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  Freeware & Shareware
February 2003

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.



I want to begin by sharing with you one of the finest free programs I’ve ever seen.  Our esteemed editor, who received it from Albert Flores, sent it to me and I want to make sure all my valued readers have access to it.  I’m talking about Convert 4.10.  It is an easy to use unit conversion program that will convert the most popular units of distance, temperature, volume, time, speed, mass, power, density, pressure, energy and many others, including the ability to create custom conversions!  Download if for free and put it on your desktop for easy access. Just go to 
FREE
Download

Keep reading for other exciting programs detailed below. 
  
Arles Image Web Page Creator 5.0 lets you create online image galleries in seconds. Arles automatically generates high-quality thumbnail images, modifies images, and generates HTML pages. You can fine-tune images and HTML pages using one of the many available options, or use templates for full control over the pages. Arles supports more than 20 image file formats and includes the Arles Image Explorer for easy image management. Text annotations, watermarks, image logos, and image borders (including 3D and button-style borders) can be added to all your images in a single click. It features rotating images, the viewing of EXIF information, a batch file renaming tool, folder titles, and drop shadow image borders.
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Album GV 1.7 creates digital scrapbooks, showing pictures with a common topic in order, complete with titles, descriptions, and a well-designed layout. Choose images with an Explorer-style interface, sort them on a light table, add titles/descriptions, customize colors/textures/fonts, add/remove images, and save to an ALB file. Display your collection in a "sequence view" or in slide show mode, at full size or as thumbnails. Utilize helpful wizards to turn albums into Web-based albums or CD archives, perform editing operations, turn images into desktop wallpaper, and more. It is free, but read the author’s note:

The use of the program is free for now, because it's my first try at software usable by a broad range of people. The best "payment" for me right now are user bug reports (hopefully no severe ones are left or have newly crept in), ideas for improvement and feature requests.
FREE
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JAlbum 2.8 is a cool program.  Drop a folder containing image and movie files onto JAlbum and press "Make album". JAlbum will create thumbnails of your images and display them in html index pages. You can also have JAlbum produce a slide show of your images for easy navigation one at a time. The output may contain scaled-down versions of the original images. Clicking on these images may bring up the original image (for printing etc). JAlbum does not touch or modify your original images in any way. It just adds some files and folders to the image folder you specify during web creation. JAlbum can also create a web of a hierarchy of image folders. JAlbum supports jpeg, gif and png image files and popular movie formats like .avi, .mpg and .wmv.  
FREE
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Protect your privacy and recover valuable hard drive space with Window Washer 4.8. Window Washer allows you to easily clean up the history of your activities on your PC and the Internet. Window Washer's intuitive interface makes it easy to get rid of unwanted information that often clogs up system resources. Window Washer can automatically clean up your browser's cache, cookies, history, recent document list, and much more. Window Washer even includes a Custom Wash Items feature that allows you to specify other files and folders that you would like to have cleaned. Free Custom Wash Item plug-ins allow you to clean many third-party programs, such as RealPlayer and Adobe Acrobat. You can set Window Washer to run automatically in the background and clean your files and history as you work, or you can have it clean at start-up or shutdown. In addition, a Bleach function is also available that overwrites deleted files with random characters a set number of times, making them unrecoverable by file recovery utilities. Version 4.8 includes enhanced password security, improved bleaching functions, faster cleaning speeds, and an automatic check for updates.  
$30.
Download

How about a nice game for unwinding while you are taking a break? Try Arcade Lines 1.23 - a relaxing, yet highly addictive puzzle game featuring brilliant graphics, optional pulsating music and a great variety of different game modes. It is very easy to learn, but not so easy to master! You'll be hooked for hours. Arcade Lines is played on a board that fills up during game play with a variety of colored pieces. You have a very simple objective: prevent the board from filling by forming rows of 5 or more pieces of the same color. The completed rows will disappear, leaving the spaces for new pieces. Sounds too easy? Build more lines in consecutive moves to get the combo bonus for a higher score. Only one piece may be moved with every turn, and only then if there is a clear path to its destination. As space becomes scarce there are less useful moves to choose from, so the game becomes increasingly more difficult. 6 difficulty levels, the time-based and the custom game modes plus various additional game pieces like the two-colored balls, color buckets and propellers add more variety to the game. High scores are achieved by surviving as long as possible, a challenge that makes for hours of mind-bending puzzle fun.
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