Well that’s pretty obvious but I bet we all have made poor decisions to install software or buy a new bit of kit before carrying out a proper review of information available on the web. I would also add to this that being an “Early Adopter” can be fun and all very cutting edge but this is often referred to as the “Bleeding Edge” with good reason. I will detail two of my recent experiences bad and good and the value of doing some good research.

A Bad Experience

About 9 months ago I bought a 2TB external storage device. My preference was to go for a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit as I already had a couple of these and liked the fact that they were universally available over the home network. A bit of searching around on the Internet showed that there was a 2TB FireWire/USB interfaced unit for about 60% of the price I would be paying for a NAS device. The 2TB unit was new on the market but came from what I understood to be a large, reputable company with plenty of other external storage products which had a good track record. This was quite a sizeable purchase at over £400 ($800) so I did not commit to this lightly, but I decided the saving was to good to pass and ordered it (over the Internet). The device duly arrived, I plugged it in and everything was up and running quickly with no problems. In fact I was so pleased that I decided to buy a second unit a couple of weeks later and daisy chain them together.

(more…)

Popularity: 15% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What Is It?

A small and efficient utility to manage the amount of CPU time being used by the programs currently running on your PC. This is achieved by a simple set of rules that you can control through the Process Tamer GUI.

As I have said before I am a huge fan of the Donation Coder utilities and this is one that I have installed on all of the PC’s/Laptops I use on a regular basis.

Why Would You Want It?

Some processes(programs) use the CPU very intensively when they are running or maybe only at certain times. When this happens other programs that you are running have less CPU time available and therefore respond slowly. Sometimes you may have to wait for relatively long periods of time before the program you are currently working with will respond or it behaves very sluggishly. Process Tamer will help to overcome these sort of problems in a simple and intuitive way..

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Allows you to set rules for the process priority of running processes based on individual process names or global rules.

Summary:

• Provides a way of automatically changing process priority
• Allows the setting of explicit rules for individual processes
• Shows feedback on changes being made in real time
• Optional Log of changes as they occur

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

(more…)

Popularity: 27% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Why You Need Them

No it’s not because your data may be stolen it’s because you may commit the crime of not protecting it!

We all know the importance of a proper strategy for backing up our precious data and how this needs to be done to a regular schedule. Yet, how often do we forget or put off creating the backup until "a bit later". This then becomes days or even weeks and then along comes the PC crash, a powercut an OS glitch, a hard drive failure, the accidental overwriting of a file. Even with a good backup strategy properly implemented he worst of this is that it is often very difficult to tell exactly what you have lost until much later when you can’t find that precious photo or the resume that you spent a day carefully crafting.

(more…)

Popularity: 8% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

What Does it Do – The Essentials?

PortableApps Menu is a a small utility that sits in the system tray and provides access to a suite of programs contained in the associated folders. It also provides access to a set of folders associated with the portable applications folder to make documents, music, pictures and videos available on you USB Flash drive or removable hard drive. (Or just use them in a folder on your PC – see Why You Want to Use Portable Freeware Applications) PortableApps Menu is part of the PortableApps.com Suite available here at PortableApps.com.

The suite comes in 3 versions:

Basic – PortableApps Menu, PortableApps Backup utility and custom folders, icons and AutoRun

Standard – Firefox Portable Edition, OpenOffice.org, Portable, Mozilla Songbird Portable, Gain Portable, Sudoku Portable and Thunderbird Portable Edition

Lite – As standard edition but replaces OpenOffice with Abiword

No doubt the above applications will be subject to the My Free Review treatment in the coming weeks.

Summary:

• Gives simple access to a suite of portable programs
• Provides a set of portable document and multimedia folders
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware (more…)

Popularity: 33% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This is the main category for software program reviews.

All reviews should appear under the appropriate sub-category, this main category will be used for general comments and news on software and developers.

Technorati Tags: Free Reviews, Freeware, My Free Review, Open Source, Portable Freeware, Portable Applications, Portable software, Portable Programs, Reviews, Utilities, Windows, Windows XP, file handling

Update February 2008

This blog was originally called My Free review and if you look back through the posts for February 2008 you will see the reasons for changing the blog name – Pro Reviewer – It’s Hard to Find a Good Domain Name! . So references to My Free Review in the following text relate to this original name choice.

—————————————————————

Well I have decided that I need to write my own blog, so what made me decide this? (more…)

Popularity: 23% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

 Update February 2008

This blog was originally called My Free review and if you look back through the posts for February 2008 you will see the reasons for changing the blog name – Pro Reviewer – It’s Hard to Find a Good Domain Name! . So references to My Free Review in the following text relate to this original name choice.

——————————————————————

The aim of My Free Review is to provide more independent information on various software programs than may be generally available from most blogs at present.

There are several web sites and blogs that provide descriptions of the programs as they are released or updated but this is usually a brief resume taken from the developers site or “press release”. (Although there are some notable exceptions).

Quite often when a program has been downloaded and installed it doesn’t really quite do what is expected or it may do several useful things that were never even mentioned. So I thought that reporting the details could be a useful guide and time saver for other software “junkies” like myself.

The reviews that will be presented are going to be predominantly freeware and shareware. I will review programs and updates that have been recently released whenever possible. Also there will be reviews on some older favourites that deserve a mention.

I feel that the more commercial programs produced by the big software companies are adequately covered by the mainstream PC web sites and magazines. However, I will try to include some personal comments where they seem relevant as well as reviewing some of the free plugins and add-ons that become available.

I am now a big fan of “portable” programs. That is programs that can be run without touching the registry and therefore can easily be transferred from one machine to another complete with all settings or run from a “memory stick”.

I also have an interest in Firefox add-ons which seem to never be adequately described or reviewed at addons.mozilla.org.

Being something of a gadget freak I also thought I would provide a little insight, where relevant, on some of these. Again this may help others from making bad choices or point to some products that have performed well.

All the reviews will obviously be personal opinions and I will welcome comments and discussion from those of you who wish to add something more, disagree or correct something if it is wrong.

For anyone who is interested a little relevant background on myself can be found at “Why I Decided to Write this Blog”

Technorati Tags: Freeware,Portable Freeware,Utilities,Windows,Windows XP,Open Source,Gadgets,Gizmos,Electronics,Reviews,Free Reviews

Popularity: 8% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites