Category Archives: Freeware Reviews

SmartViper: an online search engine to better analyze and improve your website!

Today, in our Freeware Page, we posted a brief review about SmartViper, an online search engine which allows you to analyze your website and all the similar sites built by your competitors. SmartViper is very simple to use: you can directly insert the web-address of the site you want to analyze or a keyword to find your direct competitors and find datas related to their websites. SmartViper has a double goal: you can study deeper your site and try to improve it or find the “winning” features your competitors use to predominate. SmartViper generates complete and interesting reports which are full of links to its blog where you can learn more about developing some peculiar characteristics of your website. Something to try!

How to free some hard disk space and substitute Acrobat Reader without giving up any features

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This week, in our Freeware Page, we posted some thoughts on pdf readers. Some days ago I had some problems with my office Windows XP PC because the hard disk space was ending. As usual, I cleaned up the disk using CCleaner and I earned ca. 200MB of space and proceed to compress the hard disk. Unfortunately, this strategy did not solve my problems so I decided to have a deep look into the numbers of Kb each program occupied on the HD and I was surprised in noticing that Acrobat Reader needs more than 200MB of HD space to work. Then I focus my attention on Foxit Reader and I discovered that it occupied more or less 7MB of HD space. Obviously I disinstall Acrobat Reader and earned ca. 190MB of hard disk. Today, I am not able to affirm that I solved all my problems with my PC but I am confident that, with an intelligent use of CCleaner, I will able to go ahead for another couple of months without contacting the administrator for a new HD and stop my work for (sic) at least a couple of days. Something to think about….

Pokerth: a good way to spend some hours of relax

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It is vacation time and this week, in our Linux Page (in Spanish), we have posted some brief suggestion about playing Poker Texas Holdem just for fun with Pokerth. This version, optimized for Linux, has a nice graphics (e.g. you can select between different table) colors and is very intuitive to play. If you prefer, you can also play with other remote players clicking on the option you find in the below left menu. We played some good (bur not lucky) test games and the overall results were really positive. Unfortunately, tonight the pokerth.net server seems to be down… we hope tomorrow we will be lucky! Interesting.

How to listen online, legally free, music: Pandora.com

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Today, in our Freeware Page we posted a review about Pandora.com: an online free website which offers free music listening based on your preferences. Once on Pandora.com you can decide to try it or to register for free (just an email and a new Pandora password are required). After this you can start creating new radio stations based on your favorite artists. In just few clicks, you can even listen your Pandora stations directly on your Blackberry, iPhone, PalmPre or Windows Mobile device. Using the QuickMix feature you can melt different stations in just an unique selection to share (if you want) with your friends. Pandora is legal and free but sometimes (not very often for my experience) some commercial ads are broadcasted. Anyway, in a couple of hours I was able to refine my new station options & variety and till now I am really satisfied by this service. Recommended!

Something to know before the release of Firefox 3.5: how to disable the geo-locating feature.

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This week in our Freeware Page we we have written a quick post about disabling geo-locating feature in the upcoming Firefox 3.5. I have always been an enthusiastic supporter of Firefox because I think it is so flexible that I can find any add-on I need for any purpose. I am also sure that the new Firefox 3.5 will be the perfect tool for my everyday navigation but there is something I am a little bit annoyed. In fact, the Firefox 3.5 will contain a default feature (which can be triggered remotely by a website you are visiting) declaring your geo-location everytime you connect to a site. This feature (previously known as project Geode by Mozilla Labs) could be useful for people involved in social networking but it is a potential wasting time feature for all the others. In fact, you have to declare if you want to automatically display your geo-location each time a website triggers this feature. For this reason, if you are not a social network addict, my personal advice is to disable this geo-locating feature as soon as you install (or update to) Firefox 3.5… (it continues in the Freeware Page).

How to build a website or blog using just free online tools. Part 1

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Today, in our Freeware Page we posted the first part of a brief research we made to discover the free online services, now available, to create webpages and posts. In particular, in this Part 1 we tested http://disposablewebpage.com/ and http://posterous.com/. Disposablewebpage is a very particular website builder because each website you create, has a life of just 90 days. It could be useful for all that temporary projects you want to share with your friends for a brief period or to reach specific goals in a bigger plan. Disposablewebpage is very simple to use but the graphic results are very basic. On the other hand, disposablewebpage allows you to invite your friends or your colleagues in order to completely share the website and the project. In our point of view, Posterous is even more interesting because it is so simple to use that everyone can develop his/her own post. We tried posterous and we were able to create and update our new test post in not more than five minutes. You can post just using your email (gmail.com, yahoo.com,hotmail.com, or aol .com); you have to insert the title in the subject field and attach all the images you want directly on your email. Recommended!

QuotePad a useful portable freeware to take notes “on the go” when in internet.

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This week, in our Freeware Page , we have added a short review about QuotePad which is a very interesting notepad that can be used to better organizing your online day by day work especially when in internet. In particular this light freeware allows you also to copy and paste large amounts of texts from web-pages and automatically recording the web-address. After coping the text you have only to go into your QuotePad and paste it using Ctr-Shift-Q. QuotePad directly memorizes the time of your “cut and paste” and allows you to write the most appropriate title for each of your notes. Moreover, clicking on “stay on top” (on the right in the upper bar) you can also stitch your notes above the browser you are using. Recommended.

How to share notes and images using thepiratebay.org satellite websites: PasteBay and bayimg

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Today, in our Freeware Page, we added a brief review about two, multiplatform free services offered by th piratebay.org. The first one is PasteBay which allows you to quickly create, save and protect (in a basic way) your own notes when browsing on internet. PasteBay is very intuitive, quick to use and effective. The only “trouble” could be the simple http connection (instead of https) and the password you choose that could be weak if you do not choose it in a proper way. The second online service offered by thepiratebay.org is bayimg which allows you to store images for your websites in 140 different formats. Each image could be uploaded till 100MB so it is possible to save online also high resolution images. We have spent five days testing the features offered by these two websites and we have really not found any problem or bug. Recommended!

Ext2fsd: an useful freeware to manage Linux partitions when running Windows

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Nowadays it is common to find PCs with more than one OS installed. Normally, when on a Linux OS, it is very simple to access Windows partitions and copy, create, delete or transfer files. Rarely, it could be also necessary to access Linux partitions (ext2 or ext3) from Windows OS but this operation it is not simple to manage. After some web-searches we have found a light and simple program which instantly allows to use Linux partitions as local disks: Ext2Fsd. In our Freeware Page we have posted a brief review about this freeware which is very simple to install (as usual we suggest to reboot your computer after the installation) and in just few clicks you will be ready to manage your Linux hard disks. We tested Ext2Fsd for a couple of weeks and we actually were satisfied from the results; in fact we have never registered any bug and all the writing – copying – deleting tasks were executed in a 100% proper way. Obviously, if you need to access a Linux partition, you are a purist and you do not want to use a Windows OS you can use a Linux Live CD. Potentially useful.

How to synchronize Gmail, Google Docs and Google Calendar with your PCs: the cross-platform Google Gears

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This week, on our Freeware Page , we have posted a brief review about Google Gears which allows you to keep, for example, your Gmail and Google Docs perfectly safe and synchronized with your computer. Google Gears does not add any new features if you think about what Thunderbird or Sunbird (now also known as Lightning) offer. On the other hand, Google Gears is very useful if we think it is very easy to setup and allows you to directly manage offline your email, documents and calendar without using other email applications. In the post we fastly show how to install Gears on your browser and how to start to use it. When you activate Google Gears a pop-up windows will remind you that this particular feature is totally experimental and you use it on your own risk but for our personal experience Google Gears works very well, in particular we really appreciated its Flaky option which allows you to synchronize your datas without “burning” too much band. When you are on a public PC you can also click on – load with offline disabled – button (on the below right corner) soon after the login window. Interesting!!