5.6

Use your computer long enough and you will start notice that things aren't what they used to be. Your hard drive is filling up with unneeded files, your system's performance is slowing down, and evidence of your Internet usage is everywhere. Privacy Winner is a multifeatured application that helps you manage all of these problems.

Privacy Winner's interface is sleek and intuitive, with its major features separated into different screens that are accessed with a set of attractive buttons. The Security screen allows users to scan for and delete a variety of types of information, including Internet … Read more

Sometimes in the workplace it's necessary to copy text or images from one source or another to different formats and destinations, such as HTML and PDF documents. PDFs are versatile, but it's time consuming to edit them when you don't have access to the original documents. Grab Text is a handy utility that lets you "grab" text and images from HTML documents and PDF files. Grab Text will copy text in both Plain Text and Rich Text formats. It can copy large amounts of hypertext from Web pages with few transcription errors.

Grab Text is … Read more

All My Movies is an intuitive program that lets users keep track of the movies they own. The program's well-organized interface and many features make it a great choice for keeping your movie collection organized.

The program's interface is sleek and intuitive, and almost all its functions are self-explanatory. When entering movies, users can enter the barcode, have the program get information from a DVD that's in the computer, or search 15 different databases in eight languages, including IMDB and Amazon. Once the correct movie is found, the program automatically imports database information including images, synopses, cast … Read more

We've seen a lot of docks for Windows in our day, and they're usually not very good. We regarded XWindows Dock first with skepticism, then with guarded excitement, and finally with a sense of not being as disappointed as we usually are. But yes, we were still disappointed.

One thing XWindows Dock gets right--to some extent--is the dock's appearance. It comes with icons for My Computer, Control Panel, and Trash, and all three of these are sleek and attractive. Adding other programs to the dock is a bit problematic; the icon for Firefox became pixelated and ugly. … Read more

Video and audio fans can capture and manipulate files in a variety of ways with this application, which offers a strong array of capabilities, but novices will be intimidated by the cluttered interface.

Breeze Standard Edition launches a medium-size window that--surrounding the video-viewing pane--is cluttered with buttons, icons and fields. Nothing about this application is designed for novices, for its design is not intuitive, and the Help feature, while it presents a lot of detail about the app's features, doesn't include a tutorial that would most benefit new users. That caveat aside, the app performed well in our … Read more

This system maintenance program gives you all the tools for ridding your computer of clutter and problematic files. Normally, we'd write off a program that only offers a measly 3-day trial period, but we were left impressed after experiencing its fully functional trial.

System Mechanic Professional has a very professional, intuitive user interface. We were able to jump right in and the process required us merely to click the Scan button to find any problems. The program very quickly recognized several registry, memory, and startup issues with our system. We liked that the program gave us the option of … Read more

Blink and you'll miss Second TaskManager. Thanks to a truly strange trial limitation, the user interface is only available for view for 10 seconds at a time.

Second TaskManager's bland interface unnecessarily defaults to a maximized window every time it's opened. We had to minimize it each time for a better view. The window does include all of your running processes, including memory usage, max memory, threads, and CU time. A Help file is not included, so users must navigate through the processes on their own. Each time we opened the program, it closed after only a … Read more

Apple has acknowledged an issue encountered by some Leopard users trying to install the company's latest update released Monday.

In a support document posted to its site, Apple described an issue in which a Mac would hang on a "Configuring installation" window when trying to install Mac OS X 10.5.6. That was apparently the result of an incomplete update getting seeded into the Software Update process, and Mac OS X will freak out if it tries to install a partially downloaded update.

Apple recommends that if you encounter this problem, or have already, that you … Read more

Apple's recently released Mac OS X 10.5.6 is causing a few minor issues for iPhone users. Some users have reported an inability to synchronize with iTunes after the update. An Apple Discussions poster writes:

"I have just upgraded my MacBook Pro (Intel G5) from OS 10.4.11 to 10.5.6. It was a seamless upgrade. However, I noticed when I plugged in my 15-day-old iPhone (not jailbroken, version 2.2) to sync, it failed to appear in iTunes. In fact, iTunes didn't even open. Bizarre! Everything was working fine before the upgrade. I'… Read more