Give your digital photos the professional treatment with ACDSee Pro 2
However professional you believe photos appear to other users, there's always room for improvement. For instance, did you use professional lighting to make your object appear as it should, in the correct lighting conditions? I bet your camera saved your photos as compressed JPGs, which means that they already suffer from noise, however many pixels your camera supports. You need to work with RAW or uncompressed TIF images, if you want professional-level photos.
ACDSee Pro 2 is a beta preview of the forthcoming professional-level photo management and editing software from ACD Systems. This has been made available completely free of charge until 30th of September 2007, so there's no reason why you shouldn't download and see what it's like for yourself.
There are times when you might be inspired by a particular website and want to take a grab of that site. Either that or you try and print the page and find that it simply doesn't print properly. That's often due to the dynamic content on a site. Sometimes these aren't processed properly by the printer drivers, and you'll find that the web page looks really poor on paper.
If you're seeking an integrated email, PIM and calendar, you probably would think of Microsoft Outlook. Indeed, it's popular as you can schedule meetings, invite other users, track their interest through email and even use it to manage your contacts. It's a a PIM and email client in one application and works effectively. However, it's also rather expensive and can be very slow in downloading and processing your email. There are free alternatives.
There are times when you can apply some of your business skills to your personal life, particular when it applies to managing the kids, making sure you pick them up from school, organise when engineers visit your home and more. For most people, this is like juggling various balls and could be aligned to managing a home-based project. You could use some personal management software to sort out your diary, tasks and other events.
There are various chores you need to do with your computer in order to make sure you don't lose your important work, data and important information. Part of this is installing the latest security software, the other is regularly backing up your data so you don't lose your important files and other work. It's best to make this an automated procedure, so that you do not forget to regularly run your backup.
If you want to get the most from your digital photos, forget the free software that shipped with your digital camera. Indeed, go beyond the usual freeware and other cheap commercial alternatives. You're best sticking with professional-level software that will enable you to organise and tweak just about every aspect of your collection.
There are plenty of media players on the market, from the Windows Media Player through to RealPlayer, that's been around for ages and supports both its own format as well as many additional media formats, for playing back audio and video content. It's generally a cross-platform media player, although this beta of the latest version is a Windows-only preview.
Some users believe that the more security software they install on their machine the more 'effective' it will be keeping out virus, trojan and other attacks. However, sometimes multiple security applications can do more harm than good as they work against each other, rather than with each other. Our system can quickly become a mess over time, the apps become difficult to uninstall, our Registry is cluttered and drives become fragmented.
When you install Windows XP or Vista, you're supplied with the same interface, desktop backgrounds and colour schemes that millions of other users have installed. Indeed, look at your fellow work colleagues, and they'll have hardly changed anything at all. Perhaps the desktop background, but that's about it. There's little individualisation. However, just about every aspect of the Windows interface can be altered, changed and improved.
When you upgrade your PC, you probably won't want to migrate your entire drive across to the new machine. This might be impractical when the new PC has Vista and the old PC contains Windows XP. However, you'll want to migrate across old files and important data. An ideal tool would be a synchronisation application, where you could locate the destination and the source, check the files between the two machines, then allow the tool to synchronise the files it requires between both machines.
There are times where Notepad can be useful. For instance, stripping text styles from documents you might want to post to a website. However, Notepad is rather limited and is only good for drafting basic text. You wouldn't want to use it seriously. Rather than moving across to a word processor, such as Microsoft Word, a better option would be something between the two, such as a more advanced text editor.
You don't always need to stick with the brand names in order to use the latest security applications on your PC. Indeed, some of the free anti-spyware and anti-virus applications are often the most regularly updated. If you look around, there are loads of free personal firewalls, anti-spyware, anti-virus and anti-malware applications. Two of those have been updated recently.
There are a few key applications that everyone should have installed on their computer. Some ship with your operating system, such as a web browser and an email client. Others you'll need to download. One of these applications should be an FTP client, which will enable you to upload and download files from the Internet. You'll also be able to log in to FTP servers and download large files, resuming these files if you find that you need to close or reboot your computer.
Whenever you use your drive, files are stored in different locations, written to and from each partition and files become fragmented and stored on your drive in no particular order. This means that your computer takes longer to find and load the files you need, when you boot your computer and start applications. You'll soon find your system seems to be running even slower than before. One solution is to defragment your drive, which means that the files are stored in an ordered manner, meaning they are located more quickly.
You could quite easily backup individual files, folders and data on each partition. This will take ages and you'll soon forget which files you've recently backed up. Another option is to setup an automatic backup procedure which will take selected files and folders and then back them up at a specific point each day, week or month. A better option might be back backup your entire drive or drive partition. Once you've made the initial backup, if you have problems in the future you can restore the entire drive, boot and you'll be back up and running.
The Windows Registry is a huge database of information regarding the software installed on your PC. When you install new software, further information is stored on the Registry. More often than not, this information stays within the Registry when you uninstall or remove the files from your system. This means that your Registry is unnessary larger than it should be, contains information that is irrelevant to your system and can cause your PC to boot more slowly, perform erratically and more.
From time to time, we'll invest in a new PC. We look at the specification and choose the PC relevant to our requirements. We place the order and wait for delivery. On delivery, do we bother to check whether we've received what we've ordered? Apart from the obvious aspects, such as the LCD, style of case and so on, there's little clue to what we've received is the correctly specified computer.
If you own more than one computer, getting files from one machine to the other isn't always easy. How do you tell which files have been updated on the remote system, since you last copies across your work? If someone else is working on this machine, it makes it even more complicated. Ideally you need a file manager that will synchronise files across various computers. Windows doesn't do this, but 
We talk about using a USB stick or other external drive, to store our portable applications, important data and to take our work on the road. However, what happens if we use this USB stick in a Cybercafe or similar location and leave the drive behind? In a worse case scenario, someone would have access to your licensed software, important data and personal information.
There are so many cool free applications on the Mac that there's even a website set up by users called 
There are times where you simply can't protect your personal information, particular if you're using a computer that has shared account access. This particularly applies to students, who rely on computers where personal information isn't stored overnight and work has to be carried around on a USB stick or burned on to a CD.
Up until fairly recently, we had to put up with Microsoft's Virtual PC for Mac which ran like a dog, even on the fastest PowerPC-based Apple Mac. You could only really do the basics with this virtualisation software and most Mac users never thought they'd see a native Windows on their Mac. This all changed when Apple moved over to Intel processors, which has lead to an explosion in virtualisation software for the Intel Mac market.
These days there's a fine line between shareware and commercial
software. What defines commercial software if you can purchase both on
the Internet? The clear difference between the two is that commercial
software often ships in a box and is available through retail. However,
shareware authors can give the impression that their software is
available commercially by designing a box image.
When you access your computer remotely, the connection is often too slow to do any productive work. Even logging in to your remote PC to check, download and read your email is tricky. Doing any work is almost out of the question. The other option is to automate a number of tasks. For instance, why not set up an automated routine that will start an application, run a procedure, close and then log you off? The ideal situation would be a routine that you could save as an executable, so it can be double-clicked on your desktop.
We have security applications to protect us against spyware, virus attack, system intrusion and even malicious software. However, we often forget about rootkit technology, which can affect the usage of our system. For instance, rootkit technology can disrupt how our system operates when you place an audio CD in your computer. Instead of using your chosen media player, you are forced to use the media player that shipped with the audio CD. The same rootkit technology prevents you from copying the disc contents. There are many other examples of what rootkit can do to your PC.
It was only last Monday when Apple announced 
And I thought security software was the most regularly updated software in the industry? Download managers are close behind. In the recent week at least four popular download managers have been updated. Why would you need a download manager? There are a number of reasons. They integrate within your web browser, so handle every download, including enabling you to extract video and other media from a website. You can resume downloads, schedule large downloads and go back and source downloads from multiple locations, which means they should download more quickly.
You may or may not be a fan of Internet Explorer 7, but one thing is for sure, it's not as pro-actively developed as Firefox or Opera. These two browsers are often being updated and the preview of Firefox 3 is already available in early alpha form. It won't be long before the first stable beta is available for testing. Internet Explorer 8 is way off on the horizon at the moment, although Microsoft are welcoming ideas and input from web users.
We're always looking for ways to improve the way we work. Ideally, if we could turn everything in to a shortcut, our work would consist of assigning tasks and macros to keyboard commands. This is possible. You can create a macro to automate a task. For instance, if you have to manually process a number of files, every day, you could create macro that automates this procedure. The result is, the next time you want to process the files, you run the macro or a keyboard shortcut.
If, for whatever reason, you're not happy with Firefox or Opera, there's now another alternative web browser for you to try on your PC. Apple recently released 
Burning simple audio or data CDs requires you to use a 'media suite', whereas you might just want to burn a quick CD to play in your car or on the road. Burning suites have become more complex, over the top and laden with features that most of us do not need. When a burning suite ships on a DVD, you know that it's time to look at alternatives. Some of these alternatives may include freeware burning tools which enable you to basic burning.
Back in the 80s business people carried around a Filefox which contained their diary, calendar and contact information. Indeed, the bigger and more worn the Filefox, the more 'important' you were viewed to your collegues. You could impress at a business meeting by showing how many business cards you had collected at the back of the Filofax. This soon wore off as a novelty and it's extremely rare to see anyone show off their collected business cards or even their contact list. However, we all need this information or we'd soon forget what we've got to do in the future.
Even if you have the fastest Internet connection, your downloads can be managed more effectively. For instance, if you download from a standard web server, through a HTTP link, and your download stops halfway through, a standard browser will only enable you to start the download from scratch. A download manager will enable you to resume the download. Download managers can speed up a download by enabling you to source from multiple locations.
When you install Windows on your system, many of us stick with the 'working' drives that shipped with the operating system. As long as our system boots and doesn't give us too many problems, we don't think about updating our drivers. However, like any software, hardware manufacturers often find bugs in their drivers and release updates. By installing the latest drivers, you may find that your system starts more efficiently and your hardware works without complaint. This is particularly important for Vista users.
You've probably installed an anti-virus client to protect yourself from virus attack and trojans. An anti-spyware tool can prevent keyloggers and other applications from recording our key strokes and sending personal information to a remote location. A firewall is useful if you have a broadband connection and often leave your computer connected to the Internet. However, many of us forget about malicious software that can be installed on our computer and can often make our system erratic or prevent Windows from starting, the next time you boot your PC.
One of the most frustrating elements of the ongoing Media Player v RealPlayer v QuickTime battle is that they all attempt to override each others media format. If you have an MPG video file on your computer, install RealPlayer and it will attempt to open it, whereas you might prefer QuickTime. Worse still, each media player only supports a limited number of video codecs, so what might play on one operating system and in one particular media player, may not play on another.
You've gone out and spent £10 on a CD and the last thing you want to worry about is whether you need to adhere to DRM (luckily most audio CDs do not have copy protection, so you can now backup your CD or extract the tracks to your computer) or whether you'll be able to play your tracks on your favourite MP3 player. You might want as much control as possible over your audio, where you want to play the tracks and which tracks are transferred across to your portable player.
Windows Vista ships with a slightly improved version of Windows Explorer, but it hasn't changed dramatically since Windows 95, and that was released over 10 years ago. Surely if innovation was needed, it should be the Explorer interface. For instance, why can't you double-click on the desktop to open an Explorer window, which 
Up until recently Ad-Aware was the anti-spyware tool of choice and recommended by many in the industry. It didn't lose it's way, but rival products were simply more aggressive in terms of promotion, marketing and market penetration. However, there was always a free version of Ad-Aware, which made it a popular choice for many.
Most of us are looking forward to our summer holiday and we'll be bringing our digital camera along with us. However, we get home and realise that, when we show family and friends the holiday experience, it's difficult to portray the landscape using standard 6 x 4 inch photos. You could get a special widescreen camera and print widescreen photos, but that costs money. The alternative is to take multiple photos and then stitch them together using a panorama tool.