Wednesday 11 July 2012
Nokia PC Suite
FastStone Image Viewer
For a free program, this multipurpose image tool strikes us as a good find. Although the main interface looks too cluttered with buttons at first glance, the three main windows are intuitive enough once get your bearings. FastStone Image Viewer for Windows boasts a nice default design, but you can customize it to your liking with several skins.
Clicking a thumbnail puts a larger view of the shot in the lower-left pane, and you zoom in simply by dragging the mouse around. Though its image-editing tools can't compete with those offered by a full-featured suite, there's still enough here to make a decent amount of tweaks to your shots. You can resize, crop, remove red-eye, and adjust color, brightness, and contrast. You'll also find a few simple effects and filters, including Lens, Waves, and Morphs. Other nifty features include multiple folder slide shows, batch cropping and Windows Vista support.
FastStone Image Viewer for Windows can batch-convert files into a number of popular image formats including GIF, BMP, PSD, and PNG, and the slide-show creator allows you to apply transitions, specify the interval between images, and add your own MP3s as a soundtrack. We can recommend this program to everyone but professional designers.
AVG Anti-Spyware
AVG Anti-Spyware offers a high protection level, bolstered by useful features, for a reasonable cost. After 30 days, some of the features get disabled, but you're still able to search for and remove malware, and update definitions manually.
The tools performed well but aren't for the casual enthusiast. Besides the Scanner, which offers four levels of scanning plus a fully customizable fifth, the Resident Shield blocked all malicious components we tried to install, and we were impressed with the overall level of security the app provides: there's even a shredder that offers Fast, Secure, and Paranoid levels of deletion.
The diagnostic tools are spread through different tabs, so options clutter isn't an issue. Still, there's a lot to manage, from running processes to start-up entries to connections--but the program provides little information as to which items are potentially dangerous. In some cases, the program seemed to hog an inordinate amount of memory when its real-time shield was active.
The interface is mundane, with icons floating in a horizontal top-nav bar. The main Status window had quick link jumps to control the resident shield and automatic updates. Update contained proxy connection options, Analysis offered in-depth essential information not only on system processes but Internet connections, programs running from startup, browser plug-ins, and LSPs.
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