Smart Ways

Smart Ways to Reduce Printing Costs, Protect Passwords

Even though I buy recycled and remanufactured printer cartridges, I'm still stunned by the cost. So short of shoplifting, I'll try practically anything to save ink.

There are two tricks I use. The first isn't perfect, but it won't cost you a thing.

When I print from a Web site, I always highlight the material on the page that I want to print and choose Selection in the print dialog box. That way chances are good I won't get stuck printing everything on the page.

Unfortunately, chances are also good that I'll pick up stuff I don't want--like a graphic. I might also end up printing an extra page with the tail end of the Web page, say, the "contact us" info.

Two Printer Tools

So the second trick is to use a utility to ensure that doesn't happen. True, it'll cost about the same as buying an inkjet cartridge. But the programs I talk about here give you a preview of exactly what will print, and let you delete specific pages before they're sent to the printer. And both tools have trial versions, so you can see whether they'll work for you before paying for them.

The first program is FinePrint, the $50 tool I've used for almost a decade. It has a plethora of features, including a way to use a two-, four-, or eight-up layout, which is ideal for printing drafts.

The other program is GreenPrint, which costs $35. Among other things, it lets you transform any page you're about to print into a PDF document. It also uses special fonts that fit more text on a page--without making it difficult to read. Kirk Steers explains how to save money with this nifty-sounding print utility.

While you're reading, take a look at a free Internet-based printing tool from Hewlett-Packard. Read "A New Way to Print Any Document on the Road" for details.

Useful, Free Tools to Manage Your Passwords

I'm a RoboForm fan, to the extent that I'd give up a browser if it was incompatible with the program. Read "RoboForm Eliminates Password Post-Its" to learn about the program.

I encourage you to download the free version to try it out. I've seen the Pro version (RoboForm Pro Password Manager & Form Filler) for as low as $24 online. I can guarantee that once you get through the short learning curve, you'll rely on RoboForm the way I do.

If you're not willing to open your wallet, you might want to try KeePass. It's free, open source, and has many of RoboForm's functions.

Here's something profound: "The more complex you make your passwords, the harder they are to crack... but the harder they are to remember." That's from the makers of CloakPass, a smart, free utility that handles the job of making your simple-to-remember password something extraordinarily difficult for a hacker to break.

Here's how it works: Head for a Web site that requires a login. Type an easy-to-remember password into the password field--say, stevebass--and hit Enter. CloakPass automatically transforms your simple password into a difficult-to-hack version. No matter when you visit the site, provided CloakPass is in your system tray, your simple password is transformed into something like Zf12#$6KYb8.

Once you get start using the program, you'll find it most useful on those sacred sites like banks, PayPal, eBay--anywhere where your concern level is high. For the rest, I recommend using RoboForm.

I tried the free version of CloakPass. The Standard version is $20 and the Pro version is $30; each provides extra features, such as symbols like @#%*. You might not find these extras necessary, unless, of course, you work for the FBI or NSA.

Read the CloakPass Getting Started page and FAQ to get a better idea how the program works.

PC World

Farewell Vista, Hello XP

Farewell Vista, Hello XP

How to make the switch back and deal with the gnarly problem of transferring your Vista e-mail, contacts, and user data back to the old standby operating system.

Jon L. Jacobi

After exploring Windows Vista for about six months on my test-bed PC, I decided two months ago that, along with upgrading the motherboard and CPU in my main work machine, I'd "upgrade" to Microsoft's latest operating system.

Vista's new navigation features had slowly grown on me, though I hadn't tried to work daily with the OS. Vista's appearance has it all over standard XP, and there are tons of usability features that beckon--after you turn off the incredibly annoying User Account Control that constantly bugs you when you want to install programs or tweak things.

For example, I love being able to shut down with one click; I like the junk filtering in Windows Mail (Vista's upgraded version of Outlook Express); and I appreciate the way I can easily drag User folders (formerly My Documents) to a new location so I can consolidate them with other data that I regularly back up.

Annoyances Drive Me Backwards

Unfortunately, small time-wasting annoyances in Vista cropped up almost immediately. Auto-complete of e-mail addresses in Windows Mail works only with the 29 most recently used contacts (I have well over a thousand), and overall the program is slow. The Search Indexer had an irritating tendency to start when I watched an HD DVD, and despite of the absence of multimedia files in a folder, most folders showed useless columns for Artists, Tags, and Ratings. I must have wasted an hour changing them to Size and Date Modified headings--and then the folder would sometimes magically change from detail view to icon view. To be fair, that last part is a holdover bug from XP, but all I've described was just the tip of the iceberg.

As irksome as these things were, I considered them livable. It was only when I discovered that my sound card's drivers for ASIO (a high-performance audio standard for recording musical instruments and vocals) didn't work well under Vista that the balance tipped irretrievably towards "downgrading" to XP.

The beta ASIO drivers may have been spotty, it may have been a system configuration problem, it may have been me--Vista is actually reputed to be much better for Pro audio--but I decided that it was time to revert to good old stable XP with its mature driver support.

How About Dual Booting?

I considered leaving Vista installed, installing XP, and then dual-booting using a boot manager that hides the OS not in use. But the failure of Acronis's Boot Manager and of OSLBoot (included with the OEM version of Vista) frustrated me.

I then tried installing XP on another, visible partition and using the Vista boot manager, but with XP installed on the D: drive, I had problems with nVidia drivers. I finally succeeded with Avanquest's System Commander 9 boot manager, but by that time I'd concluded that I really didn't want Vista around anymore and decided to overwrite it. Here's how I did it. (You may also want to view our video, "How to Reinstall Windows XP"--but remember, its focus is on a clean reinstall of your existing XP rather than on reverting to XP from Vista.)

PC World

Olympus EVolt E-500

Olympus EVolt E-500

Entry-level SLR digital camera brings 8 megapixels and a 2.5-inch LCD to the fray.


This well-equipped and reasonably priced entry-level digital SLR produces high-quality images. The 8-megapixel camera comes with a wide array of features that establish it as a legitimate challenger to Canon's popular, similarly priced Digital Rebel XT. Regrettably, usability issues prevent me from wholeheartedly recommending it over the XT.

Olympus markets the E-500 in three versions: $700 for the body only, $800 for the body plus a 14-45mm lens (the kit I tested), and $900 for that combination plus a 40-155mm lens. The E-500's body felt sturdy, the rubber grip fit snugly in my hand, and the 2.5-inch color LCD was eye-catching. By contrast, the Canon Digital Rebel XT seems somewhat less rugged, its hand grip is too skinny, and the color LCD is smaller.

For beginners, the E-500 offers 15 scene modes, but its true strength lies in its deep feature set. For example, the exposure lock and autofocus lock functions are highly customizable. And it offers plenty of choices for automatic exposure bracketing, white balance, and in-camera processing. Plus, the E-500 has a dust filter.

I enjoyed using the camera, but I found some aspects of its design and performance a bit frustrating. The camera's response to the control wheel is sluggish, and I struggled a bit when trying to focus the lens manually. Also, images shot at high ISO settings of 800 and 1600 were less than stellar, despite using the noise reduction feature.

The price and quality of the E-500's kits are hard to beat. But old-school photographers who like shooting in manual mode might find this camera a bit too slow to respond, and if you expect to shoot using high ISO settings, the Digital Rebel XT may be a better bet.

Upshot: A large LCD, extensive menus, and a nice price make this camera compelling, but it has a few usability issues.
-- Eric Butterfield

PC World

CyberPower Power Infinity Pro

CyberPower Power Infinity Pro

This Penryn-based PC packs a big punch in gaming performance, but it'll also wallop your wallet.

CyberPower's Power Infinity Pro is one of the first systems to ship with Intel's newest quad-core CPU, a 3-GHz QX9650 Core 2 Extreme chip--the company's first to be built on a 45nm manufacturing process--that's aimed squarely at enthusiasts and other early adopters. (Mainstream users will have to wait until next year for more-affordable 45nm dual-core offerings.) We were able to test the system before the QX9650 hits the streets, and found its test results to be a mixed bag. Though the Power Infinity Pro strutted its stuff in our gaming and graphics tests, in most general applications it showed only modest performance gains over systems using older quad-core chips.

Our review unit shipped with 64-bit Windows Vista Ultimate. In our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 test suite, it earned a strong mark of 120. That score fell a bit short, however, of the 124 mark of a CyberPower Infinity Pro that we tested a couple of months ago, which uses the previous-generation, 3-GHz QX6850 Core 2 Extreme CPU. This result echoes the benchmarks that PC World obtained in similar tests comparing the QX9650 with the QX6850 chip that it is supplanting.

In the Photoshop, 3DS Max rendering, and multitasking components of our WorldBench series, the Power Infinity Pro earned the best scores among all power PCs we've recently tested, though its marks were only a few seconds faster than the results of the next-closest models. In some WorldBench application tests (3DS Max DirectX, Windows Media Encoder, and VideoWave), the Power Infinity Pro's scores merely tied those of other systems (the Xi Mtower PCIe and the HP Blackbird 002) that used older CPUs. Most perplexing was the Power Infinity Pro's sluggish performance in the Nero portion of our WorldBench suite, for which its score of 592 seconds was the slowest of the lot. While none of our WorldBench scores reflect the performance gains that Intel predicts for the QX9650 CPU in imaging, 3D rendering, and video encoding, it should be noted that none of the applications in our test suite are optimized to take advantage of the QX9650's new SSE4 instructions, which can greatly speed up tasks such as video encoding (in applications that use SSE4).

On the plus side, the newer Power Infinity Pro posted the fastest scores ever in all of our gaming graphics tests, beating older quad-core models that use the same EVGA 8800 GTX graphics board. The Power Infinity Pro achieved an impressive average of 193 frames per second (fps) while running Doom 3 and 223 fps running Far Cry, both at 1280 by 1024 resolution with antialiasing turned on, well ahead (by about 13 percent) of the second-fastest system, the nVidia GeForce 8800 Ultra-equipped HP Blackbird 002 LCi, which posted results of 170 fps and 198 fps, respectively. That's not the 40 percent that Intel claims for gaming, but it's still pretty darn impressive. Though the Power Infinity Pro came with a single graphics board that performed well in our graphics tests, the system's Asus P5K3 Deluxe motherboard is capable of hosting two graphics cards in a CrossFire setup. (Taking advantage of the feature would preclude using an SLI-compatible card such as the EVGA 8800 GTX card in our test system.)

Without a doubt, one of the Power Infinity Pro's best features is its stylish Cooler Master Cosmos case, which sports sturdy bars on top that are helpful when you're lifting the case--especially because it weighs a ton. The top panel includes an easily accessible connection dock with USB, FireWire, and audio ports, plus an eSATA connector, with additional USB, FireWire, and other ports on the back. Five external drive bays are easily accessed behind the hinged front panel. Our test system included a Lite-On Blu-ray DVD drive, a multiformat DVD burner, and a multiformat card reader drive-bay module, leaving two open bays for expansion.

Opening the side panel (insulated to keep the system's noise levels down) is easy, and the neat and tidy interior has plenty of room for expansion. Adding upgrades couldn't be much easier, thanks to a tool-less design that features push-button locks and pull-out aluminum racks for easy hard-drive installation. But some upgrades could be costly: For example, adding a matching pair of Corsair XMS 1GB DDR3 RAM sticks to raise the system's memory to 4GB would cost about $400. A Thermaltake V1 CPU cooler, four 120mm case fans, and a cooling attachment for the graphics board provide sufficient thermal management.

The $4299 (as of 11/2/07) Power Infinity Pro model we tested represents only one of several different configurations that CyberPower offers. Our test system also came with a generous 1.8 terabytes of hard-disk space, consisting of two 150GB, 10,000-rpm Western Digital Raptor drives (configured in a RAID 0 array) for performance and two 750GB, 7200-rpm Hitachi drives for backup and data storage that can hold hundreds of hours of video.

The included dual Sylvania 22-inch wide-screen monitors (SK2201W-B) have thin bezels that make positioning them closely side by side easier, but you get no height-adjustment control for maximum flexibility in setting them up. The picture quality was very good, with crisp readable text (even at 8 points) and nicely saturated color when we viewed still or moving images. The cordless Logitech MX3200 keyboard presents a host of useful extra keys and a wrist pad that's comfortable to type on. The MX600 laser mouse also benefits from an ergonomic design that fits nicely in the hand.

The CyberPower Power Infinity Pro is clearly aimed at enthusiasts and other early adopters who don't mind paying a premium for the latest technology. But considering that the market has few SSE-4 optimized apps, mainstream users may want to wait a bit longer before taking the plunge.

--Richard Jantz

PC World

Microsoft Zune 80GB Media Player (Black)

Microsoft Zune 80GB Media Player (Black)

Wireless syncing, good sound quality, and a nice touch control make this affordable player a good choice.

Though the old 30GB Zune didn't go over too well, Microsoft's kept at it and managed to produce an impressive pair of players in its second-generation Zunes. The $250 80GB hard-drive model I tested would make a capable alternative to an 80GB iPod Classic if wireless syncing or built-in radio interest you.

The 80GB Zune is just about the same size as Apple's 160GB iPod Classic, which makes it a bit thicker than the 80GB model it's competing with. In our objective audio tests and my listening tests, the Zune performed well, producing clean sound with little distortion. One tiny annoyance, though: The player's 20-step digital volume control doesn't provide much granularity. Occasionally, I'd reach points where one step was too low and the next too high.

The 80GB Zune comes with premium in-ear headphones that are easily better than the standard earbuds you'll find with most players. While most included headphones I test get tossed after a brief listen, this model would actually be worth keeping--a nice addition.

The Zune supports MP3, WMA, WMA lossless, AAC, and its own DRM format for Zune Pass subscriptions. If you'd rather listen to radio, the Zune includes a built-in FM tuner. It also plays back video and displays photos on its 3.2-inch 320-by-240-pixel screen, and the Zune now supports h.264 and MPEG-4 encoding in addition to WMV.

Video playback looked nice on the Zune's screen, though compared with other players the screen's low dots per inch (dpi) stood out as a negative. Pixels are very noticeable.

Touch Controls

All of the new Zunes center on a rounded touch-sensitive control that also doubles as a clickable D-pad-style controller, much like the Click Wheel on Apple's iPod's. Flick your thumb up or down the pad repeatedly, and you begin to build up momentum while scrolling through long lists. At any time, you can tap to stop the scrolling, though it will eventually come to a halt naturally. In my experience, it's a very fun way to navigate through a music collection, even in a long view of artists on the 80GB player.

As you browse through the interface, you'll find that you can often scroll left and right as well. So if you've selected an artist and an album, scrolling up and down will take you through songs on that album, while scrolling left and right will switch to other albums by that artist.

Though the touch control is the highlight of the interface, you can also click your way up and down through lists using the hard buttons of the D-pad. (The Zune is still very responsive in scrolling through lists, too.) That allows for simple blind navigation, such as adjusting volume or fast-forwarding a track or two without taking the player from your pocket--always a nice option.

Unfortunately, the player's lock switch doesn't include a way to lock out the touch control but not the physical buttons. That's not much of a problem with upward and downward swipes that simply adjust the volume, but it can be annoying when an inadvertent horizontal swipe fast-forwards you out of the song you're playing.

Wireless Syncing

Ever since Wi-Fi-equipped media players such as the Zune and the Sansa Connect came out, users have been clamoring for wireless syncing. Well, it's finally here. To set up a Zune for wireless syncing, you first select the appropriate wireless network using the PC you'll sync the Zune with. Enter the appropriate security key, and you should be good to go.

When your Zune is within range, you enter 'settings, wireless' on the player and select 'sync now'. Your PC reports that it has found new hardware--a 'Zune Wireless'--and installs the proper driver. Then, if the Zune software isn't running already, it pops up and your sync begins. Over my 802.11g wireless network, transfers weren't exactly lightning-fast, but I could easily imagine buying a stereo dock for my player and setting it up to charge and sync overnight without ever coming near my PC.

At the same time, Microsoft has made a few tweaks to the Zune's wireless music sharing feature. Originally, shared tracks could be played only three times over a period of three days, and couldn't be passed on. Now you can pass along shared tracks to other users and play them up to three times over any time period you like.

Subscriptions and Software

Among other additions, the Zune's software now includes support for podcasts. You can browse for them and subscribe to them easily, and the player will download new subscriptions whenever you sync it.

Microsoft has spent a lot of time rethinking the social aspects of the Zune player, removing several restrictions on how you can share tracks between Zune players and adding an online community called the Zune Social. At the time of this review, the Zune Social wasn't available for testing.

All in all, the 80GB Zune is a decent choice as an 80GB MP3 player. It sounds great, its interface isn't a hindrance, and its pricing is right in line with the competition. Accessories and features such as premium headphones and an FM tuner give it at least one area where it's a step up from an iPod Classic, and if you're interested in wireless syncing, this could be the player for you.

PCworld

Track Down!!!

HOW TO TRACK ANYBODY ONLINE?

When you're trying to find someone online, Google's not the only game in town. In the last two years, a handful of new people search engines have come onto the scene that offer better ways to pinpoint people info by name, handle, location, or place of employment. While there's still no killer, one-stop people search, there are more ways than ever to track down a long-lost friend, stalk an ex, or screen a potential date or employee. The next time you wonder, "What ever happened to so-and-so?" you've got a few power people search tools to turn to.

Note: Stalking is serious business. When we say 'stalk,' we're exaggerating, not recommending.

I'm Feeling Lucky???

I'm Feeling Lucky???

Open the Google website, type some query in the search box (e.g. Yahoo) and click the “I am Feeling Lucky” button. Google will automatically transport you to the Yahoo! homepage bypassing the search results page.

Thus you save some important time (few microseconds) and don’t have to perform an extra mouse click but Google just lost a google chance to monetize your visit.

Marisa Mayer says that less than 1 percent of Google searches are done through the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button but some estimates suggest that Google could be losing $110 million of advertising revenue due to that button because people are skipping results pages that have Google ads.

"It's possible to become too dry, too corporate, too much about making money. I think what's delightful about 'I'm Feeling Lucky' is that it reminds you there are real people here," Google exec Marissa Mayer explained, or at least tried to.

Despite the indirect cost, this very expensive “feeling lucky” button will stay on the Google homepage. source: MarketPlace Via