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Verbatim PhotoSave DVD

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 14:45:22 -0600

All it takes is an errant foot strike or a power spike and poof—you’ve lost gigabytes of photos and memories in a single hard-drive crash. Let’s face it, few of us ever actually take the time to copy those photos to a backup drive. And if you don’t do it, do you really think your mother-in-law will? Verbatim’s PhotoSave DVD aims to solve this problem with a solution that even your newbiest relatives can handle.

Each disc contains an executable that auto-launches once the disc is in a drive. The app is Forest Gump simple. You can order it to scan one drive or all drives for JPEGs. Once it’s found all the files, a button push will burn the files to the disc. If your files exceed 4.5GB, the app will span multiple discs. Once the backup is done, you’ll find the files neatly arranged in the same folders they were in on your hard drive, accessible from any DVD drive. A second option lets you import files directly from a digital camera that’s mounted as a drive in the PC. The software is based on SoftR’s Self Recordable Media technology. SoftR has other versions tweaked to back up Outlook files or your My Documents folder, or back up and encrypt these files as well.

The cheapskates in our office wondered why they couldn’t simply use their own blank DVDs to back up to after filling the first PhotoSave DVD. While we’re all for saving a few bucks, we don’t begrudge Verbatim the right to actually turn a profit on these discs. The company simply couldn’t make any money if you bought a single disc for $2. People who think otherwise would probably also like a new, crisply folded 10-dollar bill with each disc. It’s capitalism, get used to it.

By default, the disc backs up only JPEG files, but the app can be customized to also pick up videos and RAW files. If a backup fills only part of a single disc, you can continue to add files until the disc is full, but the same rule doesn’t apply when a job spans multiple discs. For example, in a three-disc backup that we performed, the third disc was only partially filled. When we tried to add additional files to the disc, the app no longer appeared on the third disc and there was no way to add files to it.

That’s a minor kvetch though. Overall, the software is dummy-proof. Is it for a power user? Probably not. Is it for a power user’s gramps? Hell yeah. At $10 for three discs or $15 for five, it’s one heck of a great gift—something the receiver will truly treasure after his or her hard drive implodes.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 7.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 11:45:32 -0600

A fast car won’t make you turn better laps at Laguna Seca. A pair of $200 sneakers won’t help you outplay Lebron James, and installing Photoshop CS4 won’t make your photos magically better. While that may be true, Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 7.0 will almost certainly make the average person’s photos better. Now in its seventh iteration, Elements 7.0 uses the guts of the extremely powerful Photoshop and tries to make it friendly to everyone.

A new feature in Elements 7.0 allows you to combine multiple shots of you, say, standing in front of a statue and subtract people who rudely walk into the frame. It’s the inverse of a feature added in Elements 6.0 that lets you easily combine multiple group photos to create one family picture without someone blinking or sticking his or her tongue out.

Other easy as pie touches include a new tool to whiten teeth or make the sky bluer and a few easy photo effects such as the ability to give an image a line-drawing look, an old-fashioned photo look, or a saturated slide look. None of these are exactly new concepts, but we do appreciate the simplicity of it. Those looking for a bit more fun will probably find it in the Smart Brush Tool. It’s what you might expect based on its name: a very smart brush. Choose it and click from a wide assortment of changes, such as blue skies or high contrast and then paint an object. The brush will stick to similarly colored or toned pixels on the screen, so you could change someone’s sweater from blue to yellow in a snap.

Adobe has pushed additional integration with its Photoshop.com service. The freebie Photoshop.com gives you about 2GB of storage space, the ability to back up your photos online, access to a limited set of themes and tutorials, and the use of a mobile phone client for uploading and viewing photos. The client, however, is pretty limited in handset support, but Adobe does point you to ShoZu as an alternative. Ponying up $50 per year gets you 20GB of space, additional themes, and tutorials.

Initially, we didn’t understand why you’d even want Photoshop.com when you can get unlimited storage at websites like Smugmug for $40. The answer: photo editing. You can access and edit the photos that you have on Flickr.com using the far more feature-rich Photoshop Express on Photoshop.com. It’s a neat feature, but 20GB still seems miserly in a day of cheap 16GB memory cards and 15MP cameras.

Elements’s list price of $140 may seem steep, but it includes one year of Photoshop.com. Far more palatable is the $80 street price of the app. At $80, it’s well worth the investment for the person looking to jazz up their photos. It’s not perfect, of course; we’d like see high dynamic range photography support (which is included in the competing Paintshop Pro Photo X2), and finding some of the cool features, like the excellent Magic Extractor, isn’t easy; however, for basic photographers who want quick and easy photo enhancement, it’s tough to beat Photoshop Elements 7.0.

System Mechanic 7 Professional

David Murphy — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 14:27:07 -0500

System Mechanic 7 Professional is a lot like a slice of warm apple pie. It tastes pretty good all on its own, but without a scoop of vanilla ice cream to keep it company, the experience just isn’t the same.

You should pretty much know what you’re getting with System Mechanic by now. The latest version of the program again crams a ton of useful Windows utilities under a single umbrella, and, seemingly, no stone is left unturned—with it you can do everything from recovering memory, to nuking unnecessary files off your drive, to compacting and backing up your registry.

Power users will undoubtedly appreciate the program’s geekier functions. Although it takes a while, System Mechanic’s built-in ability to transplant an installed program to a new location in your system works like a charm. And the applications that come bundled alongside System Mechanic, such as DriveScrubber 3 and Search and Recover 4, are a great bonus.

But System Mechanic lacks that extra oomph—the ice cream. While the program’s lack of printed documentation has been “fixed” by the addition of a handy online help system, it would nevertheless be nice to have something tangible in the box. Even a brief “this is how you get started, noob” instructional card would go a long way.

System Mechanic provides users with a ton of information about the overall problems their computers have, but it doesn’t provide enough detail about what specifically is wrong and what specifically is being done to fix the problem. For example, System Mechanic will tell you some junk files are on your PC, but not what they are or whether it is safe to delete them. It goes without saying: One program’s junk is another program’s critical file, and System Mechanic lacks selectivity.

Still, System Mechanic is a great solution for novices who want a one-stop tune-up solution and experts who want some additional tweaking power. It’s not perfect, but hey—even by itself apple pie is still good.

DVD Copy 5 Platinum

Will Smith — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 15:25:36 -0600

Anyone who’s ever ripped a movie using the free AutoGK bundle knows that it’s effective, but that it’s also a pain in the ass to use. Assuming you get all the different bits and pieces of AutoGK working together, there’s a pretty strong chance you’ll end up with a great-looking movie and a crisp-sounding audio track that are completely out of synch with each other. That’s just what you want after spending two hours ripping a disc to Divx—not. We love DVD Copy because it takes the guesswork and trial-and-error out of the DVD ripping process.

For ripping DVDs to Divx, WMV, H.264, or just another blank DVD, there’s no easier piece of software to use. DVD Copy is easy to configure, powerful, and fast. To rip a disc, simply select the portion of the disc you want to rip (or you can let the software automatically select the main movie for you), select a codec, select the target resolution, the audio track, and the subtitles, and press the rip button. Performance varies by codec, but the multithreaded WMV and Divx encoders will speed through a full-resolution DVD transcode at about a 1:1 ratio. You can manually set the output to match your player—even on portables like the PSP and iPod Video.

This latest version adds the ability to rip entire DVDs as images, which you can then add to the batch processor’s queue. The batch processor lets you transcode multiple movies, one after the other, even if you’re not there to change the disc every few hours. Although the batch editor is a touch confusing, it’s worth the hassle the first time you encode six movies overnight.

But, naturally, there’s a catch. DVD Copy doesn’t include any software that will decrypt CSS-protected DVDs—in other words, most commercial DVDs. In order to rip those, you’ll need software that decrypts the disc’s contents on the fly, such as AnyDVD (www.slysoft.com). Having to purchase AnyDVD adds another $40 to the cost of the program, and kills any chance of a Kick Ass award.

Month Reviewed: November 2006
Verdict: 9
URL: www.intervideo.com

Private Disk

Will Smith — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 17:37:06 -0500

We carry a ton of data on our USB thumb drives that we wouldn’t want leaked on the Internet. Whether your key carries your “piss off” letter to your boss, a cache of all your passwords and serial numbers, or those incriminating videos that you took on your last trip to Amsterdam, you need to protect its contents. That’s where Private Disk comes in.

Using this tiny app—it’s less than 2MB—you can encrypt your files using 256-bit AES encryption. Without the appropriate password, your data just looks like a junk-filled file on your drive. Unlike other encryption utilities, which encrypt one file at a time, Private Disk creates an encrypted virtual volume, which is perfect for encrypting the contents of a USB key.

Here’s how it works: First, you create your encrypted volume, specifying the size of volume you want. Then the app will save a single file containing the info in the volume in a location of your choice. Depending on the size of the encrypted volume, and the speed of your computer, this can be a fairly lengthy process. Then, to access your encrypted volume, you’ll double-click the file and enter your password. After the data’s decrypted, the contents of the volume will show up in My Computer, and you can read and write files to it, just like any other drive. It’s really that easy.

We like to dedicate about half of our 2GB thumb drive to our encrypted volume, and put a copy of Private Disk on the unencrypted portion, along with other files we want access to at quick notice. All in all, it’s a great little app, albeit a bit pricey for a one-trick pony.

Month Reviewed: September 2006

Verdict: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.dekart.com

ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite

Michael Brown — Tue, 05 Sep 2006 17:17:00 -0500

Looking for cheap security for your PC? Zone Labs’ ZoneAlarm firewall is available free for the downloading, as is Grisoft’s AVG antivirus, Safer-Networking’s Spybot anti-spyware, and Spampal.org’s anti-spam software. But if you’re looking for an integrated solution offering all these safeguards and more, ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite 6.5 justifies its price.

And unlike some other vendors in this market segment Symantec, McAfee, ZoneAlarm publisher Zone Labs doesn’t start harassing you for a subscription-renewal fee on the anniversary date of your purchase.

This version of ZoneAlarm Internet Security Suite (let’s call it ZASS) has several new features, including automatic spy-site blocking, a gaming mode, and something the company touts as an identity-theft protection service that protects you “even in the physical world.” This last claim is fulfilled by a one-year enrollment in a third-party service called Identity Guard Card Theft Protection, billed as “a $29.95 value!”

When you’re delivered to this third-party’s website (www.identityguard.com) indirectly from ZASS, you’re entreated to also sign up for one of the company’s other products with this message: “…for more complete identity protection, the ZoneAlarm team recommends upgrading to Identity Guard Fraud Protection….” This service costs nearly three times what you’ll pay for ZASS.

With the free service, you register your credit cards and the company’s web-crawlers—which troll sites known to trade in stolen credit-card numbers—will notify you if yours pop up. So what’s not to like? Identity Guard feels like a come-on: bait to lure you into signing up for the higher-priced product. But if you do find it to be of value, Zone Labs tells us it plans to continue to offer the basic service for free to customers who renew their ZASS subscriptions.

Enough about that; let’s get back to some of the new features of the core product. Few things are more annoying than being interrupted in the middle a game by some specious alert from a program that’s running on your PC. ZASS now includes a game mode that automatically suppresses the program’s alerts that require you to make a decision. It also suspends automatic scans and program updates.

Zone Labs has also added a known spyware site-blocking feature to ZASS. Should you try to visit one of these sites, or should a spyware program running on your PC attempt to phone home to one, ZASS will automatically block the visit and display an alert. Labeling applications or websites as sources of spyware can be problematic, and ZASS cuts vendors a lot of slack in this regard: In a quick test, the program prevented us from visiting www.gator.com, but not the P2P file-sharing site www.limewire.com or even www.eacceleration.com, whose application the program had previously identified as spyware.

On the other hand, ZASS spyware scan did turn up two Windows registry entries from programs we had purged from our test platform eons ago: StopSign, from the aforementioned eAcceleration, and PartyPoker (installed purely in the name of research—honest!). Several other popular anti-spyware programs, including Spybot, had failed to detect these entries.

This latest iteration of Zone Alarm Security Suite offers thorough protection for your PC at a reasonable price. The program’s better-safe-than-sorry alert messages will startle novices, but experienced users will take them in stride while customizing the program for their environment.

Month Reviewed: September 2006

+ INSTALLING A FIREWALL: Jam-packed with well-integrated security features.

- INSTALLING DRYWALL: Third-party credit-card protection is of dubious value.

VERDICT: 9

URL: www.zonelabs.com