wizard

Stock Chart Wizard is aptly named--with this tool you can create, tweak, analyze, and export a range of graphical stock charts. Stock Chart Wizard lets you build watch lists of your favorite stocks, and see the ups and downs of your stocks over time by downloading two years' worth of freely available historical data into your charts. Another real plus with Stock Chart Wizard is the capability to export charts into Excel and other formats for presentations.

Stock Chart Wizard's interface is all business. Here you will find no amusing skins, cheerful paperclips asking to help, or holiday-themed graphics. … Read more

Schedule Wizard attempts to give users ultimate control over their daily lives by helping manage and remind them of important dates. This program offers many options, but navigation was awkward and there were some stability issues, as well.

Taking the standard datebook layout, this free 30-day trial will feel familiar to users with Outlook experience. Within the confines of the program, users are given opportunities to input important meetings and dates and organize the frequency with which they are reminded. In addition, users are also given the option to send an e-mail at a specific time, which can be composed … Read more

Users looking for a fast, efficient program to get rid of clutter and speed up their systems will probably be disappointed by this feature-light program.

Speedup Wizard has a professional, functional look, but lacks any solid features. It offers a generic real-time view of system resources, such as CPU load, memory usage, virtual memory, and hard drive space, but lacks any way to measure these resources. The program claims to speed up a clunky system, but users have very few options to choose from to get the job done. Options include a normal- or high-speed setting and the capability to … Read more

Casual users might not see the allure of this simple freeware, which not only detects hardware and other system information but also lets you benchmark your system's performance. Users with an interest in what goes on under the hood, however, will appreciate this easy-to-use and informative tool.

PC Wizard 2008 goes to work as soon as it's installed, quickly gathering general system information. The interface has a familiar feel with its easily recognizable icons on the toolbar to save, print, and refresh the data. While it looks like little effort was made to dress up the interface, it … Read more

Thanks to this Dunt Hunt tribute shirt from the folks at NerdyShirts, you'll always have your trusty lightgun by your side. Actually, it's not so much by your side as it is in the crack of your butt, sort of like a mash-up between The Wizard and Boyz n the Hood. It won't save you from bullies at school or a burglar trying to break into your parents' basement, but you'll certainly be safe from hordes of flying ducks attacking your screen. And you can definitely use it to cap that slobbering fool the next time … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--This is not your big brother's Dungeons & Dragons.

On June 6, Wizards of the Coast will officially roll out the fourth edition of the D&D franchise, as well as a new suite of digital tools, and the world-famous game will never be the same.

And this time, it won't require the death of the game's inventor, Gary Gygax, to get D&D into the news.

I got a preview of what's new on Monday, and while I'm certainly no D&D expert, I'll try to spell out what … Read more

Microsoft Excel can handle data tables with hundreds or even thousands of rows and columns. That's great, unless you're trying to find a specific cell's value, which could have you scrolling up and down, left and right looking for that needle of data in a haystack of cells. If your table is formatted correctly, you can use Excel's Lookup Wizard to display the data in a cell automatically.

To see if you have the Lookup Wizard installed in Excel 2003, click Tools and look for a Lookup option, probably at the bottom of the menu. In … Read more

There's good news and bad news about the popularity of something like the "RoomWizard " scheduling system: One one hand, it means companies are apparently growing and hiring enough to demand a product like this; on the other, it means they're having more meetings.

The RoomWizard is kind of a digital referee that can avoid inter-office fisticuffs by keeping track of schedules for conference rooms that are always in high demand. Spaces are booked with touch screens outside the rooms or online through the system's Web server, according to OhGizmo, and information can be downloaded to … Read more

Wandering the CES floor among the audio exhibits, with no particular destination in mind, several things caught my eye.

Radiient cofounder Jano Banks, who helped invent HDMI, demonstrated the company's Roomcaster wireless speaker technology. Most such speakers use the 2.4gHz band, which is subject to interference from household devices like cordless phones and microwave ovens. Roomcaster uses ultra wideband (UWB), which operates over a broad spectrum and is less subject to interference. The demonstration featured an HDMI video connection and Roomcaster-enabled wireless speakers, and the sound was clear with no discernable latency against the picture. So far, Roomcaster'… Read more