What’s This About?

CrossHairs is a very small program/utility that will display a vertical and horizontal line on the monitor at the mouse cursor position. It can be set to be static at the original position or to follow the mouse position.

Why Would You Want It?

CrossHair has 5 obvious functions:

1. As an aid to lining up graphics and text for page layouts
2. As an aid to estimating values on graphs and charts
3. To pinpoint the mouse cursor position on "busy" screens or difficult backgrounds
4. As an aid to people with impaired vision
5. To help young children spot the mouse position

I have found it very useful for all of the first 3 items over the past couple of years, particular 1 & 2. I am also sure it will be a great help to people with impaired vision or for children.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Shows vertical and horizontal lines activated by Hotkeys
• Lines can be static
• Lines can follow the mouse position

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 37% [?]

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What Is It?

A wonderful calculator with basic math functions plus extended financial, unit conversion, algebra and scientific functions. Combined with the ability to add your own requirements this is a truly versatile utility.

Why Would You Want It?

Ms Windows calculator provides basic functionality, Farsight Free fills many of the missing gaps you need. While some of the functions of Farsight may be beyond the your  needs in the extensive options there is something here for everybody and it deserves to be part of your essential toolbox. Don’t let the fact  that some of the functions and options are beyond your usual needs put you off that this utility is worthy of your attention.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Maths Functions
• Algebra and Trig Functions
• Financial Calculations
• Statistical Functions
• Logical Expressions
• Reverse Polish Notation

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware
• Simple to Use as a basic calculator

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Popularity: 37% [?]

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Mouse Speed Switcher is a little program that sits in your system tray (systray) which allows you to control the speed of your mouse between two user definable “speed of movement” settings. This can be done either by a mouse lick or a system wide Hotkey combination.

Why Would You Want It?

The speed of your mouse movement will often be a compromise between precision and time. If the mouse moves to quickly it is hard to precisely locate a particular point for precision work such as graphics. If the mouse moves to slowly it can be frustrating where you have to locate points across a screen or screens with a multi-monitor setup. Another problem can be where you use a touchpad or similar pointing device on a laptop but sometimes also use an external mouse (on its own or with a docking station for instance). Here it can be very useful to change the speed between the touchpad and the mouse for maximum productivity.

While windows provides a control panel function to change the mouse settings it is a long winded process. Mouse Speed Switcher provides a quick and easy interface to change the speed settings, apply one of them at startup and then quickly switch between the two with the mouse or keyboard.

Mouse Speed Switcher will also be very useful where you have children, in-experienced users or users who may benefit advanced accessibility options for mouse movement using the same computer/account as another user.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides two interchangeable mouse speed settings
• Allows for quick change between speeds.

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 41% [?]

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What’s This About?

PDF-XChange Viewer is a fully portable application with a tabbed interface and extensive options for adding notes, text, highlights, drawing, etc. on a PDF file.

Why Would You Want It?

There are plenty of PDF file viewers available and most of them are free. Acrobat is bloated and slow, Foxit is good but not portable (Yes you can make Foxit portable using a wrapper , downloading the original installer and then using an extractor to get the executable - but who’s got that long to live!) PDF-XChange Viewer provides a fully portable (English Language) version with a tabbed interface and lots of useful options for direct download. The download has been kept small by stripping all unnecessary files including the language files so you miss out on these and a help file. Not only that but it is fast, relatively light.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Opens PDF files
• Provides tools for drawing and annotation
• Supports PDF file formats from 1.0 to 1.7 (equivalent to Acrobat

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 43% [?]

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What’s This All About?

If you keep up to date with Tech news you will know there has been a lot written about the impending release of the “Google Browser” Google Chrome over the last couple of days. Well now the Beta version (another Google everlasting beta? ) has been released to the world and ProReviewer has grabbed a copy to see what it does.

Why Would You Want It?

Google have done some clever pre-release marketing and in particular a comic strip talking about what \Google Chrome offers. It clearly takes on may of the great aspects of other browsers such as Firefox, Opera and Safari as well as making sure it has MS Internet Explorer * well in its sights. The particular aspects that appeal to me are the “sandboxing” of individual tabs (well it seems to be websites) so that if they crash or a script won’t complete it doesn’t crash or freeze the browser. A Task Manager for the browser to display information about the individual tabs and allow their termination. Other aspects related to search and history within the address bar or “Omnibar” reflect what the “opposition” is currently providing.

I have very gone through being slightly disappointed to indifferent to quite excited about Google Chrome over the last hour as I have experimented with its capabilities.I still realize that I am, at present, a “Dyed in the Wool” fan of Firefox 3 Portable and it will take a lot of development and add-ons (will there be any? ) to make me consider Google Chrome as my browser of choice. However, if their is a portable version with the current functionality I would certainly add it to my Portable Apps toolbox.

Screenshot Tour

Rather than follow the normal ProReviewer review template this post will take the form of a (similar) series of screenshots with notes.

Click on any screenshot to enlarge if necessary

Installation

Standard installer progress window

Installer Welcome and Customization:

About

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Popularity: 41% [?]

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What Is It?

Tab Scope is a Firefox Add-on that displays a reduced size version of the webpage under a tab when the mouse cursor is hovered over that tab. This provides a very quick and easy way to see what the webpage contents are in an instantly available popup window

Why Would You Want It?

If you have many tabs opened at one time (as I often do) then the page title (or part that is displayed) in the tab may not be enough to quickly determine what is on the webpage. Tab Scope shows a popup of the webpage just about instantly when you hover the mouse on the tab.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Displays a popup version of the webpage
• Allows 2 switchable different user set sizes for the popup
• Allows navigation of the page within the popup window

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Popularity: 34% [?]

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Have you ever typed the perfect sentence or paragraph? A real moment of inspiration, never to be repeated! It may be into a word document, or a blog comment  webform or some other program -  and then disaster. A system or program or Internet malfunction results in these never to be remembered words disappearing in a puff of random electrons. Well if it hasn’t happened to you then it has certainly happened to me on more than one occasion.

The answer I found was to use a keylogger to record everything that was being typed. While not a perfect solution it has certainly saved some of my more important sentences, phrases and paragraphs from an early grave as well as saving my time and frustration

REFOG Free Keylogger is an excellent freeware program that has most of the functions you require for this type of use.

This forms part of my overall instant to long term backup and archiving system that uses a number of different freeware solutions  which include ”on the fly” backup of files as new documents or versions are saved through to long term backup of essential documents and information to NAS devices and online storage solutions.

This is a great example of using a utility that may be seen as only having uses for spying on others or trying to nefariously obtain passwords for a good use.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Records “all” keyboard input (including Ctl-Shift_Alt, etc.)
• Records mouse clicks
• Records details of program, time and date.
• Records web addresses visited
• Monitors addresses for changes
• Copies the clipboard information
• Logs Information

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware

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Popularity: 29% [?]

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What Is It?

A Firefox Add-on that automatically copies text in a Firefox window to the windows clipboard with many useful options.

Why Would You Want It?

Essentially Autocopy will save you having to click on selected text with your mouse and then choose Copy or using Ctl-C if you prefer to use the keyboard for copying and pasting. In a single instance this is a small saving of time, probably less than a second, but if you use copy and paste a lot then the small savings all add up. A really big advantage is if you use a clipboard extender to store multiple clipboard copies of text and images, such as Cipboard Magic, Clip Diary, Ditto or one of the several other freeware clipboard extenders available. When you use a clipboard extender you can copy multiple selections of text to use in another document without having to keep switching back and forth on each copy/paste cycle. I find this very useful when I am researching for ProReviewer or work and want to collect multiple pieces of information and then use them as background information rather than a straight copy and paste into a document.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Automatically copies selected text
• Provides Search options for selected text
• Provides other useful options

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

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Popularity: 25% [?]

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What’s This All About?

CatGrab is a handy program to download your photos and videos from a USB connected camera or from a Flashcard reader. CatGrab automatically renames your files and places them in separate folders for photos and videos on your desktop. This review is for the “small” or Freeware edition which has restricted options and a “nag” screen, however for a simple and quick method of downloading it is quite acceptable. Personally I use Picasa which is also free and provides more options.

Why Would You Want It?

Most cameras come with some proprietary software which will do the job of getting photos/videos from the camera to your PC. If you have more than 1 camera you may need to load more than one program and there may also be conflicts. CatGrab provides a simple and quick solution to this. It also separates photos from videos and provides renaming based on the date the photos were taken. Also it will not download duplicates.

(Note - Static addresses can be assigned if required. This is relatively easy for LAN addresses but will probably involve additional costs with an ISP for your WAN)

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Downloads photos and videos to a PC/Laptop
• Renames files based on original date and time
• Separates Photos from Videos

Pros: What’s Good?

Features & Benefits

• Freeware (small version)

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Popularity: 27% [?]

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What Is It?

Scan2PDF is a small program designed to scan images or load images from standard image formats which can then be combined as pages to form a single pdf file. Images can be rotated and text can be added to overlay the image if required. What’s more, several images can be added to the same page, resized and arranged with text added as captions or for information.

Why Would You Want It?

In any home or small office environment there are hundred of documents you need to keep for one reason or another. In the home bank and credit card statements, normal house hold bills, receipts, guarantees, instructions, official letters, tax returns, car documents, etc. There are literally hundreds of documents you need to keep, some for a short time others for much longer. Managing all that paper, filing it, finding it when you need it, sorting out what you don’t need any longer and what you must still keep takes a lot of time to do properly. When you don’t do it well then you spend even more time trying to find something when suddenly you really need it.

The obvious answer is to keep all the documents on your computer. With an organised file naming system (and folders as well if you like, personally I prefer to minimise on folders and use the file naming system as a sort of virtual folder structure). A document scanner that is suitable for this is fairly cheap nowadays and many multi-function devices are also available.

So why scan to pdf rather than just standard jpg, tif, bmp or other image format files. Mostly as this is a convenient and standard document format which will store multiple page documents. That combined with the ready availability of programs to convert word documents to pdf also means that you can keep all correspondence in a single format and read it with a single application whether you use Adobe Acrobat or smaller and faster pdf applications such as Foxit or Sumatra.

There are a few quite to very expensive document management applications available to do this job so it is nice to find a freeware solution which will meet the needs of most home users if used with an appropriate file naming/folder storage method.

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Scanning Interface for single or multiple pages
• Other images can be used to create pdf pages
• Text can be added where required

Pros: What’s Good?