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BOOT CAMP 212 (12/02/02)
SHAREWARE AND FREEWARE, part 2
Last week, in part one of our brief introduction to the
wonderful world of freeware and shareware we looked at five essential utilities
that can help to download and manage files, protect your PC from viruses, keep
hackers at bay and rid your machine of spyware. This week we’re concentrating
on programs that can improve your machine’s performance, configure it to suit
your way of working and make Internet browsing a lot more enjoyable by zapping
those pesky ‘pop-up’ advertisements.
In case you missed part one it’s worth pointing out that the
programs we’re looking at are either free or very cheap and widely distributed
over the Internet and on computer magazine cover-mount CD-ROMs. If you find
them useful and use them beyond the trial period it is good manners to pay the
licence fee. This will usually entitle you to support and upgrades and it
encourages development in this vitally important sector of the software
industry. Next week we’ll be looking at programs that can help you to make the
most of your computer’s multimedia capabilities.
POPUP STOPPER, 450kb, Windows 95/98/NT4/2000/Me, freeware
http://www.panicware.com/product_dpps.html
Apart from your connection and ISP subscription fees it
costs nothing to surf the web but we all know there’s no such thing as a free
lunch, which is why many web sites are plastered with adverts and banners.
However, of late there has been a more insidious attempt to get across
commercial messages and that’s the extremely tiresome ‘pop-up’ ad. Pop-ups
appear on your screen without so much as a by your leave; some of the more
persistent ones won’t go away when you click on the close icon, or another ad
appears. Popup Stopper is a small freeware program that gets rid of these
intrusions by automatically cancelling them before they have a chance to show
up on the screen and it can alert you with a warning sound, to let you know
another one has bit the dust, or you can take control manually and erase them
with simple mouse and keyboard shortcuts.
WOPR PLACEBAR, 227k, Windows 95/98/NT4/2000/Me, freeware
http://www.idg.net.nz/pcworld/fileworld.nsf/
The mighty Microsoft Office 2000 set the benchmark for
office suites but there’s plenty of room for improvement, which is where the
WOPR Placebar Customiser comes in. This incredibly useful little program saves
you time and effort by putting you in control of File Open/Save dialogue boxes
in programs such as Word and Excel. With just a few clicks you can change the
buttons and file locations to suit your needs. This outstanding freeware
program has become increasingly difficult to find of late but it’s still
available from the link above, just type ‘wopr’ in the search field.
RJH EXTENSIONS, 673kb Windows 95/98/NT/2000, freeware
http://www.rjhsoftware.com/
Windows Explorer is fairly basic and it does the job but do
you get the feeling it could do so much more? RJH Extensions, Windows Explorer
into powerful file management program. Simply right click on any folder or file
in Windows Explorer and you will be presented with a range of extra facilities.
These include a much-needed Print option that lets you print out the contents
of any folder. If you want to get rig of a folder, permanently, just click
Shred, and all traces of it will be erased from your hard disc. You can stop others
accessing your files or folders with the powerful password protected encryption
system, files can be sorted according to extensions, copied with a single click
of the mouse or renamed singly or in groups. You’ll wonder how you ever managed
without it!
TWEAK UI, 209kb, Windows 95/98, freeware
http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/downloads/
contents/wutoys/w95pwrtoysset/default.asp
Arguably the most useful freeware utility of all time. Tweak
UI (the UI stands for User Interface) is part of a suite of utilities called
PowerToys. Tweak UI was developed by Microsoft to allow users to make
significant changes to the way Windows looks and operates, without having to go
anywhere near the Registry (the critical system files that control Windows).
Tweak UI for Windows 95 is available from the Microsoft web site (see address)
the Windows 98 version is included on the CD-ROM disc, but it’s not loaded by
default, you’ll find it in the Tools\Reskit\Powertoy
folder. Unfortunately it was omitted from later versions but the Win 98 version
seems to work quite happily in Windows 98 SE and ME. Once installed you are in
control of your desktop – from how the mouse operates to removing those
annoying arrows on shortcuts -- and there’s an interesting section called
‘Paranoia’, that clears most (but not all) of the history logs and data files
that operate behind the scenes in Windows, that keep track of what you get up
to…
FRESH DIAGNOSE, 960kb, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, shareware
http://www.freshdevices.com/
Remember when your PC was new and how it used to fly along?
Your applications opened and closed more or less instantly and you didn’t have
to wait ages for the machine to boot up and shut down. As you load more
programs on your computer it slows down, but which ones are causing the
problem? Fresh Diagnose is for more advanced users, it gives your PC a
comprehensive health check, analysing CPU, hard disc, memory and video display
performance and comparing them with benchmarks and by taking regular
‘snapshots’ of your system you can compare past and present configurations, and
hopefully spot problems, before they become serious.
Next week – Freeware and Shareware, part 3
JARGON FILTER
CPU
Central Processor Unit – the main microprocessor chip in a
PC
ISP
Internet Service Provider -- a company providing Internet
access, an E-mail address and a mailbox where messages sent to you are stored
before they're downloaded on to your PC
SHRED
Simply deleting files in Windows doesn’t remove them from
the hard disc, the space they occupy is simply marked as available and they can
still be retrieved. Shredding removes all traces of deleted files by
overwriting them with random or meaningless data
TOP TIP
This week’s extra bonus freeware program is Drive Rescue, a
powerful file recovery utility that could save your bacon one day! If you’ve
ever deleted a file by accident Drive Rescue is your best chance of getting
some of all of it back, it even works on removable media and memory cards. The
zip file is 1.2Mb, it runs on all versions of Windows and it can be downloaded
from: http://home.arcor.de/christian_grau/rescue/
NEXT
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