Overall Impressions

Nowadays it’s harder and harder to remember things and to keep yourself organized these days. Thank God there are notebooks for that. But sometimes you cannot carry your notes with you all the times, while without a phone most people feel helpless. Your notes won’t remember you what you have to do. Evernote will do that and much, much more than that. It will automatically synchronize your notes, memos, lists, assuring you that you won’t have to become ubiquitous and do two things in the same time. No matter what’s your operating system: Windows, Mac OS X, Chrome OS, BlackBerry OS,  Android, iOS, WebOS, Windows Mobile and Windows Phone, Evernote will be supported on every one of them.

In order to handle your iPad or Iphone applications you need to have iTunes installed to perform iTunes application synchronization. iAppMaster 1.1 is a reliable alternative to iTunes and lets you install, uninstall and backup applications on an iOS device (it doesn’t really matter if it’s jailbroken or not).

Installation and support

The good news is that when you install iAppMaster you don’t have to install other daemons. You have to download the iOS app and a .plist file. In order to use the app you need certain .ipa files. After you download the .ipa files you need, each ipa file will be installed in a separated installation process, with a confirmation window. Even though, the installation process is not as long as you’ve though, at least when you think about the iTunes synch process, which can last around 4-5 minutes.

Overview

When it comes to storage there’s no doubt that, if money isn’t a problem, Solid State Drives (SSDs) are the big winners in matters of shock resistance, speed, temperature and dimension. This new technology may sometimes need a piece of software to push it to its highest potential performing several tricks.

Installation and support

SSD Tweaker does not require an installation process; it can be run from the moment it’s downloaded. The only shortcoming the free version of the program has is the fact that when one tries to exit the software, it displays a nag screen.

I really hope I’ll see the day in which storage space will be so large and the connection speeds so fast that we won’t need an archiving tool anymore. Until that time, size on disks matters a lot and we’re searching for the best and cheapest archiving solution. Will a free archiver be able to offer the features a commercial compression software has the offer, without wasting of lot of user’s time? The review below will throw a light on this freeware archiving software.

Installation and Support

Due to the fact that the Z-Zip installation kit is as light as 1Mb, the installation process is a very short and straightforward one. No other software must be installed in order to benefit from 7Zip archiver, which makes it a true freeware. It supports all versions of Windows Operating systems, beginning with Windows 98 onwards to Windows 7.

Overall Impressions

After buying a new computer and carefully reading the documentation about each and every component, the next thought of advanced users and especially gamers is to get a trusted benchmarking software to test it properly. Not only the advanced users think high about CPU and graphic tests, but also the average PC user who want to test their computer capabilities to assure themselves of the value of their choices. 3DMark Vantage is probably the leader in PC benchmark software due to their accurate testing results and the wide array of features they offer. It comes in three editions: the Basic free edition, which makes available only the essential features and it can only display results online, the Advanced one, with most of the features present at a cost of $19.99 and the Professional Edition, licensed for commercial use, offers command line automation and a priority support at a cost of $995. 00.

Overall Impressions

Sometimes your pictures lack something: an artistic touch. There are many simple ways in which you can reach a cool effect just hitting a few buttons and probably one of the best is using AKVIS SKETCH, a photo editing program that transform your photos into charcoal sketches or watercolor paintings without a lot of work from your part. You can choose between its many settings and options in order to improve your sketches. So, if you’ve always felt that you haven’t explored enough your artistic side, this handy graphic tool will help you in this respect.

Installation and support

The picture editor has quite low requirements and almost any computer can meet them without problems: Pentium III CPU, 1 GB of RAM, 100 MB HDD, DirectX 8 compatible graphic card and at least 1024 x 768 resolution and 32bit color depth. 

Overall Impressions

I’m carrying a whole library with me, either on my Samsung Galaxy Tab or on my Kindle eBook reader. EBooks are cheaper than paper books, easier to procure, lighter and more fashionable. But they are available on many formats and Kindle Touch can read only .mobi format or pdf, so I need a conversion software from ePub to mobi or even from Pdf to mobi and a management software that doesn’t fail my expectations. Calibre is one of the most advanced eBook management utility and conversion tool available on the market and it get better with each version. The latest version, Calibre 0.8.24 supports all the available eBook formats and it can easily convert from one format to another, (pdf to mobi, pdf to epub, epub to pdf, doc to pdf, epub to pdf, etc. ). The DRM protected books are the only ones which can’t be converted.

There are times in which a Linux user, no matter how much he likes this operating system, would love to run a Windows application on his computer.  In fact, there aren’t so many applications made for Windows that won’t run on Linux, and the majority of them are games. In order to do that, a user could use a virtual machine, but he would need for that a quite powerful computer. The other option is to run Wine, which means that the program must provide the required DDLs altogether with a substitute to Windows kernel.

In order to know which Windows applications work on Wine and to what degree, you have to consult this website. There is a great difference between the way different Windows apps run on Wine: some of them run flawlessly, some with various issues and there are a list of programs that don’t work at all.

Famous for its music recognition service, Shazam released its own separate iOS music application: Shazam Player. The music player will be available on iPhone, iPad and iPod touch and will challenge Apple’s default player with a lot of interesting features for you to discover the world of music in all its depths. Along with its music recognition feature, which identify the tracks that you’ve been hearing at the radio, TV, without knowing exactly the song or lyrics, the iOS app comes with powerful features: LyricPlay, which scans your music tracks, displaying the lyrics of a certain song, whenever it can be done, a library and playlist application and AirPlay support. I’ll speak about all these impressive features one by one.

Overall Impressions

When it comes to choosing an antivirus, people have a lot of demands: they want a real-time protection against viruses, malware, spybots, Trojans, adware, etc without slowing down too much their computer and a great degree of customization. The anti-virus companies struggle to offer them the product of their choice, constantly updating their databases definitions and creating sets of new features. AVG Free Edition antivirus gained a good popularity on free antivirus tool market due to his reliability and good detection of the viruses signatures.

Installation

Even if the software’s size is quite large for a free antivirus, AVG’s installation process is rather smooth and it didn’t take too much time. You are offered the option to install AVG toolbar in your browser, but you can skip this part.