A Business Solutions Manager at TeleCayman, Andy Tybell has a background in engineering and extensive experience in the telecoms who’s weekly look at the communications world and how best to use it is helping Cayman get to grips with the ever growing world of technology.
There are some very useful software tools now available on the Internet and most can be downloaded for free. I thought I would take a look at a couple of very popular ones that may help you at home and at work.
There are many problems associated with Internet advertising downloading dangerous software onto your computer.
Adaware (www.lavasoft.com) is a great program that can be downloaded for free to remove these unwanted programs. It has been around for some time but it is very useful for scanning your computer’s memory for programs that hide and carry out data mining, advertising, and tracking. The main target of this software is something called malware.
Malware is a generic term for programs that have been loaded into your computer without your knowledge. It includes nasty programs such as viruses, trojans and worms. In the case of advertising it normally takes the form of something called spyware which tracks and reports user activity. Often it is a program that causes uninvited advertising to appear on your PC. Adaware checks the memory of your computer to attempt to remove this software.
Outlook Calendar is a great way to schedule meetings but it does have a couple of downfalls. One of these is that with a meeting involving many parties it is very difficult to organise a time and date, in the first instance, which satisfies everybody. Organising a meeting often involves sending a meeting request, waiting for rejections and then trying for another meeting time. A new program call TimeBridge develops an email with multiple proposed times. When the email is received each meeting participant can then vote on the most appropriate time.
The other advantage of this software is that the most suitable time is automatically updated in the calendar of the meeting convenor. TimeBridge also has the calendar amended to the email itself on a side bar. This avoids the need to have another calendar window open on your desktop.
In an attempt to combine DIY, web communities and collaboration comes instructables (www.instructables.com). This is a web site that has postings on such diverse topics as how to cook, fix bikes or how to build Hungarian shelves. The website allows many different methods of building or fixing things to be posted by members of a general community. Most have step by step instructions that include demonstrations using photos and video.
A useful tool to store and share your photos is called Sharpcast (http://www.sharpcast.com). Unlike other online storage systems, such as ofoto (www.ofoto.com), Sharpcast users a desktop tool to synchronise your PC information with the information that is stored online. The advantage of this set-up is that you can view your photos anywhere on the web and so can your friends but you can still have these photos stored on your laptop or PC.
Having your photos stored externally saves the anxiety of having the paper versions or photos on your home PC inadvertently deleted or destroyed. Also, if you wish to share these photos with a friend the web system avoids having to clog email accounts with large photos or trying to get past the work security systems by sending single photos at a time. The Sharpcast desktop tool also has some useful editing features such as redeye removal, photo cropping and straightening of images.
A very useful PC tool that you can download for free is called Registry Mechanic. This program cleans up something in your computer called the registry. In most Windows based systems the registry is a location in memory that holds information about the changes that you have made to the programs in your computer. An example of this is when you change the screen size and it is updated the next time you reboot the computer.
If your Windows Registry is not updated it can lead to crashes and error messages. This can be due to references left behind after uninstalling a program, incorrect removal of software; missing or corrupt hardware drivers; or orphaned start-up programs.
Generally it is bad policy to try to make changes to the registry yourself, without the aid of a registry clean-up program. This is because it can cause your computer to crash on reboot or fail to start programs correctly.
By using registry cleaners, such as Registry Mechanic regularly, the system is more likely to be more stable.
The results of an updated registry can also allow software to run quicker, and your operating system will boot faster. With a few easy steps, Registry Mechanic will scan your entire registry for any invalid entries and provide a list of the errors found. Registry Mechanic can be found at www.pctools.com.
If you are ever caught at an internet café without the use of word processor or a spreadsheet then Google docs & Google spreadsheet are a good option. These offer online versions of spreadsheets that you can access from any web browser.
You will need to have a Google log in, which takes about 5 minutes to start, and you have access to the system to create, save and edit documents. The best way to find this is to type into google search bar : google spreadsheets.
I hope that some of these tools are useful to you. Let me know if you have any other websites or software that you think may be worth sharing with others and I can include it in my next article about online tools. andy.tybell@telecayman.com
