Messages

37626

Backup Guide / Re: Pre-review discussion of Backup Software

« on: April 07, 2005, 10:43 PM »

Maybe instead of awarding best drive imaging tool this week i will devote this saturday's entry to a guide to backing up your computer, and present a set of concrete policies for backing up..

37627

Backup Guide / Re: Pre-review discussion of Backup Software

« on: April 07, 2005, 08:04 PM »

seems the great infopackets has recently been writing some articles on backup and todays review was for acronis true image.
http://www.infopacke...image_8_0_review.htm

seems kind of pointless for us to do something 95% identical..

37628

Best Website Change Monitoring Tool / Interesting new related program: CommunityMate

« on: April 07, 2005, 04:29 AM »

I just got a nice email from the people who make Right Web Monitor, which was mentioned in the WSW review.
They pointed out to me that they are working on another program, CommunityMate, which is available for download on their site as an alpha build: http://www.right-soft.com/communitymate.

It's specifically designed to keep track of usenet (newsgroup) and web forums, and it looks to be a really neat project.

The web page says:
"CommunityMate is in alpha-version development stage. It's quite uncompleted version and needs to be tested in details. RightSoft invites testers for deep exploration of the program. Most active testers will gain a free registration for their work. If you're interested in it, just drop a note using Contact form. Anyway you can drop your suggestions - they would be greatly appreciated. "

Might be something people here want to try and send them suggestions about.

37629

Backup Guide / Re: Pre-review discussion of Backup Software

« on: April 06, 2005, 11:06 PM »

any other drive imaging software to consider?

Acronis True Image
Drive Image / Ghost
Paragon
http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/index.htm

others?

37630

General Software Discussion / Re: the definitive minimal amount of programs for the greatest security?

« on: April 06, 2005, 05:24 PM »

id consider an antivirus+firewall the bare minimum. and they should be running all the time in the background, imho.

process guard sounds intriguing though, and i'm going to give it a look.

as for antitrojan and antispyware, and others, i wouldnt waste my cpu running such programs in the background, though its nice to have these for on-demand scanning.

slightly off topic but invaluable for those of us who like to test software is a virtual machine like VmWare or VirtualPc; such a program is essential, and we will be doing an award on them in very near future.

37631

Backup Guide / Re: Pre-review discussion of Backup Software

« on: April 06, 2005, 05:21 PM »

acronis might require a boot cd.  i dont think it does, but it might, i don't remember.
i'm just pointing out it does incremental backup + scheduled backups.

ive never considered the boot cd issue.. i'll have to think about it before the review this week.

37632

Backup Guide / Re: Pre-review discussion of Backup Software

« on: April 06, 2005, 04:50 PM »

btw acronis does incremental + scheduled drive imaging as well.

37633

Official DonationCoder.com Reviews / Corrupt Hardware+Software Reviews , Payola etc.

« on: April 06, 2005, 04:20 PM »

Interesting read:
http://hardware.slas...?tid=149&tid=137

thought i would mention this as an excuse to reitterate that this site does not accept payment from companies.  We have neither received nor solicited money or gifts for our reviews, or for commissions on sales offered to our members, etc.

we only contact companies to ask for discounts for our members after our awards are decided; companies are told very clearly that offering a discount to our members will not affect the review or choice of award, except to the extent that we feel the discount makes the program's price more reasonable and worth purchasing.

37634

Best Website Change Monitoring Tool / Re: compared with Check and Get

« on: April 06, 2005, 04:09 PM »

thanks dmitry

and please do keep us updated on the progress of v3..
feel free to post here when its available for beta testing.

-mouser

37635

Best Website Change Monitoring Tool / Re: compared with Check and Get

« on: April 06, 2005, 02:17 PM »

one more thing to add: this site is all about software fanatics, and i'm sure you'd find many people here, including myself who would be happy to try new versions of C&G and offer feedback and constructive suggestions.  of course the suggestions might be useless but on the other hand if you think it would be helpful to hear what a hardcore WSW thinks about a given feature or a given proposed idea, or some user interface decision, please feel free to ask and I'd be happy to take some time to try to offer a constructive opinion.

37636

Best Website Change Monitoring Tool / Re: compared with Check and Get

« on: April 06, 2005, 02:08 PM »

everyone take a deep breath.

i'm really glad that dmitry came to the forum and made a post.  i want authors of programs mentioned to be welcome here.

as the WSW review states, C&G is probably the closes competitor to WSW in terms of features and functionality, and as the review says "you should try Check&Get for yourself and see what suits you best."

dmitry, please read around the forum and the site, and you will learn more about the philosophy of this site, and why we might take offense to you suggesting that our review is an advert.  the whole point of the review section is to indentify the best program in a class (in our opinion) and explain why.  all of the awards so far have been programs that i personally love, that's why they were chosen.  so if they sound lauditory, it's because that's how i personally feel about them; i've been a registered daily user of WSW for many years now and so my love for WSW obviously shows through.

i welcome you to post about C&G here and describe features you think people might want to pay special attention to; if you want to offer our members a discount to compete with WSW that would be welcome to; I do stand by my conclusions about C&G and WSW but I appreciate that different people have different needs, which is why I suggested people evaluate both.  If you look at the features we liked so much in WSW you might find some positive suggestions for C&G.

C&G is an excellent program and definitely worth people trying before they make a final decision about which program to buy.

37637

General Software Discussion / ASRT (Advance Software Reconnaissance Team) thread for 4/9/05 is active

« on: April 05, 2005, 02:59 PM »

in the members only section.

this section was created so we could get help prior to reviews in locating qualifying programs and thoughts on important features to consider for the review.

please visit the thread and post your thoughts.

37638

ProcessTamer / Re: Some test?

« on: April 04, 2005, 11:38 PM »

well don't expect miracles -
this program is not going to speed up normal programs.
its only useful when you have a program running that uses almost all of your cpu.
most programs do not.
only certain programs that do a huge amount of calculations, such as archiving programs, or video conversion programs , or mathematical simulation programs, do this, and process tamer is really designed to help make your computer responsive while using these kinds of programs.

37639

General Software Discussion / Re: [suggestion] ProcessGuard and RegDefend

« on: April 04, 2005, 10:52 PM »

i've heard some very good things about process guard from a friend who rescued a computer filled with viruses/spyware, and used process guard to hold the infections at bay while he cleaned it.

37640

ProcessTamer / Re: New (3/31/05) preview pictures of new ProcessTamer GUI

« on: April 04, 2005, 10:50 PM »

thanks ahlun, i would definitely appreciate your help with the translation.
i will try to look into translation soon, it will be fun.

37641

Backup Guide / Pre-review discussion of Backup Software

« on: April 04, 2005, 05:39 AM »

Next week will be Drive Imaging Tools

It will be part 1 of a 2 (or even 3) week series on backing up:
    1) Drive Imaging
    2) Incremental Backup of Documents
    3) A guide to good backup processes including 1+2 and extra info.

#2 is probably going to be the tricky one as there are so many tools for doing this..

Drive imaging (#1) is easier since there are very few of these tools (true image, drive image, and maybe 3 or 4 others).

Please help out by providing info as discussed in the other thread.

For those unclear, a Drive Imaging tool makes a complete compressed copy of your hd so that it can be restored later.
The current state of the art seems to be TrueImage and DriveImage/Ghost (now the same thing).

Minimal requirements to be considered for this award:
1) images an entire hd, including multiple partitions
2) can run while windows is still running
3) lets you explore/search/retrieve from images

so if you know of other programs that qualify, please post! (this is thing that would benefit me the most, so i don't miss a program)
and otherwise you can list your views on best/worst, and just as important if not more so, what features in a drive imaging tool you think are most important.

37642

ProcessTamer / Re: ideas for process tamer

« on: April 04, 2005, 05:22 AM »

maybe the best thing regarding any kind of cpu usage meter is just to use a series of icons, lets say 2 for normal vs tamed,
or perhaps 3, for low/med/high cpu loads, and let user customize these icons if they want, and provide one or two default sets.
that way you could customize it to have whatever appearance you want, including a completely unchanging one.

37643

Best Website Change Monitoring Tool / Re: compared with Check and Get

« on: April 04, 2005, 04:42 AM »

btw i asked Martin if he would mind extending the discount to his Local Website Archive program (http://www.aignes.com/wsarc/index.htm), which is the program that can keep multiple snapshots of web pages and can be used with WSW, and he extended the discount to this product as well; use the same code.

37644

ProcessTamer / Re: ideas for process tamer

« on: April 04, 2005, 04:02 AM »

fair enough.  new beta posted.

37645

ProcessTamer / Re: ideas for process tamer

« on: April 04, 2005, 12:11 AM »

another thing i was thinking of adding is to change the icon to be like a meter
showing overall cpu use.

so maybe something like a box that goes from green -> red for low to high overall cpu use
with some kind of indicator for when something is being tamed, like maybe a symbol inside the box, or red vs black border of the box.

what do you think?

37646

ProcessTamer / Re: Process Tamer 2 preview available to Members

« on: April 04, 2005, 12:09 AM »

new beta avail in members only
hopefully fixes the vampir cosmetics problem and the tooltip and about box should accurately report the tamed app in all cases.

37647

Find And Run Robot / Re: FindAndRunRobot.exe with tray icon?

« on: April 03, 2005, 06:09 PM »

not a strange request at all - in fact this happened to me too, which is why i added esc keep to halt search.

i could add another hotkey too if esc is too strange.

37648

Find And Run Robot / Re: FindAndRunRobot.exe with tray icon?

« on: April 03, 2005, 02:41 PM »

btw, find&run is going to get my attention and lots of new features added as soon as the process tamer 2 update is done, so keep the suggestions coming.

37649

ProcessTamer / Re: ideas for process tamer

« on: April 03, 2005, 02:20 PM »

i think i should be able to handle this situation properly in the new cpu usage calcualtion;
ill post later when i get the new calculation algorithm going.  shouldn't be a problem.

37650

ProcessTamer / Re: ideas for process tamer

« on: April 03, 2005, 12:47 PM »

thats a really interesting idea about excluding cpuidle from calculations..
i think it might be possible..

as i understand it, programs like cpuidle are used to reduce heat of cpu by taking up free processing cycles with a special cpu instruction.

so when your computer is doing nothing, cpuidle shows as using 100% of the cpu.
so of course you would want to set the rule for cpuidle to "ignore".

my question is, what happens when you have a process that is using tons of the cpu?
if you run the cpu easter test utility..
what does the PT2 cpu useage screen show? what does it say cpuidle is using? what does it say the cpu eater is using?