Month: October 2007

Zattoo is a simple, straightforward application that enables you to tune in to popular European TV channels in your computer – the menu depending on your country of origin – and enjoy a high quality of image. With an ever growing community that recently reached one million users, Zattoo continues its steady development with a new version, 3.0.8 beta, and the promise to reach new countries in the next few months.

Every time you launch Windows a few applications run along with it. However, some of them are not really that necessary and only make your starting process much slower. As you may already know, there are a bunch of software tools that enable you to manage these startup items, two of which Cyril wrote about not long ago. But you can also manage these items without installing anything on your computer.

Open the Start menu, click on Run and write “msconfig” plus Enter. You’ll open the System Configuration Utility window. Now click on the Startup tab and you’ll be able to see which processes are configured to be run when Windows launches. Simply remove the tick from those items you don’t want to be included in the startup process.

Once you’re done, reboot the system and you’ll notice quite an improvement in your startup time.

Well, tomorrow is the big day and if you’ve decided to organise a last-minute Halloween party you needn’t fear (well, only about the freaks that are going to show up). That’s because there’s plenty of PC software around that can help you make sure your bash is a real scream. The best place to start is FunParty Make-Over, which will help you create a costume that will make your friends wish they’d stayed at home. Simply load a picture of yourself then play around with different fancy dress objects in the program to create the perfect grizzly look.

Unless your guests have already dined on flesh and bats before they arrive, you’re going to need to put on a spread of food for them. A quick way of coming up with some tasty Halloween treats is to delve into the huge recipe database within Living Cookbook, which presents cooking instructions in a very simple manner. Of course, with all that food inside them, your victims guests are going to get thirsty. Introduce some gruesome spirits to the proceedings by mixing you own cocktails using Professional Bartender.

Right, that’s the food and drink taken care of, now to sort out the music for the night. A great way of queuing up haunting classics like The Monster Mash, Ghostbusters and Thriller (which are all compulsory Halloween tracks, by the way) is to download PartyDJ, which contains powerful commands for altering the song order, searching and filtering music. Another interesting app that might come in handy is Snap, which lets you convert your webcam into a virtual photo-booth, ideal for taking snaps of the all the horrific party scenes as they unfold.

They call it the game of Kings although nowadays it’s one of the most universal games on the planet and even more accessible than ever now that you can play it on your PC. I’ve always been absolutely useless myself and in despair, have often resorted to using the horses to gallop around the board destroying anything in their path. If only these games were around when I was a kid, I might have become a grandmaster instead of being one of the best Kerplunk players in the world. Here are my top 5 chess games:

• Chessmaster – The Ferrari of chess games featuring tutorials

• GNU Chess – Open source with lots of perspectives and levels

• War Chess – No more marble figures – use real Knights, Kings and Queens

• Kung Fu Chess – You’ve never seen chess pieces take each other out like this before

• ShaagChess – 2D and 3D chess games where you can preview moves in advance

Haunted by visions of spyware and trojans invading your computer? Forget calling up an exorcist or the Ghostbusters to clean up your PC. Instead you should make sure you have the right applications set up, not only to protect your computer but also to clean up the mess any intruder can cause.

Using a lot of passwords online? Yeah, you’re not the only one. What we suggest is setting up Roboform, a solid password manager with advanced functions to fill in online forms automatically. You should also have Folder Guard installed, to keep personal files safe from the prying hands of witches and devils. What about having a solid gatekeeper to prevent all the ghouls and monsters penetrating your PC? Kaspersky Antivirus is a good choice, an antivirus that will thoroughly scan your PC for any malware. Add to that the impenetrable ZoneAlarm Firewall and your computer should be all safe and sound.

To make solid backups of your work, we suggest Norton Ghost. No it won’t invoke the Ghost of Christmas Past. Instead Norton Ghost is great at backing up and recovering anything on your PC. Malicious ads trying to slip through the holes in your PC? Ad-Aware is still one of the best malware protections on the market, with a very regularly updated database.

Don’t let the ghouls waste your Halloween night by wreaking havoc in your PC. Our security section covers all the tools you should need to make your PC as safe as Fort Knox.

Have you ever seen those people wandering the streets with their laptops in the desperate search for an open wireless network. Apart from looking like a tightwad, you also run the risk of having your equipment stolen or damaged by doing so. A better way is to use your Pocket PC to sniff-out WiFi hotspots. Sniffi is a small application that allows you to literally ‘sniff-out’ WiFi hotspots in your neighbourhood or working area. Sniffi is an advanced WiFi networks manager which may be used to search for hotspots, as a connection manager or as a network parameter monitor.

The application works in a very similar way to Windows WiFi network manager. The list of available networks is clearly displayed together with their ID, protection status and signal strength. There’s a day/night color profile, full-screen switch and you can switch it from vertical to horizontal mode easily. You can even perform pings on available networks and view TCP/IP stats for each one.

If you’re anything like us then you’re constantly downloading and installing programs for your Palm. Of course, some of these can prove to be indispensible tools, while others are absolutely useless, or something you only need for a while. Uninstall Manager provides an effective way of removing apps without leaving any remnants of them behind.

Web designers and programmers alike should enjoy Smultron, a smooth text editor for Mac built in Cocoa. Fitted with a sleek and intuitive interface, Smultron offers all the tools you’d expect of a text editor like snippets, html preview multi-document find or support for text encodings.

Picture the scene: it’s a weekend, it’s raining, and there’s nothing on TV. A horrible scenario indeed, and this was the living nightmare I was immersed in for the last two days. Not having any means of occupying myself I decided that I would trawl Softonic’s software archives for some classic board games to play on my PC, and boy did I quickly forget about the gloomy weather and my boredom. Here are some of the gems I uncovered:

• Monopoly 3 – Very faithful recreation of the grand-daddy of board games
• Backgammon Lite – Moving little pieces around a board has never been so fun
• Everlong BattleShips – Boats, boats, wherefore art thou boats?
• SuperOthello – Always seems like it should be boring but never is
• Net Domino – Annoy old men by beating them at their own game online
• Risk 2 – Drug-free solution for staying up all night
• Connect Four Cities – Like the old classic only with cities. Crazy
• Trivia Machine – Show off your knowledge of useless facts
• Don’t Get Angry! – Remake of The Hulk’s least favourite board game
• VB Master Mahjongg – What Chinese people do when it’s raining