Warning: This is a subjective and slightly philosophical post - My Personal Viewpoint - Feel Free to Disagree or Just Ignore

What resources does a program use, how do you measure them, does it mean anything?

Research, software testing, subjective viewpoints of the user all present challenges to giving expert opinion.

I received an interesting and valuable comment on my AVG 8 Free post (NEW - AVG Anti Virus 8 FREE - Quick Review) from mulligrub:

Good review but a few questions.

The 2 biggest pluses for AVG free in the past are:

1. Free &;

2. Very low overhead - doesn’t use much system resources in day to day operation

The negatives include:

Not the fastest when scanning

Only daily upadtes

Outdated User Interface (looks like that has been addressed)

No Spyware, rootkit, spam protection (Spyware included in AVG8)

So if we are getting more (spyware scanning) in a flashier package
still for free the only achillies heel I can see will be the resource
usage

have you compared what level of resources it is using now?

Does the user experience ‘feel’ slower?

I am keen to know before recommending to family and friends and will test for myself too

Cheers

Well firstly thanks to mulligrub for the comment, and secondly thanks for sparking my interest to write this post!

I felt a more detailed answer and explanation is required, far more than just a comment reply on the original post. This is because it gets into some of the basic philosophy and policy I have tried to put in place for this blog.

A bit of background information is relevant to explain where I am coming from:

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A ProReviewer Mini-me Review

This is an overview of the program and not a more detailed review

What Is It?

AVG Anti Virus 8 is the little brother to AVG Anti Virus 8 Pro and as you will see it provides much more than just virus protection.

Why Would You Want It?

Everyone needs to have anti virus software installed even if not connected to the Internet or behind a router. Even if you are normally vigilant and careful about what you download, email you open or files you copy from removable media, it only takes a moments distraction or perhaps hitting the wrong button in a message box for a virus or Trojan to get into your system. Once it’s there it will probably be impossible to completely get rid of the problems it has caused. Therefore you still need to take care even when you have an anti virus software properly installed and running!

Even if you can remove all traces as well as recover files and registry settings that have been deleted or changed, it will take you many hours. Even then will you be sure that nothing is left behind? From personal experience I would suggest if you get a virus follow information you will find on the major security/anti virus sites to make sure you are safe from it returning or lurking on some other drive and then reinstall your OS from your last backup.

A good anti virus should prevent this from happening (providing it is set up and used properly as well as updated regularly)

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Anti Virus Protection
• Anti Spyware Protection
• E-mail Scanner
• Real Time Scanning of accessed files

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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What Is This All About?

Yesterday I wrote about the basic things you can do with the Windows Toolbar functionality in the taskbar. Today will tell you about some clever little tips and tricks that allows you to use toolbars to help you get more productive and generally make your computing life a little easie

Today will show you how you can go from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

and a lot more!

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What Is This All About?

Going from this:

to this:

(Click on screenshots to show full size/enlarged)

(OK ignore the wallpaper in terms of this post)

I am sure everyone is familiar with the Windows Quick Launch Toolbar as part of the Taskbar. Dragging and dropping new shortcuts to it, or having them automatically installed as part of setting up a new program. Perhaps even dragging and dropping the icons in the Quick Launch area to get them into some sort of practical order. If you are like me it’s soon full of icons and you can’t remember what program they start so you rely on hovering the mouse cursor to get the tooltip. My own experience is that the tooltips don’t always work or take for ever to appear and it all becomes very frustrating. You want to show text and you can but then there isn’t enough space to get everything in!

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What Is It?

Instant Eyedropper is a small utility to identify the colour of a particular screen pixel. It sits in the system tray when started and has no main GUI only an options window and a small window attached to the mouse cursor when identifying a colour.

A ProReviewer Mini-me Review

This is an overview of the program and not a more detailed review

————————————————————–

Why Would You Want It?

A quick and easy way to get identify screen colours in the various colour definition systems used for common computer applications using a Portable Application.

The supported colour formats are:

• HTML
• HEX
• Delphi Hex
• Visual Basic Hex
• RGB
• HSB

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Identifies the colour of any screen pixel

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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The Microsoft  Remote Shutdown Tool can also be used to shutdown or restart a local computer. Creating shortcuts to do this using the various options available enables different user defined alternative shutdown procedures to be defined. Also you can create a shortcut to STOP the shutdown process once started providing this is within the timeout period .

This is certainly not a new tip but a post today on one of my favorite blogs also showed how a GUI can be started, more of this at the bottom of this post. What I thought may be useful would be to give a overview of the available options and how to create the shortcuts to help less experienced readers.

This is a screenshot of three shortcuts I have created to shutdown, restart and stop the shutdown process.

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What Is It?

DeskPins is a program that will “Pin” any window to keep it “Always on Top” of other windows. While there are many other programs out there with this facility and some programs have this as a built in option for themselves, DeskPins has the extra ability to “Pin” by rules based on the Window name.

Why Would You Want It?

Loosing focus on the current window you are working in can be anything from irritating to disastrous if, like me, you are frequently looking away from the screen while typing. My recent post TIP - Stop Applications in Windows Stealing Focus gives you more information and a way to change settings to help deal with this problem. However, due to the different ways in which developers implement their programs the solution suggested doesn’t always work. DeskPins is a way of making sure that important programs that you are working in never loose focus (depending on how you set the rules ).

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Keeps any Window “Always on Top” (Topmost)
• Allows Rules to be set to Automatically “Pin” a window
• Wildcards allowed in rules
• Set Global Hotkeys

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Update Posting

A while back I posted on Daphne 1.32. A new version, 1.33 has now been released with some significant new features and improvements, these are:

• Fully Portable configuration using an “ini” file
• The ability to view a full list of installed software
• Display a snapshot of all current processes in a “Process Tree”
• Parent process name an PID at process’ properties
• Support for DRK’s database of process information

The original post review provides all the main details and can be viewed here Daphne - Modify, Control & Kill Processes with Your Mouse

There is also a follow up post with comments from Leo, the developer of Daphne here Daphne Update - Comments from Leo (Daphne Developer)

The original post noted:

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What Is It?

A Firefox add-on (extension - I use the words interchangeably) that provides a list of installed Firefox add-ons with user definable level of detail. Most importantly one option is to see what Firefox versions the extensions are compatible with.

Why Would You Want It?

Provides a quick and easy way to list all the extensions you have installed and their details. I have used this add-on in the past to list extensions when installing a clean version of Firefox to make sure I have added back in all my add-ons. Recently I decided to try Firefox Beta 3 Portable and downloaded it, then transferred my current Firefox 2 Portable profile complete with all extensions over. On starting it up Firefox duly sorted the compatible extensions and checked for updates so behave perfectly well. At this point I found that many of the  add-ons I consider to be essential for my day to day use were not yet compatible. OK, so you can use the nightly tester tools on a hit and miss basis to see whether the non-compatible extensions will work. This is slow and painful plus some incompatible extensions will completely crash FF on startup meaning you have to delete or move the extension folder. I tried it and gave up in the end as I could not justify the time. Later I looked at Extension List Dumper and realised this was a quick way to keep an eye on the compatibility of my important extensions so I could gauge the time when a changeover to Firefox 3 was going to be acceptable.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Lists all the currently installed extensions in your Firefox setup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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This post is the result of reading a bit of advice in one of my RSS feeds today from one of the leading and most respected blogs on the Internet. In itself the information could be considered trivial but the potential for career disaster or personal embarrassment for anyone suffering from email overload ( and that must be many of us) was immense. It got me quite incensed, maybe this is the engineer/researcher in my makeup, but everything needs to be considered in the cold light of day for its real worth.

The post in question was quite simply about prioritising email using rules, whether this is an Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo Mail or your favorite email program. In this particular instance the advice was that emails sent directly to you are more important than emails sent to a group.

My instant response is why!

The suggestion is that an email sent to you rather than a group can only be answered by you and is therefore more important. That seems to be a blindingly narrow and wrong view of emails in general.

Let me a give a simple example:

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