PC Alamode Magazine Online; Freeware and Shareware, Tim Hoke

HOME

Calendar

Join / Renew

PC Alamode

About Us

HELP

Archives

Other

by Tim Hoke

Index

Freeware & Shareware
October 2001

Tim Hoke

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.

You probably know that the rule for real estate purchasing is location, location, location. Well, I think for most of us computer users the rule of thumb for what we are after is applications, applications, applications. As Product Review Coordinator for the Alamo PC Organization I acquire commercial hardware and software for review. These products are nicely packaged and usually sit on shelves at a local retail store. But did you know that there are literally thousands of freeware and shareware products that never make it to the retail market and never gather dust on a retail shelf? Sadly, few computer users ever discover these excellent products.

We at Alamo PC would like to help change that for two reasons:

To introduce you to products you might otherwise never know existed
To encourage innovative programmers to “keep at it” and write even more outstanding applications for the PC community.

If you know of a good shareware or freeware program you’d like to “share” with others, e-mail the information to me (including where it can be located). I’ll be happy to include it in this column.

Jim Kelly suggests a freeware program called IBS Startup Editor 0.3. He writes,

This program shows you what is running at startup when windows loads and starts up. It also enables you to delete, temp. remove, restore or add programs for startup. What I like best about this program, is that if you want you can temp. shutdown running startup programs so you can defragment your system. Perfect because it removes running programs so your defragmenter in Windows doesn't shutdown because there are running programs.

A shareware program you might be interested in was suggested by APCO member Bryan Lilius. Bryan writes:

You may have noticed that I like to know the accurate time. I have been able to do this by using this very nice little bit of "careware" (see the Web site). It uses time servers maintained by the National Institute of Standards, and the Naval Observatory, to set the time on your computer very accurately.

Another product you might try comes as both shareware and commercial versions. Here’s a brief description of SANDRA (System Analyzer Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) I got from ZDnet:

It is a set of system diagnostic and benchmarking tools designed to help you keep your computer running at peak performance. It provides diagnostic, benchmarking, and performance tune-ups for different hardware devices and subsystems, including CPUs, modems, BIOS, drives, graphic cards, and DOS and Windows memory. Includes additional modules CPU multimedia benchmarking and network and memory bandwidth benchmarking. Additional types of hardware can now be detected. 50 modules are included in the shareware version, and 20 additional modules are included in the registered version. 2001 Update includes Enhanced Windows 2000/NT and Pentium 4 support. New Burn-in Wizard tests system stability.

For more information or to download, please go to 3B Software .

Well, that’s about it for this month. I hope to apprize you of the very best shareware and freeware available. Of course, your suggestions will make this column work best. Please do not hesitate to e-mail me information and location of the freeware or software you like best.