Entries Tagged 'Windows Software' ↓

The GIMP is the most popular free alternative to Photoshop – available for alot of platforms. Photoshop users have big problems switching because they have a hard time locating Photoshop’s features in The GIMP.

… Basically it is just a hack of the current GIMP-sourcecode changing the menustructure, naming and key-bindings to be more like Photoshop.

GIMPshop for Windows

Author: Elizabeth Ward

DO I NEED TO SPY PROOF MY COMPUTER?

I think the question should be, do I use my computer for anything that would best remain private and confidential? Computer monitoring has become a huge industry, involving individuals, companies and governments worldwide. Ask the millions of people who’ve had their identities stolen if they would have done anything different, knowing what they do now.

Did you know identity theft is the nations fastest growing crime?

With the advent of computer technology and the Internet spreading through our homes and businesses at lightning speed, if you haven’t been affected by computer crime in one way or another, chances are you will be soon.

TYPES OF COMPUTER RECORDING DEVICES

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Several years ago Microsoft called me on the telephone. Somehow they’d gotten the weird impression that I was an important decision maker or something else equally unlikely. If I’d answer a few questions I’d get my choice of two Microsoft software packages. After two minutes of questions I was asked what software I wanted.

I asked for a copy of Access. It still sits somewhere, never opened. And Microsoft PhotoDraw.

You’ve never heard of PhotoDraw? I don’t think many people did. PhotoDraw 2.0 was the last release. While I didn’t have great need for an image editing program I didn’t have one.

Unlike Access, PhotoDraw did get installed though it long languished unused. On taking a real interest in my main personal website I finally had a reason to use PhotoDraw. Yes, I could create logos and make theme go through ugly transmogrifications on mouse over. It never took me more than a week to realize that the effect may have looked OK on my PC but nobody would want to see it happen when their mouse accidentally ran over the top of one of my web pages.

I was using Microsoft Front Page back then. Having wisely and cleanly started out with text navigation I went off into a wild tangent of button building. You know, it takes real talent to design attractive buttons (Front Page includes nothing I’d use). I made and remade those buttons. Once a set I thought was tolerable looking was up on the page I realize they were damn ugly. Eventually I’d learn to use the program with the restraint proper to someone with no graphics talent. I still miss the little pink triangles that popped up over my hyperlinks.

Being Microsoft software I’m sure PhotoDraw was damnable &etc. PhotoDraw worked well enough for me. I got lots of bad impulses out of my system.

Before having PhotoDraw I’d been using Irfanview. IrvanView is a slick, free image viewer, image manipulation tool. I found it easier to optimize images in IrfanView than PhotoDraw. IrfanView lets me crop, sharpen and plenty of other things to pictures.

Recently the combined Adobe and Amazon rebates let me buy Adobe Elements 2.0 for $29.95. I don’t know that I really need it. A few times I’ve wanted to be able to open PSD files. People have offered attractive website enhancements. But I’d need to adjust them to my site and you quickly learn there are things you can’ t change in GIFs and JPGs. You need the source files.

Also I’m one of the few people who needs to enlarge image files, often taken from eBay scans. IrfanView will let me do that but loses lots of detail. I’m curious to see if Adobe has developed better algorithms for enlarging images or at least for cleaning them up.

I’d thought about buying PaintShopPro a couple of times when it was on sale. But it sounds like more of a power user’s tool than I’d want.

And Microsoft has PictureIt! out now. I was intrigued to read about the ability to paint out an object and have the background filled in. But given how quickly MS gave up on PhotoDraw I don’t feel like trusting them. And wondered how much their software depended on oddball proprietary formats.

For the few days I’ve had it I’ve only used Elements to crop and resize images. On one of my sites I need to enlarge images found on the web. In my few efforts I haven’t seen any sign that Adobe Elements does a better job of this than IrfanView. No particular reason to expect that it would but there was the hope that Adobe’s programmers had developed a more sophisticated algorithm.

The images have been scans of old paperback covers all of which are paintings. I’ve yet to try a photo cover. Perhaps I’ll discern a difference with those.

Not that I’m unhappy with having bought Elements. At $30.00 it be hard to. Now that my bandwidth is under control I can think about adding graphical elements to my pages and being able to open and edit the kindly offered PSD files will give me a wealth of material.

And I need to spend a couple of days on Elements tutorial sites to learn if there are subtleties of image manipulation I’m missing. Very likely.

When I was reading reviews of antivirus software recently I think the reviewers favorites were usually Norton AntiVirus and TrendMicro’s PC-cillin. Symantec is inevitably a winner in these things.

Norton AV 2004 turned me against Symantec for a couple of reasons. 1) The required online product activation. 2) Norton 2004 just doesn’t know when to shut up. We run a program that backs up critical data files every time they change. Norton claims the program is “requesting” a scan every time it does anything, which is often. When Norton displays the notice it becomes part of the Alt-Tab sequence. When I think I’m going back to my database I’m going to a trivial menu. I’ve configured Norton AntiVirus to ignore the program repeatedly. Every time I reboot the PC Norton forgets. And each time the software intervenes to make sure my backup program isn’t infecting the computer it grabs too much CPU.

While Norton 2005 is probably a peachy program I decided I wasn’t going to install it on my home computer.

I had ZoneAlarm’s Pro firewall running in trial mode for a few days. An email arrived to say that if I bought it “Right Now!” I’d get $10 off. Uh huh. Maybe if I wait a couple of weeks I thought they’ll give me a $20 discount.

Not expecting to do anything I went to the ZoneAlarm site. I saw that if I had a Norton UPC I could get $30.00 off the ZoneAlarm Suite. One of the extras is a bundled edition of Computer Associations anti-virus software.

I don’t launch files from people that I don’t know. People that I do know never send me files. Funny that it works out that way. Thanks to the spam filters I use virus laden emails are shunted to junk folders. Hard for me to judge how good a job ZA is doing. It does get confused when a virus arrives in Thunderbird. It doesn’t know how to neutralize it. Since the email has already been junked I don’t much care. When I close the warning window ZA warns me against stopping the scan. It has already scanned and I don’t need for it to do anything.

With Outlook it kills the occasional invader. No confusion.

CloudMark’s SpamNet came free with the ZoneAlarm Suite. As I noted earlier it works fine. I’ve never fired up an instant messaging client on this PC so I don’t know how well that works. At some point I should give the personal information “vault” a test. A friend of mine did have his credit card charged recently and he’s a frequent online buyer. His computer is fairly secure and we’ve never figured out how they grabbed his credit card data.

ZoneAlarm

ZoneAlarm’s firewall works as advertised. I haven’t experienced any sluggishness, conflicts or other problems. I’ve seen reports of people having trouble with Zone Alarm 5 but I didn’t install the software until it had been out for a time.

Remember Lotus Magellan? Probably not. It was a DOS program that let you bypass the simple drive letter, directory/subdirectory structure and see the contents of your computer anyway you wanted to. As with any software that didn’t show signs of making Lotus as much cash as 123 it was casually scrapped.

Many programs I’ve admired have found their way into the software junkyard. Another, again from Lotus, was Improve, a spreadsheet that let you arrange your view your data by what every arbitrary criteria you chose.

Magellan could be called a file manager of sorts. But back in the flat, simple days of DOS it seemed almost a miracle to be able to bypass the FAT file system’s limits. Do things that you *nixians are used to with your symbolic links and mounted volumes (Why won’t drive letter die? Please make them go away!)

One of the most entertaining software entrepreneurs was Philippe Kahn. He ran Borland back before they sold their applications software to Corel to become part of the WordPerfect Suite. Borland was perhaps the first software house to be simply flattened by the economic power the success of Windows gave Microsoft. He released inexpensive, but good applications, particularly a database called Paradox. Redmond looked down, realized they could readily toss out Access for as little.

Kahn left Borland to form Starfish Software. They had one program: Sidekick. Sidekick was a personal information manager. PIMs are something I’ve never needed. I have few contacts, even fewer appointments. My schedule, an overly fancy name for my routine, is at my whim.

Sidekick had a little database that you could load down with text and search quickly and easily. Sidekick ‘97 was the last iteration of the program. Along came Windows XP and Sidekick wouldn’t install.

Intermittently I’ve searched for a freeform database. Nowadays that means it has to be able to handle graphics, HTML, text, whatever I want to toss at it. I’ve looked at every freeware, shareware, commercial program I could find. Maybe I’ve looked at this kind of software more than any other sort. I’d think about AskSam but it was always more than I was willing to pay. I won’t make any money, I just wanted an easy way to toss whatever and everything else into one storage bin that would let me move it about however I wish.

When Microsoft announced OneNote I was interested. But not $199 interested (I didn’t know there was a $100 rebate for owners of MS Office). While the price drop to $99 caught my attention I wasn’t willing to pay even that much.

Last week I saw that Amazon was offering a $30.00 rebate on Microsoft OneNote for a time.

Microsoft OneNote

Tired of my flirtations with TreePad, exasperated with programs that were little more than card file replacements (remember the Windows card file?) I clicked twice and ordered OneNote.

Installed OneNote this a.m. Then I tried to install the service pack. I’d read about it and thought I’d go ahead and deal with it before I ever loaded the software. Kept getting rejected, the installer saying it was the expected version. Thought maybe I needed to reboot the PC but that didn’t help. Went to Office Update and let it install whatever it felt I needed (good thing I did, missed a couple of security patches). No luck.

To Hell with it. I just loaded OneNote. Looking under the About under Help I discovered that the CD I received already had been refreshed with SP1. Oops.

Not having lived with OneNote for very long I don’t have much to say about it. It seems very obliging in letting me pile all sorts of scrap on a page/folder. Using my text editor and a hierarchy of folders as a database works OK at times but only for very simple things.

Disobligingly OneNote doesn’t want to talk to anything other than Office 2003. Not sure that I’d use it with Outlook 2000 but I don’t have the chance to find out. Likewise with Word 2003. I suspect it’ll snuggle up comfortably with Internet Explorer which I only use when no other browser is accepted. Though I’m pretty hardened to software knowing about IE but not talking to Firefox. That is a huge annoyance.

OneNote did have to phone home. I think Microsoft is foolish here. I’ve got OneNote setup here at home. I’m not going to buy a copy for work. It might be that I’ll decide it has no use here but if I could run it at the shop might take to it there. There should give the software a chance to win more converts before fussing so much about their intellectual property.

In a month or two I’ll post a note to say if OneNote has been worth $69.95.

When paying for another software product I was offered the chance to get Cloudmark’s SpamNet for free. I’d seen a couple of glowing reviews but hadn’t felt like paying for it. I handle my personal email through Thunderbird and Gmail.

SpamNet

But I do keep a copy of Microsoft Outlook 2000 on my home computers for retrieving my used bookstore’s email. Mostly so I have a functioning copy of Outlook up in case someone at the shop calls me with a problem.

I also have an ancient Hotmail account that I read only with ePrompter. But I did install Outlook Express on a couple of computers so Charles for Charles to use with his MSN email. It was his clicking on links that a child should know are just cons hoping to either get a verified email address to spam or another PC to infect with spyware that quickened my interest in ways to protect my computers from other’s carelessness.

SpamNet collects bad email addresses from its not quite yet million users. I hadn’t pick up the shop’s email in a couple of days. 21 messages out of 178 were marked as spam the first time I ran Outlook after installing the software. It missed 2. Meaning those addresses were new sources of spam and once I marked them other people using SpamNet would have correspondence from them routed to their spam folder.

Not bad at all.

SpamNet works only on Outlook and Outlook Express. I’m thinking it is based on something under some GPL’s blacklisting scheme but may be wrong. A quick Google check showed nothing.

Having only had it on my home PC for short time I could’ve easily missed its limitations. SpamBayes is free but for some folks SpamNet’s ease may make the cost worth it.

Whatever solution you chose – death to spammers!

I’d known about SpamBayes add-on for Microsoft Outlook but had been tardy in downloading and installing I the program.

The Outlook addin is an application of the SpamBayes project. To our knowledge, the current version of the plug-in should work with Windows 98 and above and Outlook 2000 or above.

Verizon seems to do a good, ruthless job of keeping us of seeing the bulk of the spam that arrives at my used bookshop’s highly visible email address. Finally I got tired of having to hit the Delete key when I went into the shop in the morning.

We run Outlook 2000 at the store. While I run Thunderbird at home and am content with it – for assorted reasons – I’m not yet tempted to change email programs at work.

Surprisingly SpamBayes seemed to discern spam even more readily than Thunderbird’s Bayesian filtering. Within a couple of days almost no spam arrived in Outlook’s Inbox. False positives were slightly more frequent but after a couple of weeks most of those faded. The few that we’ve had were almost justified. I’ve never understood why anyone would send an email with a blank subject. Or generic subjects. “My order” or “the book” aren’t informative. Why not tell us something about your order or the buy you have a question about in the To: field? When I’m dealing with email you guys get shuffled to the bottom.

If you are using Microsoft Outlook SpamBayes is an easy painless install. In a short time your inbox will be almost wholly free of scum emails. Visiting the spam folder and dispatching it to Hell takes much less time when you can quickly tell it is all garbage than having to make sure you don’t accidentally kill a legitimate email.

SpamBayes on Windows

Black Ice Defender was the first firewall I installed after I got my broadband connection. I guess it was what all the smart guys seemed to be using.

When my first year ended and it was time to pony up more money I went to the freebie ZoneAlarm. The PC security market still wasn’t that crowded and it seemed like almost everybody liked ZoneAlarm. Why pay to renew Black Ice when ZA was free. Many other folks must have agreed I never see anything about Black Ice anymore.

Often OfficeMax stores are the cheapest place to buy software, particularly when the new version has been released. OfficeMax often has in discounts that I’ve never seen on their website. I was just going to buy a copy of Norton AntiVirus for my used bookshop. But with the mix of rebates Norton’s Internet Security Suite was cheaper. Even if you don’t want the extras paying more for less is hard to do.

Norton Personal Firewall 2005

Having a copy of Norton’s Personal Firewall I replaced ZoneAlarm. No good reason. It may have been long enough ago that Peter Norton’s name suggested more than a bright yellow box. Maybe it was that silly feeling that what you pay for is better than free (yes, yes, I know).

The Norton firewall, version forgotten, worked fine.

With a fresh computer on the way I felt I should survey my security options and buy the most secure router, best firewall and anti-virus software I could find.

Trust me I did spend lots of time. I browsed through the forums of sites devoted to networking, dedicated to online security. I read online computer press reviews and read all the user comments.

The guru caste seemed to recommend just about every firewall. Perhaps the advocates of the lesser-known firewalls were more vocal; a bit snooty but isn’t that always the case. Sometimes on closer inspection I saw they often favored an old release. I’m not criticizing that; I’m not competent to. But it did tend to fragment my search for a definitive solution. Versions were a big issue for the clueless end-user as well. “I just upgraded Zap Splat! 6.0431 just sucks. Often one of the wizardly folks would patiently guide them to rolling back to an earlier version.

AV software seemed to often bring the same concerns.

Routers I had stopped worrying about and bought an inexpensive LinkSys 801.g router.

Making the rounds of the magazine websites I found lots of roundups. Firewalls always seemed to boil down to ZoneAlarm and Norton. One of the reasons was ease of use, which doesn’t concern the more proficient computer user.

I think anti-virus software reviews seemed biased toward Norton and Trend Micro’s PC-cillin. I was surprised to see how low McAfee rated in all the roundups.

The freebie edition of ZoneAlarm is what I eventually chose, at least for the nonce.

It includes anti-virus protection. Perhaps it isn’t very good. As long as I keep anyone else from using this PC I’m not sure how much I care. I use Thunderbird as an email client. I never, ever open a dubious attachment.

Norton 2005 sounds much improved. The firewall supposedly blocks sending data to untrusted sites. But it is the user who is doing the trusting and if he really wants to sign up for that porn subscription he may feel very trusting. Phishing is probably becoming a bigger threat than simple virus infections. By some accounts people’s bank accounts are being bled by the combination of user naïveté and phishers’ increasing sophistication.

Norton AntiVirus 2005

More useful for them, if not us – we are too smart aren’t we?

The Norton AntiSpam 2005 that detects email addresses that don’t match the senders’ return email address may also help those folks who are so happy to oblige “PayPal” when it asks for their credit card details. Likewise AV supposed will stop emails from phoning home. Since all some do is load a graphic that lets a spammer no the message has been seen by a live person I can only wonder how effective any email software that doesn’t have the equivalent of Thunderbird’s sanitized HTML will be.

The quick scanning of computer memory when Norton performs a LiveUpdate sounds good. But you have to assume in the ongoing war between hacker and security software engineer that the hackers will be working to defeat that stratagem.

Norton Internet Security 2005

For myself I see no reason to buy into Norton 2005. But I know more than one person who is a sucker for all of those “bargains,” wish their mortgage could be lowered, want to see that unclad coed or are ready to learn the latest in penis research.

Nobody can develop adequate security software for them.

When I was trying Star Office Writer and looking around for alternatives to MS Word one thing that caught my attention was the fairly good-sized contingent of folks who are still using Microsoft Office ‘97 or 2000. I forget why I upgraded from ‘97 to 2000, there was a feature I wanted but there hasn’t since. And I don’t want to deal with MS’s monitoring of my software usage.

I have Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2000 but all I installed was Word 2000. Then I went to MS’s Office Update site and downloaded a couple things. The security update to keep someone from compromising my system with an evil macro. And the last major service pack. Since I use Word only for the superior spell-checker, dictionary I wanted to get upgrade for the latter buried in the service pack.

If like me you are happy to stay with an earlier release of Office you still want to go and grab the old updates to keep your copy of Office more secure.

I keep forgetting to bring my MS Office 2000 CDs home. Having caught so many stupid typing mistakes I’m afraid to write an entry without software to check my spelling.

Last night I hied myself to the Open Office to download their software. Happily I didn’t have to install the whole magilla. All I wanted was the word processor. I’ve been using Open Office Writer for about a day and a half.

Put off initially by the faux margins I was happy to see that by switching to Outline View the text entry area takes up all of Wrtier’s screen space. Even with a bigger monitor I like to have as much area for typing in as possible.

Having used Open Office Writer for awhile I have to say it is a good program but I don’t think it will woo me from Microsoft Word.

The type ahead is vastly superior to Word’s, though it does take a bit of getting used to. It does save my repetitive stress injured fingers plenty of keystrokes.

I miss Word’s grammar checker. Mostly I ignore the suggestions. I have reason to use reflexive voice. Sentence fragments are good. But it does help me spot sentences that are either annoying or meaningless (not all of them, sadly). Writer doesn’t save me from quantity errors.

Open Office Writer’s spelling help isn’t good enough. The vocabulary is too small. Writer is often thrown by possessives and plurals.

Possibly MS Word has had more money invested in its dictionary than all of Open Office. Word has been around for a long time. When I decided to leave WordStar I tried the DOS edition of Word. I hated it. For reasons long forgotten the business of banging on the Escape key struck me as stupid beyond words.

I went on to WordPerfect 4.1, justly celebrated at the time as the best word processor on the market. The built in help – annoyingly F5 – was practically a knowledge base in itself.

Later I’d switch to Lotus’ AmiPro – who remembers that word processor?

A friend who worked for Microsoft gave me a copy of MS Office 97. I installed Office and forgot about it for years. The upgrade to Office 2000 was cheap so I bought it, though hardly used it.

At home I only use Word. See no reason to buy a later edition. All I really care about is the spell checker.

This isn’t to knock Writer. If I didn’t have Word already paid for I’m sure I’d use Writer without a moment’s regret.