Knowing people that have submitted payment online only to never receive their goods and winding up losing money, I’m very cautious about giving out my bank details online. I’m often tempted to buy stuff on the Net but end up resisting in case the site is dodgy. Step forward CallingID, a program designed to indicate which pages are safe to send information to or register with.
The software installs a subtle indicator panel in your browser which changes colour depending on the page you’re visiting: green for verified sites, yellow for moderate risk and red means it’s more likely that the site is fraudulent. What’s more, CallingID also displays information about the physical domain with which the site was registered.
CallingID has its own risk assessment team and a series of monster databases listing sites that have been reported as shifty, so I guess the information is pretty accurate, although it’s difficult to test this. Nevertheless, the software seems ideal for anyone who makes a lot of bank transactions or purchases online.
Review by James Thornton
Feniks Windows
Web Builder is a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) program used to create web pages. WYSIWYG means that the finished page will display exactly the way it was designed. The program generates HTML (HyperText Markup Language) tags while you point and click on desired functions; you can create a web page without learning HTML.
Just drag and drop objects to the page position them anywhere you want and when you’re finished publish it to your web server (using the build in Publish tool). As a result, Web Builder gives you full control over the content and layout of your web page.
Feniks Windows
You can use File Manager to view and organize your files and directories, perform a lot of disk; directory and file management tasks. It includes CD-DVD Writer and more unique features that makes the File Manager an ultimate Windows Explorer replacement.
Feniks Windows
FileZilla is an FTP program for file upload and download to your FTP site, FTP server, or FTP host. FileZilla lets you transfer files and navigate among folders, Web sites, and your computer. This software enables you to perform multiple file transfers simultaneously.
Windows
I must admit I’m a very math-challenged person. Numbers were my main weakness at school and even nowadays I have problems to check if my change is correct when I’m shopping. But this doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate a tool like Math Solver.
This amazing program helps you solve all kinds of mathematical problems, from a simple addition to a complicated geometrical function. Not only does it solve the operation, but also draws a graph based on it if possible, and gives extra information about the generated graph. The program also includes an excellent database with constants and functions.
On the downside, I think Math Solver is not really comfortable to use. Solving expressions and representing functions take too many clicks. Also, as each piece of information is offered in a separate window, your desktop can get really messy. Besides, Math Solver keeps a history of previously entered expressions so that you can review them or reuse them at any moment, but unfortunately they’re not saved when you quit the program.
Review by Elena Santos
Windows
SpeedFan is a freeware program that monitors voltages, fan speeds and temperatures in computers with hardware monitor chips. SpeedFan can even access S.M.A.R.T. info for those hard disks that support this feature and show hard disk temperatures. SpeedFan supports SCSI disks too. SpeedFan can even change the FSB on some hardware (but this should be considered a bonus feature).
At the lowest level, SpeedFan is a hardware monitor software that can access temperature sensors, but its main feature is that it can change fan speeds (depending on the capabilities of your sensor chip and your hardware) according to the temperatures inside your PC, thus reducing noise and power consumption.
Windows
BearShare has been a favorite among many P2P fans for some time now, and we were intruigedintrigued to find out how the developer has attempted to diversify and launch a client designed specifically for downloading movies . Like many, we were initially puzzled by the need for such an app, when the original program allows you to download movies anyway.
Putting these prejudices aside, if you’re someone who is just looking to download movies, TV shows and clips then BearFlix could be seen as an ideal choice. The clear, tabbed interface incorporates many of the elements of its father application, which is one of the easiest P2P clients to navigate around, making this a great program for those who are new to the world of file sharing.
As you’d expect, there are several changes to the GUI that lend themselves to video downloading videos, including a nifty filtering function that allows you to hone your search to a specific movie file type, though thisn’t exactly a revolutionary feature. There’s also a traffic progress monitor at the top of the main window indicating the amount of bandwidth currently being commandeered by the app. However, possibly the biggest change is in the inclusion of a built-in video player, allowing you to preview videos and play them once they’ve been downloaded. Given that this is such an integral part ofis what supposedly what makes BearFlix different stand out from other P2P, we were somewhat underwhelmed by this feature. P layback is often a little slow and juddery, and the range of player controls is very basic. Considering it’s supposed to be dedicated to video, some multimedia conversion or compression tools wouldn’t have gone amiss either.
That said, there are still many positives to be taken from BearFlix. The advanced parental controls feature puts you in control of what content your kids can get hold of, searching is very quick, and best of all the network returns a substantial number of matching results when compared to the likes of Limewire and Ares. Whether a video-only P2P client catches will catch on remains to be seen , but if you’re looking for rare TV shows or older movies, BearFlix is a fast, simple and reliable solution. If it’s newer releases you’re after though, you’re probably better off with a Bittorrent client, as availablityavailability and download times are superior. Remember though, kids, stick to the copyright-free material if you want to stay on the right side of the law.
Review by James Thornton
Windows
CCleaner is a small utility that will take care of a few of the important maintenance tasks that every computer user should carry out as regularly as possible to keep their systems in top shape.
For me, the beauty of this program is the speed at which it carries out the various scans and fixes. Its main purpose is to clean any unnecessary files from your hard-drive and on opening the program you see the various aspects of Windows that you can search through and clear. It will also detect your installed applications that may hold on to files which are no longer any use, such as Google Earth histories or Flash Player configurations.
The interface is very easy to navigate and before taking any action, you will always be asked to confirm that you are sure about what you want to do. There is a useful registry checker that will quickly check its integrity, and let you fix bad entries after making a backup. The uninstall and startup tools are handy to have and simply add to the usability of this very rounded little maintenance assistant.
CCleaner makes housekeeping easy for beginners and experts alike. It’s small, fast, comprehensive, and free???download it.
Review by Bartley Sharkey
Windows
A couple of months ago a friend contracted a particularly nasty virus on her PC and after many hours spent trying to resuscitate the machine, I had to break the bad news that she had lost everything on there. If only she’d had backed up her system using Carbonite, she would still be watching those dubiously-downloaded James Bond films today.
The software allows you to keep a backup of your entire hard disk on the company’s servers, so that if the worst ever happens, you’ve still got a copy of everything safe and sound. After registration with the site and installation of the client, Carbonite connects itself to the Net and automatically begins uploading your data to its backup server. This process can take a long time so you need a quick Internet connection to make it as painless as possible.
The great thing about Carbonite is that it’s so simple to operate and you get unlimited storage capacity for your backups, although I noticed you cannot backup personal video files over 2Gb. Once you’re data is uploaded onto the Carbonite servers it can perform regular backups at a rate of 2Gb per day. Provided you’re comfortable transferring all your data to an external server, Carbonite makes for the perfect way to ensure you never lose any of your data.
Review by James Thornton
Windows
This software is used to back up data and to synchronize PCs, servers, and notebooks. The settings are stored in multiple profiles, and the software comes with support for FTP servers, ZIP compression, data encryption, and a scheduler for automated backups.
On Windows NT/2000/XP, the scheduler can run as a service – without users having to log on. This file synchronization tool features the ability to freely select files and folders across the whole folder hierarchy in tree-views and it has support for e-mail notification, profile categories, and various filters.
Windows