What’s Up?

So I couldn’t think of a really good title that describes the recent “technical” problems that have resulted in no new ProReviewer posts for the last couple of weeks

Soon after I finished the post on ClipGuru a couple of weeks ago, as I was about to start on the next post, in fact at just after 5pm Saturday 8th November, we had a local power cut. No idea what caused it but after a few seconds the switchgear somewhere on the main grid automatically tried to reconnect the power twice in succession. No big deal you think, happens 2 or 3 times a year.

bigfoto.com

When the power was eventually restored a little later I found that my server PC wouldn’t start up, my Windows Home Server was dead and my main XP desktop, which I use for all my work and blogging, had some data corruption (or so I thought).

What Next?

Well I started off with the dead machines checking al the usual things like fuses on the mains and then working into opening up the machines and checking connections, boards and memory properly seated, etc. To cut a long story short over I pinned it down to the power supplies having failed by taking an old power supply from another machine and trying it on the dead ones. This all sounds fairly straight forward but lack of time and pressure of other things at home and work meant this took until the middle of the week to sort out.

In the mean time my main working desktop and started to behave ever more strangely. Crashing, freezing and the graphics display working intermittently. I thought it was the graphics card as I could connect remotely and al seemed to be working normally. A new graphics card and power supplies were ordered. However, the main desktop just got worse and worse. In the end I decided it could only be the motherboard.

What Now?

Well I sorted out the server PC and WHS machine power supplies and they are all working properly. I have a motherboard/processor/memory bundle coming tomorrow (the old mobo/cpu/memory were over 3 years old, therefore well out of date, so I decided to replace the lot).

I have used part of the available time to transfer data and install programs to my Vista machine, which I am using now to write this post. It also means I have been able to move the computers around in the study so it will now be possible to switch between my main desktop with XP and the Vista PC which should help with posts including more Vista programs.

So I hope to resume normal service over the next week to 10 days with 3 to 4 posts a week

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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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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

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What Does That Mean?

In a nutshell clicking on an image in Pro Reviewer will now show a full sized picture overlaid on the current webpage. There are navigation and close buttons at the bottom of the image. This is all provided Javascript is enabled in your browser otherwise the picture/image will be shown as before – Try it on the image below.

Regular readers of the Pro Reviewer blog will be aware that the reviews like to "tell the story" as much as possible using screenshots of the software. This is because the screenshot will show quickly exactly what you will expect to get from the software and the text notes will tell you anything additional or about bugs. The old adage "A picture is worth a thousand words" definitely applies to the approach here!

The downside to this is clicking on a lot of images to enlarge them to see the detail which creates a new webpage or loads the image in the current page so you have to use the back button on your browser.

LaptopTips – Great Plugin – Even Better Support

Shutter Reloaded is a WordPress Plugin that provides this functionality from LaptopTips.

I installed the plugin on ProReviewer yesterday evening but it wasn’t working. I checked the webpage code and everything seemed to be there. Looking at the LaptopTips site I could see that it was probably a conflict with some other code but sorting that out was beyond the time I have available. So I left a comment asking for assistance:

This was late yesterday evening for me but 11am local time for LaptopTips

I received an answer 4 hours later but didn’t pick it up until this morning (my time).

Brilliant Service!!!

By the way I have displayed the question and answer as images just to use Shutter Reloaded

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Why I decided to Write this Blog

What are the Tags?

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What Does It Do – The Essentials?

TaskSwitchXP provides an alternative way to switch tasks using alt-tab. Described as “an advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off” by the developers ntwind software. Quoting them more fully adequately describes the essentials of the program:

TaskSwitchXP is an advanced task management utility that picks up where the standard Windows Alt+Tab switcher leaves off. It provides the same functionality, and adds visual styles to the dialog and also enhances it by displaying thumbnail preview of the application that will be switched to.

TaskSwitchXP also has a powerful process and window management capability that allows you quickly to close/minimize applications and their groups. The unique capabilities of TaskSwitchXP make it useful for tracking down multitudinous windows, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.

Summary:

• Provides preview snapshots of all running windows (alt-tab)
• Designed for XP with XP visual styles
• Allows for windows management (minimise, cascade, etc)
• Can select groups of windows
• Multilingual
• Process/task management capabilities
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Leo, the developer, sent me the following email answering some of the points I raised in the review. He has kindly given me permission to reproduce his comments (Thanks Leo!)

The bullet points in the email are my comments in the review and Leo’s replies are in blue.

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Tonight I am working on moving the My Free Review blog to Pro Reviewer and so far (touch wood) it’s going far more easily than I expected. I spent a lot of yesterday reading up about transferring blog domains and there seemed to be quite a lot involved, particularly in changing the MySQL database. Much to my amazement everything seems to be happening fairly automatically. Maybe this is a result of the fact that I have “parked” the new domain in the same home directory with my web host. This leaves myfreereview.com as the principal domain and proreviewer.com pointing to it.

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I am sure that in the same way as many other new bloggers have done, I have been thinking hard about the name and content of my blog over the last couple of weeks. Probably the hardest decision to make was about the blog name. What has become clear to me very quickly was that “My Free Review” has no immediate impact for anyone searching for content with Google, Yahoo or any of the other major search engines. The same lack of impact would also effect users of StumbleUpon, Technorati, Digg, etc. While every blog on “how to increase Traffic” to a blog always says content is King, that’s no good if you don’t have anyone to read it! Reading articles on changing the domain name for a blog, made it clear that the longer I left it the more the impact of the change would be. Not only are there lots of changes to make to the blog database, but there are also major effects on search engine and other rankings. So yesterday I spent several hours trying to come up with a new name that could be tied into a domain name as well.

I started by thinking of names that would have the right combination of simplicity, memorability, and authority. A name that people could identify with for the type of content but had the right sound to it, catchy without being trivial. Words in the frame included tech, techno, expert, xpert, review, pro and even (in desperation) geek. I wanted to avoid using a domain name with any of the “modifiers” suggested by the domain name sellers like GoDaddy such as adding THE, NEW, BEST, MY or OFFICIAL at the beginning of the domain name or ONLINE, HOME, SITE, LIVE, BLOG to the end. Not only do these often look lame but they also lengthen the name and potentially make it less memorable.

The other big influence on my choice of name was that I wanted to have wider variety of content than reviews and hoped to reflect that in the name. So, you ask, why have I ended up with proreviewer.com! Simply, after several hours of researching available names, apart from a couple that were available at “premium rates” ranging from $500 to $5000, I couldn’t find any name that fitted the above set of criteria. Even when extending my list of acceptable words most of the others I tried were not available or just didn’t work for me. There were also a couple of names that I could have used but were within a letter of another blog name and with content in a similar area. So I ended up with a shortlist of 5 names and with the help of family and friends (a focus group of 3!) whittled this down to a final 2. Even choosing to include proreviewer in the list, which was close to exiting names and tied back to reviews, was difficult, but in the end it was considered the best we could come up with.

As you can see, the new name has become a major compromise. It still reflects an area that is more narrow than the intended blog content but I will just have to live with that and The need to have something that sounded authoritative and was in the right area to reflect at least some of the content was important and I am sure that Darren Rowse’s excellent and highly successful site, problogger.com had an influence on my final decision.

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Why I Decided to Write this Blog

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P.S. Just visited Problogger to check spelling of Darren’s surname and coincidentally there is this post:

Six Defining Moments of a ProBlogger

which I thought was quite appropriate as I see changing this blog name as a defining moment in my blogging life.

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P.P.S. I think it will take a couple of weeks for me to make all the internal WordPress changes so don’t be surprised that “My Free Review” (myfreereview) will appear in various links and other places for a while.

Technorati Tags: ProReviewer, My Free Review, Problogger, Domain Name

What Does It Do – The Essentials?

Daphne is a small utility that allows you to view and control the processes running on your system. The beauty of this utility is that it provides the ability to do this by dragging and dropping a target with your mouse. It also provides functions to modify, control and kill processes by name and to save these as rules. I had been looking for a “process manager” with the mouse capabilities for sometime so I am really pleased to have found this.

Summary:

• Lists all currently running processes
• Kill processes by name, from main window or by dragging a target onto the application window
• Control and modify processes in the same way as above
• Controls include hide application, always on top, hide , transparency, enable and disable
• Processes can be highlighted by colour in main window
• Shows full process path in main window
• Process priority can be changed in the main window
• Details of processes can be shown
• Access to database of process details (via web)
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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What Does It Do – The Essentials?

tinySpell provides a simple way of spell checking all your keyboard text input applications and the first word copied to the clipboard. It also provides spelling suggestions and correction of the misspelled word. It monitors your typing “on the fly” and alerts you whenever a spelling error is detected. This latest version, 1.7 beta, has a new visual spelling “tooltip” alert next to the word and a single press of the down arrow key brings up the spelling suggestions dialog. This new functionality is a great leap forward for the program.

N.B. This is a review of a beta stage version and therefore some comments and conclusions may not apply to the final release version.

Summary:

• Spell checks text input to all applications
• Provides spelling suggestions
• Programs can be specifically excluded or included
• Comes with an 110,00 word American English dictionary
• Can be set to run automatically at Startup

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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