Oh for god's sake. Do we REALLY need another browser? It was bad enough when half the world got suckered into the delusion that is Firefox. Now Google are trying to tout their new Chrome browser as the next best thing. It's probably awesome if you're seventy years old, but it doesn't work with Roboform, it uses the Webkit rendering engine (so you might as well use Safari) and basically it's just pure crap. Like I keep saying, stick to Internet Explorer and one of the many shells (like Maxthon or Greenbrowser) that are out there for it. Avoid Chrome.
Looks like Disktrix are improving their product in order to compete with PerfectDisk 2008. It's not out yet but some of the advertised features (such as 30-50% faster defragmentation) look pretty good.
The latest version of PerfectDisk (which, in my opinion, is the best defragmenter currently available for Windows) has been released. It's called PerfectDisk 2008 and there have been a lot of changes. Some good, some a little annoying, but the good changes are enough to warrant purchase. But let's start with the bad stuff. They're forcing a ridiculous blue Vista-like skin on us now. I hate skins/themes at the best of times since all they do is slow down any given process at the expense of "looking good" but as long as the program has a minimize button it's acceptable. There are other things like a "stealth" mode that does background defragmentation, which I guess is similar to what Diskeeper has, and again it's not something I care too much for. But the improvements are where it counts - faster startup and more intelligent defragmentation. We recently purchased it at work for our main intranet server and there was a noticeable speed improvement after running it - one of the main components of that server is Dokuwiki which is a text-file-based wiki system - due to its continuous use the intranet server is constantly getting fragmented up the wazoo. I've tried the others and for a while I believed that Disktrix's UltimateDefrag was the best of its type, but I have to say that PD2008 trumps it. New also are VMWare-compatible versions of PD, plus there's a version that defragments Exchange server stores. Can't go wrong with this. You can get a 30-day trial from http://www.raxco.com.
So I know that recently I said that GreatNews "completely eclipsed" FeedDemon as an RSS aggregator. I may have spoken too hastily. Yesterday, one of my freeware feeds stated that FeedDemon was now free (reread that a few times!), and I decided to reinstall it and give it another shot. And I must say, the newest version is pretty nice. Many of the features that I thought were so neat in GreatNews are also in the newest version of FeedDemon, including "news watches" (specify a keyword and then a special channel appears, which contains feed articles from ALL your feeds which in turn contain the keyword you specified). GreatNews still does this better though - not only is there a "watch" channel, but in fact if you're viewing the channel itself, the row containing your keywords will be highlighted with the color of your choice. FeedDemon only shows keywords within its watch channel and nowhere else.
I ran both programs (into which I imported exactly the same channels, via OPML), selected the same feed in both and checked memory usage. GreatNews used 17Mb RAM, FeedDemon used 53Mb. Considering that GN has been running on my machine for a while, with time to collect hundreds more feed articles than the newly-installed FeedDemon, I'd say that GN is a clear winner in this regard. For those of us with 2Gb RAM it's not so much of an issue, but these programs are supposed to cater for people with crappy laptops and desktops too.
So, in my final analysis, whereas GreatNews is still the better program, FeedDemon's done a lot of catching up recently - my hat's off to any decent shareware that becomes freeware (unless, of course, I were to have paid for it - which fortunately I did not ).
And the small, useful tool of the week goes to a program called Taskbar Shuffle. It allows you to do three things - click and drag a taskbar footprint in order to rearrange it in your taskbar, CTRL-click and drag to rearrange the order of your systray icons, and (most useful for me) middle-click on a program's taskbar footprint to close that program. Install and have a play around with it - very cool indeed. And not like I care or anything, but it apparently works in Vista as well.
So once again I've found a freeware program that's better than most of the shareware/commercial equivalents. This time it's an uninstaller program called Revo Uninstaller. What does it do? Well, as it's name might suggest it displays a list of software installed on your machine and allows you to uninstall one or more of them. Now you might ask, "Why not just use the Add/Remove Programs option in the Control Panel to do this?" The reason this program is better is because most programs still leave behind some "residue" on your computer and don't completely remove what was originally installed. Typically this information is left in the registry. If, like me, you install and uninstall a lot of programs, your registry will become more and more bloated with this "residue". Revo Uninstaller first calls the program's built-in uninstall routines, then performs an advanced scan of your computer - files and registry - and cleans up the crap that is left behind. It's like a colonic irrigation of your hard drive. Awesome stuff. And, like I said, it's freeware.
So for quite a while I've believed that FeedDemon was the best RSS aggregator for Windows, but recently I found a program that totally eclipses it in all respects. GreatNews collects and arranges all your RSS feeds similarly to FeedDemon but has some nice touches. For example, you can set a "keyword" and feeds to filter by that keyword. Then the program will automatically identify all feed articles that contain that keyword and display it for you in a separate view. For example, you can set a keyword of "free" and then indicate that you want all your bargain shopping websites to be scanned for articles containing that word. It's free as well, which is way better than paying $29 for FeedDemon.
Well, I thought that the blog would be a nice replacement for the news module but I think I prefer the latter. It's actually not that much faster or easier to load up Windows Live Writer, like I had been planning to do, then write out some news item and then post it to the web site. News simply wants me to log into the site and then post an article through the web interface. Plus my news categories are RSS-capable and I don't think the Wordpress system is. Maybe it is. Who cares. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year - I'm reinstating this module.
For the moment, I think I'm going to retire this module. I just tried to switched my Wordpress Blog module in as the main module for the site but when I do that some stupid errors appear, so until I can work out why it's happening, News will still be the foremost module. You can click on Wordpress Blog in the left-side menu to access the most recent stuff. I may unretire the News module in the future. We'll see.
New versions of two of my most-used programs have recently been released. Well, one's not actually a program but a codec.
Musepack is an audio codec, much like MP3 but MUCH better (higher quality at comparable bitrates, faster encoding). After several years, they have finally released a beta of Stream Version 8 (SV8). I have been encoding all my albums into Musepack (.MPC) files for years now. It's consistently been the best lossy codec, but unfortunately not too many external players support it. Not that I care, since I don't actually own an iPod (nor ever care to buy one since I think they're crap). I play most of my music on the PC, using foobar2000.
Which neatly brings me to the fact that foobar2000 v0.9.4.5b1 has also been released. Along with a couple of minor fixes, it fully supports the new Musepack SV8 beta - conversion to and playback of. If you've never heard of foobar2000, it's the absolute best music player program for the PC. Yes, even better than WinAMP.
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