win

Fax the Word

Windows' built-in fax tool often doesn't integrate seamlessly with Microsoft's Word, which is usually part of the Office productivity suite. That's where Fax 4 Word Addon 2.6.2 from Addins4Office can help. As its name suggests, it's a Word add-in that both streamlines and expands your capability to fax a wide range of documents to numerous recipients. You can send personalized documents to specific recipients, a capability that turns Windows' basic fax feature into an excellent direct-marketing tool.

Fax 4 Word installs a new toolbar on Word; its look depends on which edition of Office … Read more

Safe FTP

WinSCP is a small, free, open-source file transfer client for Windows that uses Secure Shell (SSH) technology to enable the safe copying of files between a local and a remote PC using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP), SSH FTP, or SCP (Secure Copy) protocols, as well as offering some basic file management features.

This small tool's full-featured installer includes additional, optional software called Jing, but you have to select it; the default installation omits Jing. The installer also presents a choice between two different main interface styles, a full-featured Commander interface with panels for local and remote directories and … Read more

Microsoft plans Windows Summit for May

Microsoft is planning a new Windows conference for May, but it sounds like Windows 8 won't be on the agenda.

The Windows Summit, as the Redmond, Wash., event is known, is aimed at helping software and hardware makers create products that work with today's versions of Windows and Internet Explorer. The three-day event, for which Microsoft quietly began registering people last week, will be held May 25-27.

"Windows Summit 2010 is an opportunity for partners and developers to interact directly with the Windows Team and learn to build great products based on technologies in Windows 7 and … Read more

Start-up task organizer

WinStart Manager provides a helpful organizer designed to improve a computer's start-up time. With a clean layout, simple commands, and useful results, this program is a real winner.

The program's interface was smartly organized with intuitive commands and a strong visual layout. The program's online Help file gave us instructions to some of the smaller elements, but was largely unnecessary because everything felt so easy to use. We were able to easily view every program that runs at start-up and disable or enable it with a simple button click. In addition, we could tinker with the start-ups … Read more

Maintenance made easy

In our duties reviewing software for Download.com we install and uninstall a lot of programs. As we're sure you can imagine, this creates a bit of a mess on our PC. Many programs leave files behind when they're uninstalled, and since we're constantly downloading and deleting things, we end up with a lot of invalid shortcuts, broken registry entries, etc. For this very reason, we were excited about trying WinUtilities Free Edition, a suite of tools designed to free up disk space and improve system performance. We were quite pleased with the program's results.

Some … Read more

For the love of HD

In the age of high definition videos, video recorder, and TV screens, Corel's latest video-editing and -processing app, Corel VideoStudio Pro X3, had better add some HD features to its midlevel tool set aimed at enthusiasts. And it has. VideoStudio Pro X3 adds burning to Blu-ray in addition to the standard DVD format--you can do both with the bonus DVD Movie Factory Pro 2010 app that comes as part of the package.

The app now also sports a darker, sleeker-looking interface. In addition to a simpler menu for easy editing, there's now an advanced edit menu. Some menu … Read more

Top 5 worst holiday tech gifts

There are lots of really good gifts to give and to get this year. We're giving one away in this top 5! But there are also a lot of really bad mistakes you could make. So don't make them. Watch the Top 5, heed the warnings, then come back to this blog and post a comment for a chance to win a Sony Reader touch edition, courtesy of Sony Electronics. It's easy.

So, how do you win this CNET Top 5 giveaway of the Sony Reader touch edition? Let me enumerate the basic rules. Please read them … Read more

It's DjVu all over again

DjVu, pronounced "deja vu," is an advanced image compression technology that simplifies the difficult process of scanning and digitizing paper documents in a format that captures enough detail to be useful but in files small enough to distribute online. Developed by AT&T Labs in 1996, it's since been advanced by an open-source forum of the same name. It's gaining in popularity since it promises to make available tons of books, magazines, and other important stuff that otherwise would come in files much too large to be hosted by anyone but the likes of NASA.… Read more

Unimpressive compression

Photo RAR for WinRAR is a JPEG compression utility that allows users to control the parameters of the compression, including selective compression of particular portions of an image. Although the program looks nice at first glance, using it is at times unintuitive and unnecessarily complicated.

The program's interface is somewhat cluttered, yet it has certain a sleekness that may lead users to think that they are dealing with a well-designed program. This is not necessarily the case, though. Upon closer inspection we noticed that certain tools did not even fit completely within the interface, and there was no way … Read more

Hidden asset

WinMend Folder Hidden is an interesting security utility that can safely hide any file or folder on a Windows partition or removable device, which covers most users' hard drives and external drives as well as flash drives, memory cards and sticks, micro devices, and anything else you can store a file on. Your files and folders stay safe and hidden even if they're reinstalled on another computer, and they can't be seen or accessed by other programs and operating systems. You can enable password protection for specific files and folders or whole volumes of data. WinMend claims that &… Read more