a special process viewer, startup manager and port enumerator that are not fooled by rootkits. It's left to the user though, to interpret the results. In the hands of an skilled user, its an amazing tool but not much use to beginners. The Chinese download site is very slow but Major Geeks has a local download link [5].

The reality is that at the present time full protection against rootkits may require the use of multiple products. For details see my article on rootkits [6].

[1] http://www.f-secure.com/blacklight/ Free beta, Windows 2000 and later, 818KB
[2] http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/RootkitRevealer.html Freeware, All Windows versions, 207KB
[3] http://www.sysinternals.com/Forum/default.asp
[4] http://www.gmer.net/ Freeware, Windows NT and later, 280KB
[5] http://majorgeeks.com/Icesword_d5199.html Freeware, Windows XP and later, 1.9MB
[6] http://www.techsupportalert.com/rootkits.htm <= How to deal with the threat of rootkits

Software Suite

The Open CD site [1] offers for free a wonderful collection of just about every application software product you need to run a PC including the latest version of OpenOffice. Many of these freebies substitute admirably for expensive commercial products. There is Abi Word as an alternative for MS Word, OpenOffice for MS Office XP, Thunderbird for Outlook, The Gimp for Adobe Photoshop, 7-zip for WinZip and many more. If you then add to this collection some of the other utilities from my "46 Best-ever Utilities" collection you will have all the software you'll ever need without spending a cent. Note: All of the Open CD utilities can be downloaded for free as a CD ISO image. If you have a slow connection you can purchase the CD for a as little as $1.99. In addition to the Windows versions, the CD also contains the same collection of programs implemented under a version of Linux called Ubuntu that can be booted and run directly from the CD. That way you not only get to try all these great programs you can try Linux as well, without interfering in any way with your current Windows installation.

Update: the folks at Ubuntu [2] are now giving away free CDs containing the latest version of Ubuntu Linux together with most of the programs on the Open CD. They will send you the full Ubuntu installation CDs plus a live CD where you can run Ubuntu directly from the CD. You can order as many CDs as you want and you don't even have to pay the mailing costs! When you get your CDs read this this simple introduction to Linux [3] before starting.

[1] http://theopencd.org
[2] https://shipit.ubuntu.com/
[3] http://www.paulstamatiou.com/2005/10/24/how-to-ubuntu-linux-for-novices/

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6

Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 is the best antivirus application we've seen this year. We think you'll like Kaspersky's straightforward, no-nonsense interface (one that doesn't try to up sell you additional Kaspersky products).

Setup
Kaspersky downloaded and installed without incident on our test systems in just a few minutes. You do have to reboot your computer, but that's a minor inconvenience. Once installed, Kaspersky occupies a mere 50MB of hard drive space, and it consumes very few system resources when active. Unlike McAfee and Symantec, Kaspersky will run under Windows 98, Me, 2000, and XP on older PCs with as little as 64MB of RAM.

Although Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 lists for $10 to $20 more than Norton AntiVirus 2007 or McAfee VirusScan Plus 2007, we found several retailers, such as CompUSA and Office Depot, offering Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 at competitive prices after various discounts and rebate offers are applied. And Kaspersky is the only major antivirus vendor to offer a free, lighter version of its antivirus product (McAfee and Norton still do not).

Should you ever want to remove the program, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 includes its own uninstall icon. Unlike McAfee and Norton, Kaspersky Anti-Virus left zero traces--no registry files, no folders with mysterious log files--which is how a good uninstall should act. Why McAfee and Norton can't clean up after their own messes is beyond us.

Interface
If you ever used Kaspersky in the past, you'll be pleased with the redesigned interface. Gone are the messy tabs across the top. Version 6 sports a cleaner and brighter look, with its intuitive left-hand navigation and system status alerts prominent in the lower-left corner. The much larger right-hand window pane is used for details. On the left, there's a Scan option and, unlike the one-button "fix" solutions offered by Norton and McAfee, Kaspersky gives you more options--handy, because there are times when you want to run only a quick scan, a deep scan, or a single file scan, and this way you can do so without much fuss. Also, if you don't like the native interface, Kaspersky allows you to change its theme or skin--something that Norton and McAfee do not offer.

Features
Kaspersky offers a number of specific antivirus protections for your PC. Like most antivirus products today, Kaspersky also protects your computer against spyware--scanning for both viruses and spyware, which is much more efficient than scanning for each separately. Kaspersky scans not only e-mail, but also Web-based port 80 traffic, routing out online viruses, Trojans, and other malware before any of these infect your hard drive. To reduce scan time, you can even ask Kaspersky to scan only the files that have changed or been modified recently.

Standing behind the Kaspersky Anti-Virus application is Kaspersky Labs, one of the best antivirus research labs in the world; often Kaspersky is the first to report new malware. We like that Kaspersky features hourly signature file and program updates; other vendors update your system only when necessary. And with Kaspersky, you can roll back any update (in the case of a software conflict), which is not the case with other antivirus vendors.

Kaspersky is proactive; it's vigilant against the unwanted installation of adware, dialers, rootkits, and remote access utilities. It also locks specific system registry keys, such as Startup, Internet Explorer, system security, and system services from changes made by malicious code.

The only negative we could find involved creating a rescue disc, which is optional. If you are running Windows XP SP2, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 can create a bootable Rescue Disc in case a virus knocks out your system. Unfortunately, the process is a bit complicated. First, you must to install PE Builder, a free download available from a variety of online sources, but you must also have your Windows XP SP2 disc handy. Our Windows XP SP2 was a download upgrade, not a disc, so we were ultimately unable to take advantage of the Rescue Disc feature.

Performance

In terms of protecting your PC, we cite results from two leading independent antivirus testing organizations. In the latest test results from AV-Comparatives.org, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 earned an Advanced + (highest) rating, catching 99 percent of all malware tested. And from CheckVir.com, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 was one of eight products to earn its Standard (or highest) rating.

Support
The fact that Kaspersky is a Russian antivirus company doesn't mean you can't get top-quality technical support from within the United States or elsewhere. First, Kaspersky Anti-Virus 6 provides context-sensitive in-program help files. For example, if you are on the Data Files page and you click Help, you're taken to the entry for Data Files within the Help file. It's a small touch, yet we don't see it often enough. Kaspersky also delivers excellent online documentation. Unlike Norton AntiVirus 2007, which offers a pithy, 32-page manual online, Kaspersky offers a robust 208-page PDF manual, including everything we want and need--except an index, although the table of contents is fairly detailed. There are active user forums and FAQs available online. Finally, you can e-mail or call a toll-free number for live technical support.

Conclusion
If you're looking for an antivirus application that's light and fast and consistently wins detection awards against the competition, Kaspersky's the one. We found this antivirus application easy enough for beginners, with customization features that will please more advanced users, as well.