Netscape's New Prototype Nods to IE, Firefox - 12/1/2004 Netscape's new beta release of its venerable browser offers a rich selection of IE and Firefox features as well as support for both browsers' rendering engines.
WinAce: Whether to Zip or ACE - 11/29/2004 Whether you want to ZIP, ACE, or even RAR your files, WinAce is up to the task, while also being able to handle all of your file management needs.
Search Engine Toolbar Round-up: One-Click Web Searching and Much More - 11/27/2004 Most of the major Web search engines now offer toolbars that become part of your browser, letting you conduct quick Web searches at any time and from any site. Today we compare three of the most popular search toolbars currently available.
KeePass: Keeping Your Passwords Safe and Secure ... and Easily Accessible - 11/22/2004 How many passwords do you keep track of on a regular basis? Network logon, email, online banking and shopping, regular Web browsing ... the list seemingly never ends. How can you possibly remember all of them? No problem, this nifty little open-source "password safe" will handle the memory-intensive labor for you.
WebSite-Watcher: Save Yourself Time with Automated Site Monitoring - 11/15/2004 Wouldn't it be nice to see what the competition is up to without having to take time out of your daily routine to check a dozen Web pages for updates that might offer clues as to your competitors' evolving business strategies? That's the premise behind WebSite-Watcher, a nifty application that periodically visits selected sites and notifies you when anything has changed.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0: Microsoft Alternative Comes of Age - 11/9/2004 If you're looking to explore the internet without being tied to IE or if you yearn for a new "Outlook" on e-mail, the officially released Mozilla Firefox and pre-release Mozilla Thunderbird serve as solid alternatives with some intriguing extras. And the price is right — both are available for free.
Google Desktop Search: Lightning-Quick Searches for Your PC - 11/4/2004 With its new Desktop Search utility, Google is hoping to improve the process of text-based searching on your computer the way it did on the World Wide Web. It passes with flying colors in this area, returning accurate results in fractions of a second, but does providing nearly instantaneous access to your PC's information come at a cost?
Kerio Personal Firewall: Premium Security That Delivers Strength and Simplicity - 10/27/2004 To better protect yourself against threats like rogue applications downloading and running on your PC, you need to be running a software firewall. Though such products from companies like Symantec, McAfee, and Zone Labs are certainly better known, Kerio Personal Firewall distinguishes itself in the category by managing to be simple enough for a novice to operate while still providing many of the advanced features that typically appeal to more tech-savvy users.
Desktop Armor: Waging War Against Malware and More - 10/24/2004 Desktop Armor is a toned-down, business-oriented version of Geek Superhero that offers all the same features as its comic-inspired counterpart. The $25 client protects your computer from a wide variety of nefarious and annoying activities that can stealthily infiltrate your computer, including adware and spyware components, programs that secretly install and automatically run when Windows starts, and poorly trained apps that leave unwanted detritus littered across your desktop.
Anfy Java and Anfy Flash: Enticing Visual Effects for Your Web Site - 10/21/2004 Adding visual interest to your Web site can increase your site's return traffic, but if all you add is blinking text you're likely to do just the opposite and drive visitors away. Anfy Team's Java applications and flash creation site let you create complex and compelling effects without doing any programming, and without spending any money.
Excellence in Technology Awards: Make Your Nominations - 10/20/2004 What hardware was hot, what software sizzled, and which services reigned supreme? Break away from your balance sheet and nominate your favorites in the Small Business Computing 2005 Excellence in Technology Awards.
ListGarden RSS Feed Generator: Create RSS Files Simply and Quickly - 10/18/2004 RSS is one of the hottest technologies on the Web today. Most blogging and content management systems have RSS file creation capability built in, but if you're not using one of those programs, it can be a bit tedious. Enter the ListGarden RSS Feed Generator.
Portable RoboForm: The Convenience of Password Management Anywhere You Go - 10/12/2004 RoboForm is a useful tool for automating the often tedious processes of filling out Web forms, storing and entering logon credentials for sites, and creating new passwords. The newly released Portable RoboForm (RoboForm2Go) does an efficient job of taking these capabilities and making them mobile, allowing you to utilize the convenience of RoboForm on nearly any computer.
Java 5: Unleash the Tiger on Your Next Project - 10/3/2004 Sun has let loose the Tiger. The next version of the Java platform has been released as Java 5 with many enhancements and performance optimizations. But what exactly happened to versions 3 and 4?
Maxthon: IE on Steroids - 9/29/2004 If you've tried browsers like Opera and Netscape but for some reason keep coming back to Internet Explorer, no doubt you still miss some of the features these alternatives provide. Fire up the IE-based Maxthon and you'll be able to enjoy a multi-window interface as well as a compelling list of extras that can make your online experience more productive and enjoyable. Oh, and did we mention it's free?
Alcohol 120%: 240 Proof Proves Intoxicating - 9/22/2004 Do you ever worry that your precious game disks will get scratched, or even worse, lost? And even with all that RAM and a multi-Gig CPU, why do you still have to continually wait for your DVD drive to deliver data? A speedy alternative to the CD/DVD drive bottleneck, Alcohol Software's Alcohol 120% might make your head spin once you get used to moving your CDs and DVDs to your hard drive.
WinGate 6.0: Your Gateway to Internet Connectivity for the Entire LAN - 9/20/2004 More than just a means for connecting the computers on your LAN to the Internet, WinGate offers maximum protection from Internet-based threats and a wide range of services for effectively operating in today's net-centric environments.
Zoom Player: A Player for Every Type of Media File? - 9/8/2004 Can you play multimedia files on your computer? Of course you can, but which of the multitude of file formats can you actually use? Zoom Player from Inmatrix claims to support the widest variety of multimedia formats, including the most recent formats, while also giving you ultimate control over your viewing and listening environment.
Bloomba: Putting an End to the Frantic Search for E-mail - 9/2/2004 Whether you're chronically disorganized or merely overwhelmed by the massive size of your inbox, Bloomba makes it easy to find that electronic message in a haystack.
Gaim and Trillian: Making Multi-Protocol Instant Messaging Possible - 8/31/2004 For those that cannot imagine life without a real-time link to friends and co-workers and for whom one instant messaging client is simply not enough, you're in luck. Several vendors have stepped up to the plate with products that can handle chatter from multiple IM services at the same time. Today we'll take a look at two, Gaim and Trillian, to give a sense of what's possible.
Windows XP SP2: A No-Brainer Upgrade? - 8/26/2004 If there's one phrase to sum up the raison d'etre of Windows XP's long-awaited Service Pack 2, we would submit that it should be, "It's the security, stupid." Almost all the features of SP2, and certainly all of the most important ones, concern security in some way, shape, or form. And that's definitely not a bad thing, but does it make the new service pack a must-have upgrade?
RoboForm: Efficient and Convenient Password Management and More - 8/25/2004 RoboForm is a useful tool for automating the often tedious processes of filling out Web forms, storing and entering logon credentials for sites, and creating new passwords. The newly released Portable RoboForm does an efficient job of taking these capabilities and making them mobile, allowing you to utilize the convenience of RoboForm on nearly any computer.
Geek Superhero: Waging War Against Malware and More - 8/23/2004 While its comic-inspired motif may come across as a bit distracting – and even goofy – Geek Superhero has quite a bit to offer under its somewhat flaky exterior. The $25 client protects your computer from a wide variety of nefarious and annoying activities that can stealthily infiltrate your computer, including adware and spyware components, programs that secretly install and automatically run when Windows starts, and poorly trained apps that leave unwanted detritus littered across your desktop.
Style Master: Complex CSS Coding Made Easy - 8/18/2004 Creating a layout with CSS can be quite complicated. And even though some WYSIWYG HTML editors offer visual CSS authoring capabilities, many Web designers still end up needing to tweak the CSS code by hand. Style Master (formerly called Layout Master) is a powerful editing tool designed to help remedy that problem.
AntiVir and AVG Free: An End to the Elusive Search for Free Virus Protection - 8/11/2004 A virus scanner that offers free real-time scanning, free regularly updated virus definition files, and free technical support is a rare find indeed. Our exhausting search for just such a beast has finally come to an end in the form of not one but two completely free virus scanners — AntiVir and AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition.
Zoom Player Pro: A Player for Every Type of Media File? - 8/8/2004 Can you play multimedia files on your computer? Of course you can, but which of the multitude of file formats can you actually use? Zoom Player from Inmatrix claims to support the widest variety of multimedia formats, including the most recent formats, while also giving you ultimate control over your viewing and listening environment.
WinRAR: A Worthy Competitor for WinZip? - 8/4/2004 In this age of outsized hard drives and files of equally generous proportions, file compression capabilities are a virtual necessity. In the PC world that usually means the ZIP format, but ZIP isn't the only game in town. RAR is one alternative format that claims better compression than ZIP as well as a variety of essential capabilities you won't find in RAR's ubiquitous rival. Joe Moran reviews a feature-rich client that adeptly handles the RAR format, WinRAR.
Anti-Spam Round-up: Stop the Spam-sanity - 7/29/2004 We don't have to tell you that unsolicited email, or spam, is completely out of control. If you've been searching for that perfect spam-fighting solution, you're in luck. Here are some of the hottest spam filters currently available, each of which brings to the table a different collection of tools for attacking and eliminating unwanted email.
PKZIP and SecureZIP: Low-Carb Diets for Your Files - 7/20/2004 To cut the fat from files, PKWARE's PKZIP and SecureZIP, a kind of PKZIP on steroids, offer the goods. They competently compress files, create archives, and extract files to save hard disk space and reduce file sizes for e-mailing and archiving.
Mozilla Thunderbird and Mozilla Firefox: Microsoft Alternatives Come of Age - 7/14/2004 If you're looking to explore the internet without being tied to Internet Explorer or if you yearn for a new "Outlook" on e-mail, Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird, respectively, serve as solid alternatives with some intriguing extras. And the price is right — both are available for free.
Abobe Photoshop Elements: Elements of the Real Thing - 7/14/2004 Adobe's sub-$100, trimmed-down version of Photoshop is a well thought out response to the rash of requests from its customers for affordable image editing software. Photoshop Elements includes a reduced set of Photoshop features along with some handy additions to enhance overall ease of use.
Norton AntiSpam 2004 - 7/7/2004 As part of Norton's Internet Security suite, Norton AntiSpam makes sense as the spam detection and removal client of choice for current users of the Symantec suite. Its appeal to newcomers, on the other hand, is not quite as certain. While definitely not without its limitations — the client is neither the most powerful nor the most efficient anti-spam utility available — Norton AntiSpam is also not without its merits.
RSS Round-up: SharpReader and FeedReader - 6/30/2004 RSS feeds have started to emerge en masse and now populate countless web sites in the form of the familiar orange XML and blue RSS buttons. In our first look at RSS readers, we put two of the more popular aggregators, SharpReader and FeedReader, through their paces.
SnagIt 7.1 Review - 6/25/2004 Imagine your keyboard Print Screen key connected to the dashboard of a Ferrari, and you've got TechSmith's SnagIt 7, a sub-$40 screen capture and customization utility that will wow software testers, trainers, and webmasters alike.
Trillian and Gaim: Making Multi-Protocol Instant Messaging Possible - 6/24/2004 For those that cannot imagine life without a real-time link to friends and co-workers and for whom one instant messaging client is simply not enough, you're in luck. Several vendors have stepped up to the plate with products that can handle chatter from multiple IM services at the same time. Today we'll take a look at two, Gaim and Trillian, to give a sense of what's possible.
NetOp Remote Control 7.65: Support Tool or Trade Secret? - 6/24/2004 Mike Houghton puts this super secret, supercharged Cadillac of remote tools through its paces and finds a world-class support and help desk application that you've probably never heard of.
Avant Browser - 6/21/2004 This free, custom web browser application sits on top of Internet Explorer, adding a wealth of features and functionality to the basic Microsoft offering. A built-in pop-up blocker, tabbed browsing, search engine toolbar, integrated Flash animation filter, browser trace eraser, and URL aliases are just a few of the useful additions Avant Browser brings to the table.
OpenOffice.org - 6/16/2004 While not as flashy an upgrade as Microsoft Office 2003, v1.1.2 of OpenOffice.org adds to what was already the best value in Windows software. The free, open-source, Office-compatible word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and drawing combo gets a facelift, a speed bump, and improvements ranging from PDF export to macro recording.
Qurb - 6/12/2004 A white list-based spam filter that integrates seamlessly with Outlook or Outlook Express
