I had used Napster for a little over a year when I was banned from their service. So like many others I needed to find an alternative mp3 downloading program. I first tried
BearShare, but maybe it was the fact that I use a dial-up but it just didn't work quite like I had hoped it would. Plus it has spyware attached to the program. Then I stumbled upon a program called
WinMX. At first it connected to all of the Napster servers plus various other open-nap servers, including MusicCity. But since Napster has shut down in anticipation of switching over to a pay service and MusicCity has closed their open-nap services in favor of a program that I just hated,
Morpheus, they have developed their own peer to peer system. When I initially downloaded it I assumed that I would be disappointed. I was pleasantly surprised. Not only did I download faster than on napster, but I was thrilled to discover that the hell of terminated downloads was, for the most part, over. WinMX allows you to resume downloads from another user if the file name & size are equal. There is more than an adequate selection of music to choose from plus you can share any type of file at all. All in all this is the program to get if you download MP3s at all. Even my wife, Kristie uses this program so this is...
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What can be said about this handy little program that already hasn't been said. At first the only MP3 player I used was
Real Jukebox. I thought real jukebox had a nicer interface and more organizational type tools. But as I downloaded more & more songs it started working slower and slower. Finally I decided I had to find another MP3 player.
I had downloaded WinAmp before but was turned off by the rather unorthodox interface. Everything was just to small to see in my opinion. But I had read all of the glowing reviews concerning this program so I decided to check it out again.This time I studied the interface a little harder and decided that it wasn't so bad after all. My primary reason for preferring WinAmp is the fact that when you can load an individual song or a playlist whereas with Jukebox when you open it up it has to access every song that you have. When you have over 1,300 songs as I do, that can take some time and precious memory. It also has a great sound. You probably already have this program, but if not I definitely recommend it.
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You know how when you download a song, sometimes it has this huge gap in between when the MP3 starts and when you actually start hearing music or when the music stops and the actual end of the MP3? Well, this handy little application takes care of all that. It allows you to trim the excess of the beginning and end of MP3s. Pretty handy, wouldn't ya say?
But wait, that's not all! If you download now you will also receive the ability to regulate volume. Actually, anytime you download you'll have this ability. It's all part of the package. Anyway, I'm sure you've downloaded a song and the volume isn't quite where it should be? You have to crank the volume up very loud or turn it down some. This program has this system, and I have no idea how it works, that analyzes the volume and corrects it. We don't use this program for every MP3 we download, although you could probably save a ton of storage space by trimming every song in your collection. We primarily use this when we make a cd. It also gives you the ability to fade a song in or out. This program is a nice little addition to any MP3 toolbox.
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When we first got our cd-writer we could not burn MP3s to disk. I didn't know why and still don't. Since we got
Easy CD Creator we've been able to burn MP3s, but we still prefer to burn wavs. What does all this information have to do with Mpeg Suite? Well, this is the best Mpeg decoder I've run into. It's relatively fast and it produces a quality wav file. It has a couple of well known codecs loaded so
you know you're gonna get a pretty good output. Not only does it decode, it also encodes wav files to Mpegs and converts high bitrate MP3s into lower bitrates, which is nice for saving storage space. This along with the previous program featured here,
MP3 Trim is used every time we make a cd. The site says that it has two bugs, one that make it do nothing on some systems and one that makes it unusable under Windows 2000. I reckon you need to just try it and see whether or not it works for you. Now, when you go to this site there will be a huge closed sign at the top. You can still download the application from the site, I reckon that just means that you don't have to worry about missing the latest version because you have the last version. If you prefer to burn wavs to MP3s this is the way to go.
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When I Gave up Real Jukebox I needed some way to organize my MP3s. After many downloads of programs that were either not up to the task or ones that were loaded with more bells and whistles than I would ever need, I found this little program. It's a database type application that you can load your MP3s into. You can have several volumes of music. Maybe Mom's version, Dad's version and one for little Johnny.
You can organize them by file name, artist, song title, bit rate or anything listed in the ID3 tag. There is also a renaming utility included with it, but I have to be honest and tell you that I haven't figured that one out yet. I use the search utility quite a bit. Don't you just hate it when you download this great old song and realize that you downloaded it a year ago. I check all the classic country songs I intend to download against my collection using this program before I download. Of course, if you don't remember you have a certain song, I guess that just means you don't need it in the first place. A handy little program.
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Probably one of my first freeware downloads and still one of my favorites. You can apply themes that came with your PC or you can mix and match to get just the right atmosphere for your desktop.
You can do most of these things in windows in other places but it's about a dozen other places. This is one stop customization. Plus once you have a theme set up that you are in love with, you can save it and load the whole setup again. For example, You have your favorite theme loaded but the holidays are rolling around. You being a festive guy or gal want a holiday theme. Because you've saved your favorite customized theme you can load your holiday theme and the day after Christmas you can load your old theme back exactly as it was before. Pretty neat wouldn't you say. This is the one of the
top three.The link I provide here doesn't seems to want to work anymore. It sends you to someplace totally different. I hope this program lives on at another site. It's just to valuable to be lost to time.
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I know that at least once in your life you've looked at the start button on windows and thought to yourself, "By the gods, I wish that there was some way to change that damnable button to say what I want it to say". No? Me neither. But for just a second let your mind wander
and contemplate just how much more personally fulfilled your life would be if only you had a program capable of changing that button. Now, allow your mind to expand even more and imagine that this program also allowed you to change the icon on the button and the tool tip text. Yes, that would be nirvana. Don't think it's quite that earth shattering? Well, me neither. As a matter of fact, I had never thought much at all about it. I ran up on this little program at
The Screen Savers web site. (cool show and cool site, by the way) Anyway, if you're anything like me then you want total control to customize windows and this is just one more small step to that goal. You can do all of these things in the registry but this is so much easier and safer. Above you will see what my start button looks like now. If you're interested in this program, as with all other programs on this page, just click on the image and a new window will open where you can get the program.
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Wow, this thing is fabulous. It does everything that the
IE Personalizer does and more. Of course, IE Personalizer is much easier to use and not quite as dangerous for your system. This program gives you an unbelievable amount of control over how your system looks. I was able to add buttons for
Winamp &
WordWeb to the Internet Explorer Toolbar, which I think is incredibly handy. I was able to change the manufaturer information under "My Computer" properties, by the way, It's no longer called "My Computer" on my computer, It's now "Lanham's Computer". I did that with X-Setup as well. I was able to change the Blue Screen of Death to a Black Screen of Death, which of course is totally useless, but it's fun. I'm easily amused. There is tons of other things you can do.
This program works on plugins that you can download from the manufacturer or the personal webpages of individuals who design their own plugins. I found out about this through
The Screensavers TV show. The young lady, that does the freeware feature, my favorite part of the show and not just because of the freeware (I think she's a cutie), said that she had some trouble with the program stealing her quick launch bar and not giving it back. So as a result, I tun away from any mention of the quick launch bar. You'll always want to back up the registry before you play with this thing. This thing is very comprehensive. If you've got the guts, go ahead and download it. I love it, but of course if I can squeeze one more personalization feature out of my pc, then I'm there. This program is provided by a company called Xteq Systems, hence the logo to the right.
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I used to have a very similar program called Tclockex. I downloaded this thinking it was an updated version. Nope, I've come to the conclusion that they are two totally different programs. This program was written by a Japanese individual, whereas the previous program I had was written by a South African. Enough, about my confusing of programs. This program changes the style of your clock. You can add seconds, the year, month and other information inmany layouts. Personally, I don't want a lot of
extra text taking up my space, so as you can see, I was able to take away the am/pm text. I figure if you don't know if it's am or pm then you need to shut off the computer and go outside for awhile. TClock always keeps the correct time because it synchronizes itself with NTP Servers. It's got an alarm and you can even set it to chime on the hour. But wait.....that's not all. As you can see, my start button is different than yours. With this program you can change not only your start button, but also the start menu bitmap you see along the left when you press the stop button, you know, the one that says "Windows Whatever". Very cool! You can also change the start button with
StartButton v1.1.80 but I seem to prefer this method. You can make your own bitmaps with this program and as I mentioned you can change your start menu bitmap. It's a nice little item to add to your personalization tool box. You can also see the
TrayManager in this image. Check that program out as well. You can get download TClock directly from this site.
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This is the program that replaced
Hotbar. It does so much more. I am in love with this little item. Below you will see the toolbar I actually use in my day to day surfing. I made it myself in
Paint Shop Pro, (My favorite program of all) and loaded it with IE Personalizer. You will also notice that in the upper right corner of the bar where you more than likely have a little rotating globe, I have a picture of my wife with a swirling background. There's a few other fun little things that this does as well. I was tickled pink to find this. You can click on the toolbar to go to the IE personalizer site.
Download managers resume downloads after you get kicked off the internet and if you have a dial-up, you've been kicked off the internet. Like most people my first download manager was
GoZilla.
It seemed to work for me okay. But it tried to take over as my zipping utility with ZipZilla, which is included. I use
Winzip for that. Plus, it's spyware. I grew to hate it after awhile. I downloaded Flashget from
C-Net. I was quite pleased with the performance. It's a simple little program with not a lot of superfluous bells & whistles, which I hate. It has a simple interface, which I love. I use Flashget simply for large downloads. I keep the default windows downloading utility on my PC. Flashget will set quietly where it belongs until called upon. It works fine for me maybe it will for you as well. Give it a try.
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Ever get tired of the plain boring gray of the internet explorer as you search the internet? I know I did. I'm a feller that enjoys customizing my workspace, so when I heard about this little program I hopped right on it. You can change your I.E. toolbar to an design you want using bitmaps. Pretty cool. The previous version was better in my opinion. The current version puts a toolbar add-on on your Explorer. Mostly
just advertisements and a sub par search engine. Recently, I've found another program to change the toolbar,
IE Personalizer. It's in another category all together. I don't know why. I suppose because the toolbar add-on. Yep, that's why. because of the add-on. Anyway, even though I got rid of this it is a great program if you're a novice with all this computer stuff. IE personalizer is just a little more advanced, plus with that application you have to make your own bitmaps. Hotbar is the program to use if you want to jazz up your explorer without the hassle.
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Don't you just love Google? Put in your own name and see if you can find yourself. It's called vanity
surfing and I've been known to partake. The best search engine for that sort of thing is Google. And now you can take the power of Google anywhere with you on the web with the Google toolbar. As you can see by the small screen shot to the right there just what it looks like. It opens up a separate window with your search results so you never have to leave the page you are on. It also gives you a little graph of the Google ranking of the page. There's a long explanation of how they come up with the ranking figures but it looks boring and math heavy, and I've always hated math so I didn't read it. Plus, there's an info button where you can view cached snapshots of the page, similar sites and the like. Another handy feature of this app is the search term highlights. Let's say you want to search for all of the times that I mention Google. You type in Google into the search field and hit the button and all references to Google will be highlighted. Now, these more advanced options are optional and if you use them you are giving them permission to use your surfing habits to apply to the Google ranking so it is a form of spyware, but unlike most spyware programs you can opt out. I love the Google toolbar. I use it every time I surf the internet. You can see
here what the google toolbar looks like on my browser.
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Early on in my computer life it came to be revealed that henceforth it would be quite difficult to get ahold of me via the telephone, as I was constantly in the same place that you are at this very moment, on the internet. One day as I was searching for freebies I happened to see this program. This is an Internet Answering Machine, pretty cool idea, huh? While you are online, calls to your number are forwarded to another number and at this number your
caller receives a callwave commercial and then they are directed to leave a message. The message is then forwarded over the internet to the callwave program and you can listen to the message as you surf the net. Never miss another call. It seemed a little too perfect, however I downloaded it. The software was free, but you do have to set up "busy call forwarding" on your phone and that costs a small fee on your phone bill. It's no big deal however. The program worked like a charm for me. I eventually received an e-mail from callwave informing me that they would be going to a pay service. I immediately uninstalled the program. Months later I saw the program on my parents computer, they informed me that it was still indeed a free program. So I downloaded it yet again. This time I elected to pay for the custom service. Which includes caller I.D. and the ability to minimize the callwave window. With the free version the window stays open with rotating advertisements. The screenshot to the left is full size so you can see it's really not to intrusive. Being as how
AutoDun doesn't seem to want to work with XP, Callwave has replaced it as one of my
top three programs. This one is definately a kepper.
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I can never remember the dozens & dozens of passwords I have. I have no memory at all. This little thing remembers them all for you. Just start it up when you're on the internet and if you come to a site that you have a stored password for it asks if you'd like to fill it in. Pretty handy, huh?
When you register at any site it will ask you if you's like it to remember it for you, which is nice I think. Plus it stores the information that you have to input when you are registering for any service on the web. Most of the time when you run upon one of these sites asking for information it will pop up and ask if you'd like Gator to fill in the blanks for you. No more cramping hands from typing when you're out signing up for freebies. It also store credit card information but I don't use that for obvious reasons. The only drawback is the fact that this is spyware. It monitors your surfing and every once in awhile a window will pop up trying to sale you something. The pop-ups don't happen enough to be overly annoying. Neat little tool.
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I was never to comfortable with all the spyware involved with
Gator this is a more than adequate alternative.
This program gives you all the advantage of
Gator without those pop-ups I mentioned. It is a more robust program in my opinion. It does take a little more computer savvy to make it work though, I believe. You can have more than one password saved for, as an example,
Hotmail. I don't remeber if
Gator does that or not. I uninstalled
Gator from my system. It took forever to get all that crap they snuck into their program off my system. Also included is a neat little program for moving all your passwords from
Gator to Roboform. Worked like a charm. This is the password prgram I use and the one I recommend.
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Now this little bugger is a trick. I'm amazed it's free. For the longest time I used AT&T Worldnet, which sucks by the way. Of topic totally for a second. They once told me I was online for 300 hours one month and with a 150 hour limit they sent me one hellacious bill. I could not have been on for 300 hours. Their connection wasn't that good. Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Worldnet had their own dial-up automation. I thought all ISPs did. When I finally decided on
Mikrotec,
after a few terrible experiences with a few others that shall remain nameless, I discovered a brand new kind of hell. Every time I opened up explorer to work on HTML or something I would begin connecting to the internet. Trust me, it was annoying. I found this at
ZDNet Downloads. I really didn't have any idea what it did. I was just on a freeware frenzy at the time. What it does is this; It automates windows dial-up networking and quoting the homepage for it, "
In its simplest configuration, AutoDUN will automatically start your dial-up connection, monitor it until a connection is made and then open your Web browser. When you click the 'Auto Disconnect' button, AutoDUN will disconnect your dial-up connection and close your browser.
" All that is great but it will also start any additional programs you need while you surf and then close them down when you disconnect. I have mine configured to load AOL IM & Gator on start up and shut them down again when I disconnect. Plus there is a monitor that tells you how long you were connected for a calendar month. It's never been anywhere near 300 hours let me tell you. Great program. One of the
top three freeware programs listed here, in my opinion.
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In October of 2001 I got a new computer preloaded with XP home edition. A month before XP was officially released. XP is pretty cool. Anyway, one of the very few programs that will not work in XP, is one of my former top three favorites,
AutoDun. I searched high and low for a suitable replacement. There's not a lot of this type of dial-up programs out there apparently.
I eventually found one called
LemonDialer. It was okay, but not as robust as what I was used to. I like to be able to start certain programs automatically without having to do anything myself. Plus I am used to hitting the connect button on my keyboard and instantly dialing up. This program could do neither. Then I found SuperDialer 2000. While it's still not
AutoDun, it does nearly all the things I want it to do. Just hit one button and you are connecting. When you are connected the programs start any programs that you program into it. All in all, an adequate replacement. It still doesn't earn top three status though. I reckon that's because I was just so attached to
AutoDun and also because I reinstalled
Callwave, which took that spot.
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This is a neat little trick.
I primarily use it when I am writing HTML. I need the url of a certain site in my favorites, so instead of actually going to that site or clicking properties, I just click on the button provided in your right click menu. This has many other uses as well. That's why I included it in Internet Tools category. This is what the producer has to say about their freeware product; "CopyURL is a shell extension that helps you to copy different information from your Internet Shortcut files (entries in the Favorites folder) to the clipboard. Then you can simply paste it from clipboard to your e-mails, HTML editor or other documents." I think it's a handy dandy little program. Just click on "More Freeware" along the left hand side of the page to get to the download area.
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I download quite a few paint shop pro tutorials. It was always such a pain to do it one page at a time with the save utility that comes with Internet Explorer. I wanted something that would just grab all pages of a tutorial. I looked around quite a bit for one of these website strippers.
After reading many reviews concerning many freeware programs, I decided to go with this one. It does exactly what I wanted it to do. I was surprised that it even was able to handle javascript. The options are a little advanced for me but of course you don't have to use them. It has a basic wizard that makes it as easy as 4 or 5 clicks to get your pages. With this thing I was able to get entire tutorial sites with no problem at all. I mean 12 megabytes of information with hundreds of files. If you feel you need a program like this, then HTTrack would not be a bad choice.
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