Category: PC Productivity

Adobe Acrobat Capture

Adobe Acrobat Capture: as a Document Management Solution Product: Adobe Acrobat Capture 3.0 For: Windows 95, Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 Price: US$895 and up Product: Adobe Acrobat Capture 2.01 For: Windows 95, Windows NT 3.51 and 4.0 Price: US$577 and up (the basic price provides a dongle that allows 20,000 pages to be processed. Additional payment...

Microsoft Office XP

How we conducted our tests One of the perks of being a member of Microsoft's MSDN developer network is gaining early access to the company's line of software tools. A few weeks before the May 31 retail release of Office XP (version 2002), the company shipped developers the final release of the retail code, and made it available to those with a...

The Digital Ear

Audio-to-MIDI Conversion Software - The Digital Ear Overview Recently, I became frustrated with my Creative AWE64 card and MIDI scoring software.  I was disappointed by the huge difference between human and (untweaked) computer performance, especially for breath and bowed instruments.  So I looked into ways to spice things up.  I...

Post It Notes for your PC

The Macintosh includes a utility called 'Stickies' which many Apple owners use very successfully as they might a Post It Note, attaching reminders,  to-do lists and other free-form data to their desktop. And yes, there are equivalent programs for Windows. We've seen commercial software from the makers of Post-It Notes that behaves more or...

Genealogy Software

Tracing Your Roots The most popular genealogy software for Windows PCs is Family Tree Maker. However, many enthusiasts agree that there are better titles on the market, including Ancestral Quest (available in a US$37.95 Standard Edition or as a downloadable demo). The free program Personal Ancestral File (PAF) is also highly regarded. Indeed, Dave...

System Fixers - Worth the Money?

CyberMedia Uninstaller 4 Registry Management for Windows 95 and NT Users As Macintosh users are so fond of pointing out, Microsoft Windows isn’t always an easy system to maintain. When it’s all working the way it’s supposed to, Windows is great, but when something goes awry…yikes. And despite the advances Microsoft has...

Speech Recognition for PCs

Speech! Speech! Voice recognition has the potential to radically change the way we use computers. After all, who among us can type 140 words per minute? These programs can. Current speech recognition programs have the capability to recognize continuous speech -- that is, speech that is -- not -- like -- this. Here are some of the latest tools that...

PC Buyer's Guide

Talking to your Computer Voice Command software that actually works. Realize Software's Realize Voice for Win95/NT4 is voice command software for Win95/NT that uses Microsoft's Whisper speech recognition engine. It's very good at what it does (although it is not a voice dictation system like IBM's US$99 ViaVoice). You don't need to train Realize...

Testing Anti-virus Tools

Would you be alarmed to discover that neither of the leading anti-virus tools could detect some viruses already on your hard drive?  We were.   Introduction Norton AntiVirus and McAfee VirusScan are, respectively, the #1 and #2 anti-virus products in the market and both are regularly placed in the top 10 sales figures of software...

Solutions for Macintosh and Windows - Anti-virus Tools

Dr. Alan Solomon, the virus expert behind Dr. Solomon's Anti-Virus Toolkit, estimates that the worldwide virus count currently tops 11,000 viruses, and that hundreds of new viruses appear each month. According to Symantec's team of virus experts, over one-third of current viruses are of the word processor macro variety. These viruses can be spread...

Dragon Slays Computer Club

"Computer Questions? Join our club." is the motto of the VPCUS computer club. On the second Thursday of each month, the Vancouver PC Users Society meets at the H. R. MacMillan Space Centre. Barry Weinbaum and Roedy Green, walking computer encyclopediae, field questions from novices and 'nerds' as the evening gets under way with a Q&A...

Microsoft Reader

"ClearType" technology improves the on-screen reading experience. The History In his CES keynote address in Jan., 2000, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Bill Gates demonstrated for the first time a new applications that now ships with every Pocket PC: Microsoft Reader with ClearType display technology. On Aug. 8th, 2000, Microsoft made a...

Q&A: Production Graphics Techniques

Q:  How can I insert a screen shot into my Windows-based PageMaker program? A: you can copy any Windows-based screen to the Clipboard by simply pressing Print Screen. Then, paste the contents of the Clipboard into your graphics or DTP program with Edit>Paste, or press Control-v. Note that PageMaker has a so-called "magic stretch...

Photoshop plugins

Photoshop plug-ins Looking to expand your Photoshop chops (short for "Channel ops," of course)? Check out these plugins: First up is I-US' Plugin Galaxy product, which consists of 20 plugins for Photoshop and over 120 filter effects. The URL of Plugin Galaxy is http://www.i-us.com/products/plugingalaxy/pg.htm Visit PlugIn Com HQ --...

CorelDRAW 8

Product: CorelDRAW 8.0 From: Corel Price: about $700 (educational version available for US$118). (Version 9 for Linux is freely downloadable from www.corel.com) Pros: improved interface. Good PostScript importer. Some new tools, including a "Squizz" plugin that also works in Adobe Photoshop. Cons: Intellihance and KPT special edition are...