Preview and manage your font collection with FontExplorer
Although most of us do not work with professional fonts, when we install image editing software on our computer, or an office suite, we'll find that fonts are installed as default. If we then work on documents using these fonts, we'll want to know what's installed and how we can move them around our system so we can move them across to our new PC. We forget to back up system files such as our fonts when we back up our files for moving across to a different PC.
FontExplorerL.M. 5.6 is a professional commercial font manager that will enable you to preview and choose from your installed fonts, as well as installing (permanently and temporarily) or removing fonts from our system. You can group fonts, find font symbols using the virtual keyboard and more.
Download
managers can prove to be an effective tool; they enable a user to download
files, in the background, whilst they perform other web related tasks, such as
browsing, without any interference. Not only do they leave you free to browse,
but they can also maximise your download speeds and enable you resume files that
stop downloading, without reason. Most download managers use multiple sources
for download so that maximum download speed can be maintained.
To most end users, Vista looks nothing more than a few visual improvements. In fairness, you could say the same thing about Leopard. People are always more interested in how the new operating system will look and feel, as well as any increase in system performance, over and above the technical improvements deep in the new system. However, the biggest issue facing Vista users is that these technical issues require most of your software to be upgraded. This can end up causing you additional money, over and above the upgrade to Vista.
There is a key reason why software such as Acronis True Image is so popular. It enables you to back up your entire drive or partition and then restore the content if you experience problems in the future. With the new version, you can now back up individual files and applications, as well as your entire drive. It's been around for a while, is tried and tested technology, and is a back up solution of choice for us and many of our web users.
Swapping and storing files between
your computer and removable drive can become confusing; say for instance you
update an image on another machine and you want transfer the file back to your
machine. The filename wouldn’t have changed, although the file may have been
edited. How would you know which file is the one you want to keep or discard?
You could manually check the date modified, but then you might copy across the
wrong file or overwrite the new file with the old
revision.
If you’re using a computer regularly, you’ve probably changed various settings and have personalised your desktop. There’s nothing worse than a vanilla workstation that has a standard version of Windows installed. Changing the desktop wallpaper or screensaver is first thing we’d do when personalising our PC. However, finding good, high quality images to use on your desktop though, can be laborious, and there never seems to be any good images available, and even when you eventually find one, it doesn’t take long to become bored and you want to swap. Doing this within Windows is more of a manual process. 
Computers inevitably accumulate junk
when we’re online, cookies, temporary files and downloads stored on your system.
Worse, some of your downloaded and installed application info is stored deep
within your Registry, and is almost impossible to remove manually. Without
keeping on top of the junk, your system will become slowly hindered by the
amassing files. Apart from being a nuisance, they can sometimes become a
security threat, especially as a lot of us bank and shop
online.
Install software on your computer, then uninstall months later and you'll soon find that your system begins to slow, that your computer still thinks parts of this software is installed on your machine and other software can get confused. The problem is that not everything related to the software is removed from your Registry and irrelevant entries remain, which can cause confusion over filetypes, startup applications and which security application is your default choice.
Social networking applications are hugely popular, and when Microsoft announce, unofficially, new features planned for Windows Live Messenger 9, people immediately want the new version, even if it's still in alpha. Worryingly for the publishing industry, a couple of rival downloads sites have even found file-sharing links to this closed beta and have offered it to their web users. Do they have any scruples? Windows Live Messenger 9 is only available as a closed and early beta to selected testers, so isn't available for public consumption.
From time to time, you may want to grab some text from a document, invoice, magazine or other printed literature, for a quotation, legal document or other reason. You could type the document by hand, but you're almost bound to make mistakes. It will also take time. If you have a scanner, why don't you scan in the document and turn the words in to digital words you can use in other documents?
Get a quote from a web developer and you can easily spend a few thousand pounds developing even a basic web presence, without an e-store, connection to your local database and other advanced features. For this reason, many smaller companies are attempting to put their own site online, and maintaining the contents, rather than employing someone full-time or the use of an external web development team. The snag is, how do you get started?
Until fairly recently, creating a print-quality PDF document required commercial software. Sure, there were (and still area) a small number of freeware titles available but being based around the Ghostscript technology, the final PDF images generated were not always good enough for professional or commercial printing. The bonus of using PDFs are that they are a universal document format, and almost anyone using the web can download read and print the literature contained within these documents.
With later editions of Windows or Mac OS X, you have the capability of logging in to a computer, wherever it is connected to the Internet, as long as you know the IP address and the login/password (oh, and remote access is enabled). If you can log on to a remote computer or use a remote computer as a home-based server, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to share your printer with another Internet user. This means you could print your work on a printer, whether it is connected in a building down the road or at the other side of the world.
We've been speculating for months now, but it looks like Google are finally about to release their storage depot for storing or backing up your files online. If you have a Google Mail account, you're able to store nearly 3GB worth of email, for free. If you require more space, you can purchase more. You can also store and share your photos using the Picasa Web Albums and, again, you have the option to purchase additional space.
Moving and copying files is generally so straightforward we don’t even give it further thought: simply select the required files and copy or drag to your desired location. However, sometimes simple problems such as a file being in use can interfere with the copying process. This could cause the file not to be copied correctly, and if you are copying multiple files this can cause confusion. Using an application to replace the Windows Explorer copy command could help, or maybe an application that offered notification of any problems during copying would be handy. 
There are a number of different archive formats, with ZIP the most common across the two major operating systems. Factor in RAR, TAR and the different ZIP formats and it's rather difficult to find an archive manager that will handle all formats. The commercial applications are also somewhat feature-laden, offering many different functions that are often irrelevant for most users. You might just want to open an archive as quickly as possible.
If you're a Mozilla Firefox fan, we hope that you've downloaded the first preview of 
At this time of the year, the Americans are busy celebrating Thanksgiving and, as a result, various commercial companies offer promotions for either the day or across the weekend. For instance, Apple usually offer various (small) discounts from their products, this Friday. This is a day-only promotion.
If you're out on the road, away on vacation, staying at the parents or simply working from another office, there are times where you won't want to drag your laptop with you, try and establish an Internet connection and then use this simply to check your email. The easiest solution would be to take a external drive or USB stick and connect this to the host computer. Indeed, you could even be crafty and use your iPod Classic, as this will work as and external drive. Create an encrypted partition and you could install your favourite apps, bookmarks, passwords and more, then use this info, without it infecting or leaving traces on the host computer.
We all want to install the latest software and then leave it on our system for weeks, before we decide to remove. The problem is that when we then remove the software, it can sometimes lead to files left on our machine, entries within the Registry and other software preventing a complete uninstall. This then causes our Registry to be larger than expected and, in return, can slow down our system startup and can conflict with other installed software.
We get so much spam these days that you often do not have the time to download your email before you start work. If anyone has used Microsoft Outlook, they'll tell you it can be very resource-heavy. Often you have to wait for the process of downloading and sorting your email to finish, before you can do some serious work. Particularly CPU intensive work. For this reason, it's it could be more useful to use a lightweight email notify application to inform you when important email arrives, then you could go online and read with your webmail service.
Unless you use Internet Explorer for everything, just which web browser do you set and use as your favourite? It's frustrating. You might prefer to use Opera at home, but then your work-based laptop will stop you from installing third-party software, so you're stuck with Internet Explorer. On your workstation, you might be able to install any browser, but only Firefox or IE will access and work with your internal CMS (we can't use Opera to edit vnunet.com content). Worse, you want to use Mozilla Firefox 3, but the majority of your favourite add-ons aren't yet compatible.
Enter a keyword when searching through Google and you'll be presented with hundreds of different web pages, many of which have no relevance to the original search. You've then got to make your own quick analysis, from the description of the page, which sites are the most relevant to your search. This can take ages and you'll also end up on various sites that you didn't want to visit. If only Google presented you with screengrab of the web searches which may help make your decision.
The snag with any operating system is that it is designed in a manner so it will install on as many PCs as possible. For this reason, the drivers supplied are as safe and as tested as possible, and the operating system has only been optimised so far. Install the latest Windows Vista on your computer and the operating system hasn't been tweak, optimised and manipulated so it takes advantage of your PC and the peripherals attached. One starting point would be to grab the latest hardware drivers so that you have the latest drivers for your kit. The other option is to download a tweaking and optimisation tool.
Whilst many employees work remotely, away from the office, most of our clients would have no idea where they are located. It's the same with a web server. Gone are the days where you needed a leased line and you would host a website on your own server and had a full-time admin making sure that it was up at all times (well, during office hours). Many servers are hosted in a remote location. The snag is, they're more likely to go down for various reasons.
If you own more than one computer, buying or upgrading Microsoft Office can be a real expense. Indeed, own a Mac laptop and a Windows desktop machine, and you have to fork out for two different editions. There must be an alternative. There are many different commercial and free alternatives, including the recent multi-platform Lotus Symphony, which is currently at beta 2. You could use this across both Windows and Mac OS X, keeping the same user-interface and familiarity, whilst reading and writing to Microsoft Office documents.
From time to
time, we follow a link on our favourite website and this leads to further
websites that look interesting, but do not want to add to our bookmarks. One
option would be to print the homepage, although s
There’s
always plenty to keep you busy, whether this would be your work, family or
friends. However, what if you take on a large project, a renovation or extension
and how do you keep everything from becoming rather overwhelming? You would have
to keep track of dates, budgets and expenses. A good way to keep up with
everything at hand would be a personal information manager to help you organise
your daily life. 
When we sit in a company meeting, everything seems like a good idea - particularly when it comes from your boss - but when we leave the meeting, many employees spend quite a bit of time avoiding the action points that were brought up and agreed. To make sure your new ideas are kept on track, you could email the people involved with the project, but then email can lead to excuses such as spam-filtering, accidental deletion and more. It's too tricky using an external IM client, in case it is either block by your or a third-party firewall.
Far from being an online auction house, eBay is almost an online shopping portal for people wanting to buy their goods. It's fairly easy to make money through eBay, but more difficult to get noticed and, if you start from scratch with no feedback, you'll need some eye-catching professional auctions so that you look like you've bothered to make the effort. Here lies the problem. Most eBay sellers simply use the standard browser-based tools to create their auctions and do not know that you can manage the visuals that make up your auction, through another specialised application.
If you felt inclined, there is no reason why you couldn't securely protect your system with free security software. There are some quality tools available. These include free anti-virus applications, such as PC Tools Free Anti-Virus, AVG Anti-Virus Free and so on. Some of these need manual updates, so there's a chance you may get caught out. There are free firewalls, too, from PC Tools, the most recent 
It was originally meant to have been released in November 2007, so it's a long way behind schedule. Let's be positive, the first beta public preview of 
Microsoft's Windows Live service contains a myriad of online and offline tools that enable you to check your email, manage and share your photos, host and store data online and much more. They've now gone much further and added the facility for you to point a domain name to the services, so instead of using live.com or live.co.uk, you can now use yourdomain.co.uk and your Windows Live-based email will go through the Live service, even though it looks like you're hosting your own email, site and so on.
If you want to back up and burn your files, you can do this within Windows XP or Vista, although you'd be surprised that people go out and purchase an expensive media suite in order to create their own audio CDs or burn and backup their data files. There are alternatives and many of them are free. Most audio managers such as iTunes will enable you to create and burn your own audio CDs, although these are no good if you want to backup your files to a data disc.
With the rise of portability, we have to somehow remember more passwords when we surf the net. Borrow someone else's computer and you do not have access to your email, favourite sites and more. Worse, you try and access your email, online, and you suddenly realise that you had to set up a POP3 password for your specific email address, after you created your broadband account. Can you remember this info? Indeed, some sites auto-generate you a password that you're almost certainly never remember.
Download and install some software on your computer and you may not realise that it has long-since been updated, with new features integrated. Better still, it might have had a fix to introduce stability in all scenarios, particularly under more recent operating systems. We don't always have time to check through all of our software and see if it has been updated, so an integrated tool that would show installed software and whether an update exists, would be handy.
As a software developer, despite the hours spent beta testing, there are always problems when you submit your software to the general public. There are many different system configurations, online issues and more. However, despite making updates available, many end-users simply forget to check for updates and will quickly uninstall your software if they experience issues. As a developer, adding an auto-update facility to your application, makes a lot of sense. It would enable the tool, on startup, to check for an update, download in the background and then re-launch the application.
I'm not sure what's going on. Surely our broadband Internet connections have reached saturation point? Well, they probably have in the UK as we rely on old copper-based telephone lines. Fibre optic cables enable increased bandwidth. However, it's irrelevant when the servers that host software can't cope with this increased bandwidth. You only need 100 people with a fast broadband connection attempt to download from your server, at the same time, and your commercial server won't be able to cope. For this reason, there's still a market for download managers and this must be why we update more download managers than anything else. Apart from security apps.
Programmers tend to work long in to the night attempting to squash bugs rather than leaving the code until the morning. What happens if, when you’re debugging your code, you forget to save the changes you’ve made? You then need to go back and analyse changes made since your previous debugging session. A more simple solution would be to use a merging tool; this will enable work to be compared side-by-side.
It’s not often
that PCs go wrong, and it’s even less likely for the problem to be hardware
related. Unfortunately though, if something does go pear shaped, it’s then we
tend to think about system recovery or backup. If your PC won’t boot due to a
problem, there’s not a great deal you can do, unless you’ve thought ahead and
installed recovery software.
If you have one computer in your sitting room, it's normally regarded as 'open house', rarely is switched off and accessible by all family members, their friends and other relatives. The snag is, this is often the same computer you may use for editing your work documents when you get home. If you leave these lying around on your computer, anyone can read through them, accidentally delete them from the drive or worse your computer may be accessible to intruders when left connected to your Internet connection.
A while back, Adobe decided to release a free version of their photo management software, to gain a quick foothold in the emerging digital photography market. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition was the result and it limited you to managing a small number of your digital photos as a preview to the commercial edition. Sadly Adobe Photoshop Album is no longer available, so there is no direct upgrade path from the free Starter Edition, but it's been primarily updated so it will take advantaged of Vista.
We've been waiting for OS X Leopard for months, now it's finally available and it's a major upgrade and adds value to your old Mac. The snag is, it's a first revision product, with new features, so is bound to ship with a number of issues, problems and possible security hazards (for instance, the firewall has received bad press since launch). It was only time before the first update was released - the first update for Tiger was released 3 weeks after launch - and 10.5.1 is now available and is essential for any Leopard user.
Although we're generally poor at managing our personal finances, business users must manage their company finances, as they have to be accountable to shareholders, pass their finances to Company House and may even be exposed to a VAT or tax investigation. For this reason, we're seeking a low-cost finance package that will enable a small business to juggle managing their finances with issuing invoices and making sure that they are being paid, on time.
Like many Internet users, you're probably keen to see more about the forthcoming Firefox 3, which is due for a beta preview release any time soon. This will be the first release that is made available for general public testing. Our friends at 
Over the past couple of years peer-to-peer (or P2P) file sharing has been under fire, more so than any other technology. Maybe more so than the latest boom in social networking. Even with all its bad press, P2P is always advancing, enabling users to share and download files from multiple sources, which, in time, could pave the way to reducing the requirements for saturating your bandwidth.
As most PCs now ship with a huge internal hard drive, we partition these in to multiple drives, use an external drive for backup and sometimes a USB stick to transfer files between machines. The trouble with this storage space is keeping track of the location of your files and older editions of Windows can take forever to search for and locate your required files. Vista is a lot better, although there are alternatives.
There are numerous ways to back up your data. Most of us back up important files to a disc, then put them in storage in case they are required at a later date. Others backup to another partition or an external hard drive. The alternative is to backup to an online storage solution, but then you have to rely on these guys protecting your private and personal data and hope they never go bust or have a disastrous server crash, losing your backed up data.
There are so
many photo managers on the market, you need to do something special to get your
product noticed. Most professionals, who manage thousands of photos, will stay
loyal with a tried and tested photo manager such as Adobe’s Lightroom or
Aperture, both now well established within the industry. The benefits of
something like Adobe Lightroom are that it will sit alongside programs such as
Photoshop. However, we don’t all need these professional standard programs but
would like something more substantial than a basic freeware photo manager.
Confusing as it seems, Apple really do believe that there's room in the market for another Windows-based web browser, along with the popular Mozilla Firefox and Opera. For this reason, they are still pressing ahead with updates to their Safari web browser and the latest version sees a host of new updates, features and bug fixes.
Dynamic web content is widely used, to make sites more aesthetically pleasing and eye catching. It’s also heavily used within advertising online to hold the attention of the target audience. With more and more developers incorporating Flash elements within their design, you don’t want to get left behind. However, you do not have to use the expensive Adobe Flash to create Flash content, there are cheaper alternatives which can create the same effect. 
With everyday computer use, your PC will accumulate unused, unwanted, and temporary files which take up vital space in the system. To keep your PC free from junk files, a disk management tool would be ideal. You can make sure your system is free from clutter by deleting all unwanted files, in turn, you free up memory which keeps your PC performing at its best. 
Microsoft
Office is the office suite of choice for the majority of PC users, offering
everything from a word processor to a spreadsheet tool; the modules required for
either a home office or workplace. However, what if you require the newest
office suite or it hasn’t been installed on your new PC? The Microsoft office
suite is an expensive package for most people. Do you really need the
compatibility that Office 2007 requires, or can you make do with an alternative
suite?
You may or may not have noticed that we've added and updated a number of security applications on vnunet.com/downloads, recently? The reason is down to us working hard on a forthcoming Computeractive 'Ultimate Guide to PC Security' magazine, which goes on-sale 6th of December 2007. As you can imagine, the disc for this magazine packed full of security software and, whilst I'm here, I'll also mention the three world-exclusive covermounts we've got lined up for this mag. You'll be surprised.
We need to be more organised and in control of our personal finances, tasks and projects. Tools such as Microsoft Outlook are designed to enable us to send emails, but also track our events, meetings, tasks and other 'to do' items. We can invite other users to meetings, track their invitations/declines and more. However, there are few tools that enable us to do this on a personal level. There are a number of apps that will enable you to track your media collection, such as Libra or MediaMan, but these only offer a certain level of flexibility.
Security developers must realise that if they get their apps installed on end-users machines, then they are more likely to extend their subscription, rather than uninstall and find an alternative. For this reason, companies such as PC Tools and other have promoted their security apps through coverdisc promotions and virtually given away most of their old tools. Their userbase has increased and they now have a strong foothold in the market.
Everything we do online has become much faster generally, whether downloading files, streaming videos or simply browsing the web. As with all aspects of computing, anything we can do to increase speed or ease of use is often something we embrace. Tabbed browsing is something that has now been implemented in most browsers, allowing a user to switch from page to page easily. 
When we purchase a new PC, some sort of security software is often the first thing we would install. An antivirus, antispyware or firewall is a good place to start, but ideally a full security suite would provide your machine with better protection. The trouble with installing separate security applications is that they could conflict with each other, and its often more effective to install a single, complete security package from one manufacturer. 
We are all
on guard against of the threat of the computer virus, with email users
particularly aware of spam and other malicious software that can be attached to
or contained within email messages. What about general web browsing, how do we
know that the pages we are viewing are secure and safe to browse? To ensure
that web pages are secure, a browser plug-in could be a useful addition, as it
would enable a user to avoid certain web pages that are deemed insecure.