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January 2005
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Tim Hoke is the Sr. Pastor at Faith Presbyterian Church, a long-time member of Alamo PC and an avid computer user who loves to try out new programs, especially shareware and freeware. He gets excited about a good deal. More than that, he enjoys sharing good deals with others. Why not send him a note about your favorite shareware or freeware programs. |
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Well, here it is January, 2005. Now that you have all the
new computer goodies you got in December, it is time to start using them
to their fullest. While there are plenty of great software programs
on the shelves of computer stores, there is a plethora of excellent software
programs that never make it to the commercial venue. My column is
designed to track down and describe to you some interesting, useful, and
affordable programs that will enhance your computing experience.
I hope you find my January offerings to your liking.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 is a fast, full-featured browser for Windows that makes browsing more efficient than ever before. Firefox includes pop-up blocking; a tab-browsing mode that lets you open several pages in a single window; integrated Google searching; simplified privacy controls that let you cover your tracks more effectively; a streamlined browser window that shows you more of the page than any other browser; and a number of additional features that work with you to help you get the most out of your time online. I’ve been using Firefox 1.0 for a few weeks and have pretty much switched from Internet Explorer (IE). For some reason IE became very slow and would not allow me to access certain things. I run Adaware regularly, but although it finds spyware, this never fixed IE to my satisfaction. Mozilla firefox seems to run a little faster than IE, and it has given me absolutely no trouble to date. While I’m at it, I’ll include another offering from Mozilla, Thunderbird 1.0. Thunderbird makes e-mailing safer, faster, and easier than ever before with the industry's best implementations of features, such as intelligent spam filters, a built-in RSS reader, and quick search. Thunderbird gives you a faster, safer, and more productive e-mail experience. Mozilla designed Thunderbird to prevent viruses and to stop junk mail so you can get back to reading your mail. Thunderbird provides the most effective tools for detecting junk mail. The tools analyze your e-mail and identify those that are most likely to be junk. You can automatically have your junk mail deleted or you can put it in a folder you specify, just in case you like reading junk mail. You can view your e-mail the way you want it by accessing it with Thunderbird's new three-column view. In addition, you can customize your toolbar, change its look with themes, and use Mail Views to quickly sort through your e-mail. Thunderbird provides enterprise and government grade security features such as S/MIME, digital signing, message encryption, support for certificates, and security devices. Thunderbird gives you IMAP/POP support, a built-in RSS reader, support for HTML mail, powerful quick search, saved-search folders, advanced-message filtering, message grouping, labels, return receipts, smart-address-book LDAP address completion, import tools, and the ability to manage multiple e-mail and newsgroup accounts. Thunderbird lets you add additional features as you need them through extensions. Extensions are a powerful tool to help you build a mail client that meets your specific needs. CleanCenter 1.33.79 will find and delete temporary files and clean up a lot of space on your hard drive. It is a user-friendly application developed to free up disk space by deleting junk files that are no longer used by any software on your system. Even the least-experienced user can easily remove junk files with this tool. Just select the drives to be cleaned, scan the system for more than 50 types of junk files, and click the Clean Now button. While your system is being scanned for useless data, you can see how much space you will gain. $30.00 123 Free Solitaire 2004 Card Games Collection 5.30 includes 12 solitaire card games: Spider Solitaire One Suit, Spider Solitaire Two Suits, FreeCell, Klondike, Carpet, Eighteens, Travelers, Grandfather's Clock, La Belle Lucie, Pyramid, Spider and Royal Rendezvous. 123 Free Solitaire 2004 features a pleasant layout, fast game play, rich sounds, extensive options, and quality help. Each solitaire has more than 9 trillion possible games to play, so the game remains fresh no matter how many times you play. Under Windows XP, 123 Free Solitaire 2004 is fully skinnable with XP themes and visual styles. Version 5.3 adds a new game: Flower Garden. Yahoo Messenger 6.0 is a free service that allows you to see when friends come online and send them instant messages. It also can alert you to new e-mail in your Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Personals account, or when you have upcoming events recorded in Yahoo Calendar. Yahoo Messenger offers firewall support, a standby mode that minimizes the program until an Internet connection is made, the ability to save and print your conversations, and a tabbed interface that provides quick access to your favorite stocks, news, and sports scores. Other features include the ability to create a chat room automatically, stock price alerts, the ability to send messages to friends (even if they're not online when you are), a Quick Compact mode that hides the Messenger tools to maximize your viewing area, Messenger Themes, and voice chat, which allows you to talk for free to anybody else on the Internet. Using a Webcam, you can see who you're chatting with or view the Webcam of any Yahoo member who has granted you access. The latest version adds Launchcast Radio, Yahoo Games, Yahoo Audibles, and stealth settings.
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Alamo PC Organization, Inc.
San Antonio, TX USA