Some software has earned a permanent place on my computer - because it’s stable, well done, useful. Here’s a new set I either didnt think of last year or which has earned the place since last year. If you try them and like them, please register them…

Regrun - watches what is happening on my pc and blocks anythig suspicious

Gamedrive - i got virtual drive with my soltek motherboard and liked it, but many modern games did not like it. Gamedrive can make a virtual CD of any game or software CD so that one does not need to juggle CDs anymore.

Acronis True Image I had DriveImage but it let me down (funny, the same happened with partition magic, powerquest is losing their touch if you ask me), This is a lot friendlier as it lets you get single files out of partition backups and works most of the time without even a reboot. Kudos!

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As a software junkie with an accumulation of images I have tried a lot of tools over the years. Here are some that everyone should look at before picking a tool of choice. These all allow you to browse your images, do quick changes or batch changes. Some offer powerful tagging/organising/searching tools too.

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More and more I like small tools that do one thing well. Here’s a list of some I have tried and kept.

resizer - a smart jpeg resizer - http://www.virtualzone.de/

colorpad - a color picker, skinnable - http://www.entic.net/~vmoya/index.html

colorcop - another color picker with some nify features - http://www.datastic.com/tools/colorcop/

font viewer - a very good font organiser - http://www.wonder-hosting.com/~ampsoft/

easy color themens - explore colour combinations -

screen swift - turns a flash app into a screensaver - http://www.tenmiles.com/screenswift.asp - Free for personal and non-profit use only.

fxplo lite - freeware - moonsoftware.com

A very slick freeware backup tool: http://www.backup4all.com/

NOTE: the newest version of b4all is now shareware :(

Version 1.3 of B4all is still freeware and has most of the features of shareware tools that cost in the $25-45 range, a clean interface.

- multiple jobs
- automation
- full and incremental backup
- archiving multiple versions

A recommended tool to automate backups so you don’t have to do it manually

Some software has earned a permanent place on my computer - because it’s stable, well done, useful. I just realised some programmes had barely a description so here’s an update.

Update: out of all these, I still use Total Commander, Object Desktop, PhotoImpact, Spinrite, Xnews, and poco (but Opera is my main mail client nowadays, poco got slow with the quantity of email in it).I still occasionally use Netcan and dreamweaver but havent upgraded, same for Slickedit.

Total Commander - some people have told me it looks dated but once they use it a while they stop complaining… It’s a file manager, gives access to the command line, can compare and synchroniye, search within files, zip and unzip and supports pretty much any type of compression, includes an ftp, can manage file extension associations etc. etc. etc. It has even plugins to do even more things (access third party file systems and encryption etc), Shareware, very good price for what you get.

Visual Slickedit - This is unashamedly a programmer’s editor and has features that are very cool if you’re a developer… and very ‘duh?’ if you’re not. Shareware. Pricey but worth it, and yes of course my version is really legal!

Stardock’s Object Desktop. Anyone who gets frustrated at the way the basic windows GUI looks and works should try it. Unlike many similar products this suite of programs also lets you improve the way windows works, not just the looks. Shareware.

Ulead PhotoImpact - an excellent image editor and probably the best value for money. It’s a photo editor with all the trimmings and a very complete but easy interface. It was one of the first to offer drawing elements that remained “vectored” throughout the editing process (can change the text even after loads of effects have been applied, resize a box or bullet even after it have had textures and all applied to it). This makes it a very good web layout and graphics creator.

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I needed something to turn imminent doom into a proper gateway. I tried a lot of things. The first few are very lightweight systems with simple configuration. Work as a dream if you don’t do a lot of online gaming. They fall a bit short if you play games on a lot of servers as they expect you to set port mappings for any server. From Comsocks up the systems are more sophisticated, supposed to offer full NAT (usually installing a service at the network level), advanced security features etc. Some offer cool features like connection pooling and downlad manager etc. You really have to try a few and see which ones has all the features you want and works in a way that is easy and intuitive to you.

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My needs are different from most users’ as I want to take screenshots in games as well as screenshots on the desktop for documentation purposes. I also have a lot of image manipulation tools, which most people don’t. So I want something that takes shots, and I dont want to pay for annotation / manipulation tools

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