Recent Posts

5726

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: New Raxco Product : Defragmenter - Optimizer ; $9.99 until 2007-05-13

« Last post by Darwin on May 10, 2007, 12:46 PM »

Both Raxco and Diskeeper offer year long maintenance contracts that are MUCH cheaper than their upgrade pricing. However, Raxco's maintenance fee for a year was about $9 vs. $30 for Diskeeper. The cost of buying the apps outright is cheaper going the Raxco route, too. What I like about PerfectDisk is that you get it all: there's no Std., Professional, and Professioal Premier versioning to worry about, and it's cheaper than Diskeeper. Diskeeper, in its current Professional Premier version (and I thought the previous one was very good too - about par with the current version of PD), in my limited testing/comparing of the two defraggers, is much more "set it and forget it" friendly than PD. Does that make it better? No, probably not. I think that at this stage both are so good that it's a pretty pointless debate. All I was trying to say above is that if Raxco is going to start getting really silly, the current version of Diskeeper is a more than capable alternative. What I fear is that this new, dumbed down, everything and the kitchen sink approach heralds a switch to a marketing model that will feature a quite cheap an "dumb" version for regular users and a much more expensive version for power users and IT professionals. What I'm afraid of is PD 9 rolling out to great fanfare as a Professional line with prices to match. I shouldn't worry too much as I'm covered for about 11 months by my $9 investment in another year of maintenance contract cover, but what about beyond that?

I hope you're wrong about the Symantec dig  !

EDIT: clarified the text - I was really out in left field at one point 

5727

What's the Best? / Re: cd burning

« Last post by Darwin on May 10, 2007, 10:16 AM »

Note that Ashampoo Burning Studio 7 is out now... and allows for DVD copy and the creation of bootable disks. Wait two to three months and you should be able to pick it up for about $8 or $9. I love ABS 6... I'm about ready to ditch Sonic RecordNow! 8 as I NEVER use it anymore.

5728

Found Deals and Discounts / Re: New Raxco Product : Defragmenter - Optimizer ; $9.99 until 2007-05-13

« Last post by Darwin on May 10, 2007, 10:12 AM »

FWIW - I have been maintaining licences for both Diskeeper 2007 Pro Premier (on wife's notebook) and PerfectDisk 8 (on mine). I first bought Diskeeper and switched to PerfectDisk because at the time it was lighter on resources and seemed to do a better job. I must say that Raxco, IMO, is on the ropes since DK 2007 came out. It is seamless and invisible. With PerfectDisk, I keep having to check to make sure that my disk is defragmented (I have it set to do this automatically) - often I need to run a boot-time defrag. On my wife's machine, the disk is ALWAYS defragmented, there is no discernible hit on the system, and I rarely check to see if the disk is degragmented anymore. It's very impressive. Note: I'm not complaining about PD, really - it's an excellent defragmenter. However, if Defragmenter-Optimizer is the future of the company I'm concerned!

I was hoping that PerfectDisk 9 would come out and up the ante again; I wasn't expecting this Swiss Army Knife to be released instead 

Anyway, I don't want to re-ignite a Diskeeper/PerfectDisk war here, but thought I'd give my impressions after using DK for three years and PD for 18 months.

5729

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is it so hard to find a decent image organizer?

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 08:31 PM »

Thanks for positng this, John. I may have to give iView a look now (software junkie, you see. That makes you the pusher!)...

Er... no. Looks FANTASTIC and your points about amateur photographers having the same needs as the pros when it comes to image organization and cataloguing are spot on. However, there is no way in H-E-double hockey sticks I'm going to ante up $200 for it (not a principle thing, just economic reality!) so I won't be tempting myself with a trial! Looks fabulous, though.

5730

Living Room / Re: How do you spend your time on the computer?

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 05:48 PM »

BTW, I personally think that mouser should be given a PhD for coming up with, executing, and maintaining Donationcoder. I say we get a petition together and see if we can't get the University of Illinois to do just that. All those in favour say "aye"!

5731

Mini-Reviews by Members / Re: Quality Comparison: 8 x freeware PDF Readers / Viewers

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 02:11 PM »

Thanks Carl. I'd better re-download and actually test fly PDF-XChange Viewer. I'm not unhappy with Acrobt Reader, but being a bit old school am offended by its resource usage!

5732

General Software Discussion / Re: DVDProfiler 3.0 is finally out !

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 01:07 PM »

Looks interesting... so, if I read this correctly, one can use the latest version free of charge? If you pay for unlimited registration you get voting rights and access to the betas? Pretty cool. I've been using Collectorz.com apps for this kind of thing, but haven't actually gotten around to trying to organise my dvds.

5733

General Software Discussion / Re: wolves

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 01:04 PM »

Thanks for the link urlwolf. I'm off to read the petition now.

5734

General Software Discussion / Re: To Vista or not to Vista that is the ?

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 12:53 PM »

Well.. i remember i didnt want to switch to XP.. though finally i did, mostly because of the app support, which will happen eventually with vista.

I'm in the same boat. Funny (but completely understandable) how initially app support is dreadful and keeps people from upgrading, yet within 12-18 months everyone s clamouring to make the upgrade because 3rd party developers start dropping support for older Win flavours. No doubt this is a long way off for XP... one hopes!

EDIT: spelling correction 

5735

Living Room / Re: How do you spend your time on the computer?

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 11:45 AM »

We're in good company, too, and we can look for inspiration to at least two people at donationcoder who have actually finished their PhD's - Zaine and Ken. Obviously, they've managed to balance a love for computers with their academic workloads, so it can be done!

Well, I have finished my PhD, but that doesn't mean that I have a good balance between my academic life and other activities (love for computers being one of them). If fact, I'd say that very few people achieve that balance, and it gets worse the more responsibility you have/older you get. If you don't believe me, just peruse threads in this forum:

http://chronicle.com....php/board,33.0.html

-urlwolf (May 09, 2007, 11:24 AM)

 

Thanks for the link, urlwolf. I'm more interested in academic productivity though! Speaking of which... Time to balance my chequebook so that I can get on with some PhD-type work (drinking coffee, staring out the window, mentally spending $1 million, designing and test flying the perfect paper aeroplane, etc.).

5736

Living Room / Re: How do you spend your time on the computer?

« Last post by Darwin on May 09, 2007, 11:41 AM »

Hi Armamdo,

Ah! La Belle Province! I'm from the other side of Canada from you - Vancouver Island, BC, where I'm working on a PhD on the evolutionary ecology and morphology of the Neanderthals... I got fed up of English universities so moved home to write up. Not necessarily the smartest thing that I've ever done (another act of lunacy was signing up for a PhD in the first place!).

I'm thinking of taking a looooong break for the summer.

Be careful about that... my long break has graduated from months to years and it's REALLY hard to get the momentum back.

Good luck with the PhD - we should form a support group to encourage the student citizenry of Codyland to spend some portion of their days working on their assignments and projects. Anyway, in case you haven't done so already, why not become (yet another) statistic and add yourself to the "PhD" group on this poll?

5737

Living Room / Re: How many students are active here (instead of writing up?!)

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 11:07 PM »

Drat! Another one I forgot. I've added an option for associates degree. Sorry Josh. This is really embarrassing as I teach at a community college in an associates degree programme 

5738

Living Room / Re: How many students are active here (instead of writing up?!)

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 05:53 PM »

PPS Voting is unlocked again...  I accidentally locked it when stabbing at the "edit poll" button with my ten thumbs and a mouse designed for a mix of fingers and thumbs.

5739

Living Room / Re: How many students are active here (instead of writing up?!)

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 05:50 PM »

Sorry, Carl, I dashed the poll off quickly and was having trouble thinking of all the possible types of qualifications that people might be working on. Good thing mouser had the wit to add the "other" choice... Anyway, thanks for taking the time to vote!

PS was going to add "teacher training" to the choices but can see that then I'd be adding "MBA", "CGA", "CA", "BN", "RN", and so on, and so on... I'd *like* to keep it simple, if possible.

5740

Living Room / Re: How many students are active here (instead of writing up?!)

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 04:46 PM »

Good idea, mouser. Hadn't thought of that!

5741

Living Room / POLL: How many students are active here (instead of writing up?!)

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 04:36 PM »

I thought it would be fun to get a sense of JUST how many procrasitinators students there are at Donationcoder. I know of at least two high school students, two Bachelors' students, one Masters' student, and five PhD candidates... So, how many more of us are there out there in Codyland?

5742

Living Room / Re: How to get the perfect (looking) résumé / CV

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 04:19 PM »

Yes - I didn't know that about Times New Roman... 

5743

General Software Discussion / Re: To Vista or not to Vista that is the ?

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 04:07 PM »

Another PhD procrastinator! Woo hoo - the ranks are swelling... Welcome to the boards, Mandork. You've come to the right place to set aside all things PhD (I'm not doing one on the Middle/Upper Palaeolithic transition - ie the Neanderthal "problem", but from a bio-anth perspective).

5744

Older Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for May 8th, 2007 - Codename "Discounts Galore"

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 02:16 PM »

Most excellent, meow-mesiter! I'm off the finish of my mini-review then...

5745

Older Newsletters / Re: --> Newsletter for May 8th, 2007 - Codename "Discounts Galore"

« Last post by Darwin on May 08, 2007, 02:06 PM »

Great newsletter, mouser! Now, where are the cody club tasks then (not that I've finished with the last batch of tasks, but they're on my "to do" list!)?

Thanks!

Mike

5746

Living Room / Re: OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from?

« Last post by Darwin on May 07, 2007, 09:50 PM »

Welcome canarsie! 850 GIGAbytes of the Dead? OMG!

5747

Living Room / Re: Today I was searching for interesting software...

« Last post by Darwin on May 07, 2007, 07:45 PM »

What the.... ? I've seen it all now. This is sort of like that schtick that Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan go through, dry humping women in night clubs in A Night at the Roxybury. Or am I reaching, here...

5748

General Software Discussion / Re: Sumatra PDF Viewer is cool, thin, and open-source

« Last post by Darwin on May 07, 2007, 07:27 PM »

So... what is our status WRT cobbling together a biggish infusion of cash to spur Sumatra's development? Just wondering...

I actually navigated back to this thread to say that I'm using Adobe Reader 8 to open pdf's off my harddrve and Foxit as the default reader for on-line pdfs. I'm having difficulty picking one over the other! Foxit has such a tiny footprint, but AR is very well behaved - releases all the resources it was using when it's shutdown... I've used a tweak posted here by Ampa to bolster Foxit's rendering of fonts and it's considerably better. AR's strengths include better copy support and far more robust document navigtion (Foxit offers thumbnails only and only if they were set up by the author/creator of the document) while Foxit opens in the blink of an eye...

5749

General Software Discussion / Re: A NEW VERSION (v1.9) of ObjectDock just released

« Last post by Darwin on May 07, 2007, 07:23 PM »

I re-installed ObjectDock (v.1.9) the other day. I certainly won't be setting it to start with Windows, but it's a very mature app now - much more refined that 1.1 - 1.3 and lighter on resources. Worth a look if you're intersted in this kind of thing.

EDIT: added hyperlink to developer's site - thanks for pointing that out Hirudin!

5750

General Software Discussion / Re: Directory Opus 9

« Last post by Darwin on May 07, 2007, 05:34 PM »

I had the same experience, but visited the gpsoft download page, downloaded and installed the update and all is well...