Several pieces of software came to my attention just recently; all four of them published by the practically unheard of ‘Fresh Devices’ company and available completely free of charge from www.freshdevices.com. I spent an hour this afternoon trying them out and thought they were worthy of inclusion in Click.

Fresh Download

Fresh Download is a download manager that replaces the bog standard file downloader built in to your existing browser. It supports opening multiple connections to decrease download times off slower websites, includes the ability to pause downloads as well as resuming those that failed part way through. The program is easy to use and can be integrated with either Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and many other browsers that work in any version of the Windows Operating System.

Fresh Diagnose

Fresh Diagnose is used to analyze and benchmark many kinds of different hardware in your machine in order to gain more information about a specific component or to measure its speed. Benchmarks can be performed on practically any part of your system such as your processor, hard disk, memory or alternatively it can be used to give you an overall impression as to how fast your computer is running and how this compares against other machines.

Fresh UI

Fresh UI is a tool designed to configure and optimise Windows. Once you’ve installed the software you will be able to change hundreds of hidden settings not usually accessible from within Windows itself from within what looks like a simplified version of Windows Explorer. You’re offered a variety of areas of the system that you would like to alter which include Applications, Explorer, Hardware, Windows System, Windows Interface and Covering Your Track. Within each of these categories are a huge number of different settings that can be easily changed to suit your personal preferences.

The majority of settings you’ll probably want to leave at the default settings but I can guarantee that everyone will have one little grumble with Windows that they would change if they had this utility installed on their machines.

Fresh View

Fresh View is a utility which allows you to organise and view images, audio and video present on your system – you can use it to listen to music or to view pictures and movies saved in practically any format. There are dozens of other programs that perform this function at least as well as Fresh View it is still worth a look due to its small file size and simplistic interface.

I’ll be honest with you in saying that none of these programs are going to change the world and for the most part each one of these utilities covers ground that has been walked a thousand times before. Having said that however I would still urge you to give them a go as each utility is well designed, easy to use, small in size and accomplishes exactly what it says on the tin – nothing more, nothing less.

After this instalment of Click many readers may be convinced that I’m on a mission to replace all the Microsoft products on your computer with those created by other manufactures but you would be quite wrong. Whilst it is true that I quite often suggest alternative products to those such [...]]]>

After this instalment of Click many readers may be convinced that I’m on a mission to replace all the Microsoft products on your computer with those created by other manufactures but you would be quite wrong. Whilst it is true that I quite often suggest alternative products to those such as Media Player which are built into Windows, it is for good reason and certainly not anything against Microsoft. I do believe that for technology to continue to progress that there should always be a great deal of competition and unfortunately if everybody sticks to the software included as part of Windows then this simply wouldn’t happen as other manufacturers will have no incentive to continue developing software.

This week I’ll be covering an alternative to a product that has landed Microsoft in plenty of hot water of late and that is of course Microsoft Internet Explorer. The reason for their problems is that Internet Explorer was forced onto all users that bought a Windows operating system and rather understandably competitors such as Netscape considered this to be anti-competitive as there wasn’t ever an option to install Windows without this browser present. With almost everybody using Windows based operating systems and everybody having Internet Explorer installed by default it was and indeed still is very difficult for companies offering alternative products to attract customers and Microsoft have had to pay heavy fines in numerous anti-trust cases as a result.

Opera (www.opera.com) is a browser which has a strong following and, like the majority of the programs I review for click, is completely free of charge. They do request that if you want to get rid of the very, very limited advertising then you do need to purchase the full version for £24 all inclusive. Fantastically the version of the browser without Java support included is a paltry 3.2mg which compares to around 75mg for the full Internet Explorer download; quite how Opera manage to make a browser that’s more feature packed than Internet Explorer but also under 5% in size I have no idea.

Of course, there is a limit to the work you can do to improve or change an Internet Browser so you will find that Opera does look quite similar to the offering from Microsoft however there are a number of nice touches. My personal favourite feature is that the whole browser uses a ‘tabbed’ interface so rather than having dozens of Internet windows open on your computer at any one time you just have the one version of the application open and then you organise the different pages you’re viewing within this one application. It’s quite tricky to explain this point well unless you’ve seen it in action but it does make browsing a lot clearer and easier to navigate.

The browser includes a download manager that is far more effective than the simple ‘save as’ box that Internet Explorer pops up when you try and download a file as it allows you to manage your downloads as well as pause and resume downloads or retransfer files that have failed. You also get a pop-up stopper for when browsing the Internet and an spam filter for us with the integrated e-mail tool which although I didn’t get chance to use myself did look fairly simple but also comprehensive enough for most users.

To download this fantastic little program simply head to www.opera.com and click on the ‘free download’ button. Give it a go; at 3.2mg you really do have nothing to lose but those on broadband or with a little more time on their hands may want to download the version with Java support which pushes the total download size to around 15mg. Anyone who has an operating system other than Windows such as Solaris, OS/2, Linux, BeOS, FreeBSD i386, QNX or MacOS can download a version suitable for their specific machine.

In last weeks edition of Click I promised that I’d review the numerous Linux products that were available on the market as alternatives to the popular Windows Operating System. Unfortunately however I have been unable to find the time to install any such programs on [...]]]>

In last weeks edition of Click I promised that I’d review the numerous Linux products that were available on the market as alternatives to the popular Windows Operating System. Unfortunately however I have been unable to find the time to install any such programs on to my laptop and so this week I’m going to go off on a completely random tangent instead and discuss the SETI@home project which I was recently reminded of.

SETI (the Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) has been conducted by many different scientific institutions interested in exploring the galaxy for signs of alien intelligence for many decades; NASA, for example have been conducting such research since 1959. Unfortunately the process of analysing a such a great deal of scientific data that is gathered by the various telescopes and satellite receivers for artificial intelligence is such a large undertaking that it requires huge amounts of resources to accomplish. For this reason, the computers many of the big institutions use only spend their time analysing on a very shallow level as they don’t have the resources to spend time looking at the weaker signals as to do so would require an tremendous computing capacity which would not be affordable.

A drastic alternative that a group of people from UC Berkley devised was that instead of using a handful of supercomputers it would instead be possible to link up a great number of the smaller computers that are already connected via the Internet to accomplish the same results. It’s the perfect solution; there are after all so many computers sat in offices just idling their time away for around 5 hours a day that instead they could be used to a more productive end. By taking the idle time of these machines combined you are then able to use them to analyse data for signs of intelligence, the results of which are then sent back to the SETI team.

The above process is achieved by using a special screen-saver on your computer that when running uses your existing connection to the Internet to download raw data from the SETI@home server to be processed. This program is available freely from http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu as a 750k file that takes only a couple of minutes to download on a standard 56k modem connection. Once installed it sits quietly in the background and whenever you leave your PC for a specified period of time it will start to retrieve and process the information required by the SETI team. Since you have to be connected to the Internet while this happens you will probably only want to use this software if you’re with a ISP (Internet Service Provider) that offers you 0800 dial up access. Installation on my laptop was relatively painless and my machine was soon off searching for and analysing possible candidates for the first proof of Extra Terrestrial life.

Even if the project is deemed not to be a success, the principles the SETI@home project uses to analyse the data are important for the future of distributed computing – as I mentioned at the beginning of this article, imagine all the computers in the country that are currently switched on but doing nothing at all. If you can now believe that they’ve all got high-speed Internet connections then you can possibly appreciate how it could be possible for other complex data to be analysed in much the same way in the near future. In total, over the past few years the team at SETI have been able to accumulate half a million years worth of CPU time so just think of the possibilities if the same amount of time could be put in to a worthy cause such as medical research for example.

Take a look at the site http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu and then even if you choose not to participate in the program you will perhaps understand the possible benefits this technology could offer us.

I have an irritating problem in Word 2000 that hopefully you can help me with.  When pressing the return key a strange symbol appears after the sentence.  [...]]]> This week I’ll again spend a bit of time answering a selection of readers’ questions in the hope that I can resolve some of your most common problems.

I have an irritating problem in Word 2000 that hopefully you can help me with.  When pressing the return key a strange symbol appears after the sentence.  Also, when you press the spacebar, a small dot appears each time.  I enjoy reading the Click column in the Herald Express every week.
Alban Williams, Kingsteignton.
These characters that you refer to are known as ‘Formatting Marks’ and are basically used to highlight paragraph marks, spaces and tab intents in your publication.  Some people find it helpful to have this feature turned on so that they can easily see whether there are two spaces in between a couple of words or whether an intent is tabbed or justified into position.  Personally however I can’t stand my document being littered with formatting marks so to turn it off do the following:
In Word go to ‘Tools’ and then ‘Options’ from the main window then half way down the dialog box that pops up will be the option to display formatting marks.  Just ensure that all the boxes for the different types of formatting marks are un-ticked and then click ‘OK’.

I read your column every week and find it very useful. I was wondering if you could answer this question for me please. I’ve heard a little about Linux, is it worth me installing it on my computer and are there any advantages or disadvantages over Windows?
Chris Truman, Dartington

For those of you not in the know, Linux is a popular alternative to the Windows Operating System that has in recent years become a real option for the home computer market and not just the professional server market that it once occupied.  In many instances the program is available free of charge and manages to rival and even beat the popular Windows Operating System in several areas such as speed and reliability.
One of the most extraordinary things about Linux is that the source code is available to anyone who requests it and they are then able to modify it themselves to add new features or bug fixes.  This leads to some quite interesting spin offs of the original product – For example, some of my more observant readers may remember an article I wrote five weeks ago that focussed on the ‘Lindows’ Operating System that was based on Linux but promised to allow you to run Windows applications.  This was one product based on Linux of many and over the next couple of weeks I’ll take the opportunity raised by your question to attempt to review the options available to home users as a real alternative to Windows.
I have a small problem with my PC that I’m hoping you can help me with.  When I shut down Internet Explorer and then disconnect from the Internet my PC attempts to re-dial almost straight away.  Although I can cancel this off, it does get quite annoying.
Brian Carter, Brixham

It sounds to me as though you’ve got it set up so that your computer automatically connects to the Internet whenever it detects that a connection is needed which can be quite troublesome as even though you have shut down Internet Explorer it is likely that you may still have a number of small programs running in the background.  These programs, such MSN Messenger, ICQ, Kazaa, WinMX and so on continually search for an active Internet connection to log on to so that they can provide an Internet based service for your computer.  It seems most likely that one of these small programs is triggering your auto-dial just by searching for a connection that it can use.
The two choices are either to disable these programs before you disconnect from the Internet or to disable auto-dialling.  To perform the latter, simply open up the connection that you use to connect to the Internet and ensure that ‘Connect Automatically’ is un-ticked and then go into ‘Properties’, ‘Dialling’ and check that  ‘Dial whenever a network connection is not present’ is selected as the default option.

For the final instalment of this series of computer maintenance articles, I will be reviewing a program that claims do everything that I’ve explained over the last 4 weeks, more effectively and with greater simplicity that the programs that are bundled with Microsoft Windows. For the price of around £30 [...]]]>

For the final instalment of this series of computer maintenance articles, I will be reviewing a program that claims do everything that I’ve explained over the last 4 weeks, more effectively and with greater simplicity that the programs that are bundled with Microsoft Windows. For the price of around £30 you will get a copy of the program Norton Utilities 2001 – The latest in the Norton range, which, amongst other things includes improved versions of Microsoft Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter that we have covered in previous articles.

Before I elaborate on all the features of Norton Utilities, what exactly does Norton Utilities versions of Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter offer in comparison to their Microsoft Windows counterparts? Well for a start they’re faster and do a more thorough job than their Microsoft counterparts. Hopefully you’ve all taken my advice in previous articles on System Maintained and have had a chance to get to use both of the fore mentioned programs. You’ll know what I’m talking about then, when I say that I tend to find that the Norton versions of these programs don’t seem to restart as often whenever a file is saved to the hard drive or when there are a lot of programs running in memory.

Anyway, I digress. One of the most impressive features of this package is the Norton System Doctor; Just launch this program up and it goes about your computer looking for disk problems, fragmented files, missing program files and invalid parts of your Windows Operating System that can be repaired. All in all this will lead to you having a much more stable computer and will probably add a little bit of extra speed into the mix for good measure. After running Norton System Doctor, you would be wise to run another The Norton Optimisation Wizard – Another component of Norton Utilities.

As its name suggests, this program optimises your Windows files and therefore reduces the amount of time that you are waiting for your computer to load and run. Imagine it being very similar to the way that you would take your car to the garage to have its engine tuned. Even by themselves, these two programs, Norton System Doctor and Norton Optimisation Wizard should themselves be worth the £30 asking price. If you are willing to put aside 30 minutes a month to let them free on your computer, then you will find that your machine will become much more pleasant to use.

In addition to just preventive medicine, if the worst does happen and you have a problem booting up into Windows properly, there are a number of ways that Norton Utilities can help you out. First try getting into Windows Safe Mode and then using System Doctor as detailed above. With any luck, you will be able fix the problem that is preventing you from starting Windows properly. The program also has the option of creating a Rescue Disk, which could provide invaluable if you find that one day you are unable to start Windows at all – Not even in safe mode. The Rescue Disk will allow you to at least start your computer so you can attempt to diagnose the problem by following step by step on screen instructions.

This suite of programs also allows you to un-delete files that you mistakenly deleted. For example, if you have spent days doing a 10,000 word report and then you go and accidentally delete the file, chances are that Norton Un-Erase can restore it for you. In harsh comparison there is also a utility called ‘Wipe info’ which allows you to delete files way beyond recovery, so that if you were working with confidential information and didn’t want anybody to be able to recover the file after it was deleted then you could simply shred it.

In addition to all these extremely useful features there are also a number of smaller utilities that may appeal to certain users only, for example, an improved Windows registry editor, the ability to easily compare the properties of two different files and an improved version of the Recycle Bin.

All in all, taking into account the asking price, I would say that Norton Utilities is an extremely good buy for anybody that uses his or her computer a moderate to heavy amount. Obviously if you only ever write the odd letter using your computer then you probably wouldn’t get the use out of the program and therefore it would be hard for me to recommend it.