Utilities - April '98

Note: PC User provides these programs on an as is basis, and they should be used with extreme care. While they have all worked fine in testing, we cannot promise that they will work as expected on all systems. In rare cases they may even cause some damage.

Angela Booth selects her pick of the latest useful utiltiies for your PC and office.

Windows 95

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ClipTrakker automatically remembers everything that you've copied to the Windows clipboard, creating snapshots of each item, as well as thumbnail graphics. The thumbnails make it easy to find specific items later. To store your items long-term, you can create as many tabbed pages within the program's main window as you need. The program is highly configurable. You can, for example, choose which formats you want various items saved in: if you want to change a format, select the new format you want, and ClipTrakker regenerates the thumbnail. The program's best feature is its OLE functionality: you can drag and drop items into any Windows program that is OLE-enabled.

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Dropit is a simple utility that can save you a lot of time when it comes to filling out forms -- especially on the Internet. You simply create any text that you want to reuse in Dropit, open Dropit from the system tray, and drag and drop your selected text into the form.

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This is the latest version of the clever Windows 95 macro recording program. It's very easy to use as it comes with a wizard which steps you through the macro creation process painlessly. You have the option of creating hot keys for your macros, so now you can perform quite complex tasks (such as launching several programs at once) with a single keystroke.

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From our experience, one of the most reliable virus scanners around. Thunderbyte will detect all known viruses, plus guard against new and unknown viruses. For full protection and virus cleaning capabilities you will need to register, but the shareware version will alert you to any virus you may have and offer several options to getting rid of it.

After expiry the program will work ONLY as a demonstration copy ... file cleaning, virus disinfection, internal scanning of archived and packed files, heuristic analysis, and some other features will be disabled.

To license AVP in Australia, New Zealand, the South Pacific region, or South East Asia, see the textfiles ORDER.TXT and PRICE.LST files after installation

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PaintShop Pro has always been our favourite graphic file viewer and converter, but in this latest version, this shareware program is now a comprehensive graphics package. As well as providing a Browse utility for managing graphics files, it lets you create and save graphics in the GIF and JPG formats common on the Web. It also provides image manipulation tools that'll let you grab an image and edit it to your heart's content.

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This shareware utility is our perennial favourite for unzipping and zipping just about every type of compressed file, as well as for decoding Internet file formats, such as UUencode, BinHex and MIME.

This new version features an updated zip/unzip engine with automatic support for multi-disk ZIP files, plus a number of Windows Explorer menu enhancements. But perhaps the best new feature is the free WinZip Internet Browser Support Add-On. Using this free add-on, you can download and open archives from the Internet with one click via Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

This free player from Apple allows PC users to play Quicktime .MOV files -- the standard movie file format for the Macintosh, and used by many cross-platform multimedia CD-ROMs.

Windows 3.1x

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This useful calculator is configurable in many different ways according to your requirements. It includes a history tape that stores all your calculations in a scrolling list and which you can annotate, save, print and resize; selectable syntax (process numbers like a normal calculator, a scientific calculator or an adding machine); customisable display; automatic financial calculations of various kinds; statistics; and intelligent cut and paste to other Windows applications like Excel and Quicken.

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PaintShop Pro has always been our favourite graphic file viewer and converter, but in this latest version, this shareware program is now a comprehensive graphics package. As well as providing a Browse utility for managing graphics files, it lets you create and save graphics in the GIF and JPG formats common on the Web. It also provides image manipulation tools that'll let you grab an image and edit it to your heart's content.

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This shareware utility is our perennial favourite for unzipping and zipping just about every type of compressed file, as well as for decoding Internet file formats, such as UUencode, BinHex and MIME.

This new version features an updated zip/unzip engine with automatic support for multi-disk ZIP files, plus a number of Windows Explorer menu enhancements. But perhaps the best new feature is the free WinZip Internet Browser Support Add-On. Using this free add-on, you can download and open archives from the Internet with one click via Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator.

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From our experience, one of the most reliable virus scanners around. Thunderbyte will detect all known viruses, plus guard against new and unknown viruses. For full protection and virus cleaning capabilities you will need to register, but the shareware version will alert you to any virus you may have and offer several options to getting rid of it.

This free player from Apple allows PC users to play Quicktime. MOV files -- the standard movie file format for the Macintosh, and used by many cross-platform multimedia CD-ROMs.

Windows NT 4.0

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From our experience, one of the most reliable virus scanners around. Thunderbyte will detect all known viruses, plus guard against new and unknown viruses. For full protection and virus cleaning capabilities you will need to register, but the shareware version will alert you to any virus you may have and offer several options to getting rid of it.

DOS

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This is a binary conversion utility that is simple but very useful for programmers and students. Just Press a key on your keyboard to see the number displayed in DEC, HEX and OCT formats; pressing plus or minus on the keyboard increases or decreases the number displayed, and Esc closes the program.

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From our experience, one of the most reliable virus scanners around. Thunderbyte will detect all known viruses, plus guard against new and unknown viruses. For full protection and virus cleaning capabilities you will need to register, but the shareware version will alert you to any virus you may have and offer several options to getting rid of it.