Category Archives: Reviews
Review: Microsoft OneNote for iPhone
Well, this review is long overdue, but I’ve been putting Microsoft’s latest addition to the OneNote family through its paces. Overall, I’m fairly pleased with how well I was able to reorganize my notebooks, including some older ones from when I had a Windows smartphone but never had the incentive to do anything with until the iPhone app came out.
However, I should make sure to stress the word "fairly".
Geek Friday & Review: LogMeIn
I have VNC running on my home computers, which is a lot handier than running up and down the stairs. I was using UltraVNC, but it had some really bad issues with freezing up a lot. Sometimes, it would refresh after several minutes, but sometimes the only remedy was to kill VNC and restart. TightVNC was somewhat better, but I still had that problem on my home theater personal computer (HTPC). Sure, I have the remote keyboard, but the characters on the screen are a little difficult to make out at a distance (my TV isn’t really that big).
So, I thought I’d give LogMeIn a chance, and at first it was great! I could do all sorts of thing without it freezing up.
Review: NetDrive
NetDrive is YAPOTILTL (yet another piece of technology I’d love to love). That’s another way of saying that it is a grand idea but the implementation is severely lacking.
FrontPage was always the app to love to hate. Yet, it had one feature that, if it worked correctly, sometimes made it worthwhile: It could sync directories between the local file system and the server’s. Unfortunately, it too didn’t work very well, and it often timed out while doing updates in either direction. Even worse, its successor, Expression Web, is just as bad at this.
However, I love FreeFileSync. I also love FileZilla, but the honest truth is that FileZilla falls flat when it comes to trying to sync with FTP directories. FreeFileSync, however, does not do FTP. This isn’t so bad when you are talking a handful of files, but if you really want a backup of the files on your server, you need to know quickly which are updated and which are not. Visual presentations are fine for some things, but not when you need a real snapshot of your server locally.
Review: Customizations With the Ultimate Windows Customizer
Tweaks and such are nice. I’ve written before about branding and login screen customizations. However, in looking at all the tools and such, I came across The Ultimate Windows Customizer., which claims to not only modify the logon screen, but allows you to change context menus, the start orb, size and look of the taskbar icons and much more than I can honestly fit into a short review.
The setup went smoothly. There didn’t seem to be any crapware installed with it.
iDevice Manager (was iPhone Explorer) Installs MySearch/Incredibar Crapware
I’m a little P-O’ed. The worst thing about shareware used to be the risk of getting nagware. It would nag you to death until you coughed up whatever their fee was.
Nowadays, though, the biggest danger is the slipping in of crapware, in particular toolbars that do little more than slow your computer down, track your browsing and serve you up ads. It’s an annoying practice, even if the little addition is a legitimate program. However, to install real unwanted crapware and not even prompt you if you want to install it or not is inexcusable.
It is puzzling in particular when donationware does this. Now, I have donated to some very useful program sources in the past, even when I thought the promoting of giving donations was a little pushy (although it does make me more likely to really drag my feet first, because I get suspicious when it’s too pushy). I mean, if you really need the money that bad, why not make it shareware and have people pay for what the program really does?
Well, unfortunately, it seems that even potentially useful utilities like iDevice Manager from Marx Softwareentwicklung, www.software4u.de, fall victim to stupid practices that just piss people off. I thought it was a fluke the time before last, but it happened again during an update. My default search was changed to the Incredibar BS and installed the MySearch malware without asking me. If you uninstall it from the Programs control panel, it will only uninstall the IE toolbar. Your home page and default searches for all of your browsers, though, are still set to the Incredibar nonsense. You have to clean it out of all of your browsers and reset their home pages (although, System Restore might do that for you as well if it is recent).
Seriously, stuff like this should be prosecutable in a court of law. I’m putting the word out to anyone who will listen to avoid iDevice Manager like the plague.
Oh, and as to a donation? You’ve got to be doing drugs! Now that I’ve written my review, I’m removing it ASAP.
Review of Outlook Tools
There are plenty of Outlook utilities and plug-ins, but most of them are single purpose and a lot of them are just not any good. I cannot tell you how many of them I’ve installed only to minutes later uninstall.
I’m happy to say that I cannot say that about Outlook Tools. Not only does it cover a range of functions all in one nice interface, but it is one of the few that hasn’t given me more headaches than the problems I was trying to solve.
If you are like me, you probably:
- Cannot remember where Outlook puts its data files (seems to change every version, and even on the same version for the smallest of reasons).
- Cannot remember where the ScanPST utility is on the hard drive (why don’t they provide a shortcut to it in the Start menu?).
- Cannot remember the commandline switch to clean out reminders.
- Get really annoyed at blocked attachments.
This, and more, can be addressed with this tool. It is donationware, so if any of the above describe you, I’d encourage you to try it out.
Review of GCal Duplicate Deleter
It is inevitable when sync’ing calendars between devices that something will get duplicated. ActiveSync was especially bad for that, it seems, which was really annoying as it was pushed out by MS themselves as the solution for sync’ing between Windows Mobile and Outlook. Well, changing to an iPhone and a Google calendar but still sync’ing with Outlook has actually worked quite well, but the inevitable has happened.
Geek Friday & Review: WinAudit
Well, I like lists and checklists and what-not, but it is sometimes difficult to keep track of where you started in order to know where you are going. There are tools that help, like Secunia Online Software Inspector, which is nice for check for out of date software. It is especially nice because it will even catch those pesky out of date Flash OCX files that don’t show up in Add/Remove Programs.
However, it really would help to have a list of programs, and even a list of devices, just to get an idea of what you are starting with. There are tons of programs out there that do this, but they are expensive for the most part. I just wanted something to list the program and the version – nothing fancy. In addition, I want to be able to carry it on a memory stick (aka thumb drive, flash drive, etc.) and not have to actually install it.
Well, it turns out that WinAudit fits this bill quite nicely. Not only that, but it is free. For that price, all I expected was that it would produce a text output that I could print out and cross items off as I go. However, while it will produce a text report, it can also create a comma separated file (CSV) to import into Excel or an HTML to bring up in a web browser.
It is a nice, down-and-dirty program that cuts to the chase. It reminds me a lot of how software used to be written back in the 640k days. If you want bells and whistles, then this isn’t the program for you, but if you just want something quick and easy to use, then give it a whirl.
Between these two utilities, WinAudit and Secunia OSI, it should be easy to keep your PC clean and up to date. Don’t forget that Secunia also has a Personal Software Inspector that runs on your own machine and provides you a more thorough inspection.
First Look at GoToAssist Because UltraVNC Does Not Cut It
I have looked at a number of remote control applications that can be used to do remote support on someone’s PC. The sad part of all of this is that it truly should be unnecessary. Windows is supposed to have Remote Assistance built in and free of charge. However, in true Microsoft fashion, they turned around and screwed up a perfectly good idea. It is difficult enough to set up a remote session that it is easier just to talk them through the problem they are having!
For a while, I was using UltraVNC’s Single Click application to do remote support. However, it is so buggy and slow that it really is not a good solution. I have found that whether using Single Click or not:
- UltraVNC has a tendency to crash. The interesting thing is that it seems to crash most often when an UltraVNC Viewer connects with an UltraVNC Server. When using UltraVNC Viewer to connect to TightVNC, there is no crash! Huh?
- UltraVNC has a significant lag. This doesn’t seem to happen all the time, but it is at least half the time. By lag, I mean you actually have to click on Refresh and still wait 30 seconds or more for any action to show up. I noticed early on that this occurs even when on the same local area network (LAN). Again, this does not occur when connecting to TightVNC Server.
