Program: Agent Publisher: Forte Inc. Category: Usenet News Reader My Shareware/Freeware Pick of the Week is the Usenet newreader "Agent," from Forté. Agent is a trialware / freeware program for reading Usenet news. Agent is licensed as "Trialware". In other words, you can download Agent and try it out free of charge for 30 days. After 30 days, [...]
A First Look at Windows 7
Well, the install was a pain. Not really — but my initial install worked extremely smoothly until Windows rebooted. At that point, it simply failed to boot with an ambiguous error message that was less than helpful. It told me to reboot the installation DVD and select the Repair option. When I did selected Repair, [...]
A First Look at Acronis True Image Home 2009
I’ve been using Acronis True Image Home for a long time, as readers of my newsletter know. I started with ATIH 7, then ATIH 9, ATIH 11 and now I use ATIH 2009. Each of the versions included improvements over earlier versions — but when I saw the features of Acronis True Image Home 2009, [...]
Adware Ties into Internet Explorer
I received a query from a reader about a warning message he was receiving: Hi Terry , I was wondering if perhaps you can help me , I have this very annoying adware that occurs EVERYTIME at startup …. not-a-virus:Adware.Win32.BHO.cr Now althugh this doesn’t appeato be causing any problem on my PC and I get [...]
Adware Popups Problem
Subscriber Sheikh Sarwar wrote to ask: When I start pc, lot of popups, programs start showing up. I have to close one by one. Need help in how to (a) stop this messup (b) close all open windows in one shot. Thanks, Sheikh Sarwar I wrote back to advise Sheikh that it sounded like an [...]
Advertising and the Web
There is a very popular misconception that the Internet — especially the Web — is free. We get that feeling because most sites are freely open to the public — they don’t require memberships fees or subscriptions fees for you to access the sites. Sometimes, we get that feeling because we pay to access the [...]
Adobe Reader Versions and When to Upgrade
Subscriber Diane wrote with a question about Adobe Reader, the program that reads .pdf files: I have Acrobat Reader 5.0 and lately couldn’t open some things. After being “advised” to download a later version, I got 6.0 downloaded but not installed. Then I saw info about 7.0 today. I’d REALLY like some advice about the [...]
Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat Security Alert
US-CERT, the computer emergency response team that is now part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, on February 20, 2009, released a Cyber Security Alert warning about Adobe Reader versions 9 and earlier and Adobe Acrobat (Professional and Standard) versions 9 and earlier. According to the US-CERT release, the issue is that JavaScrpt, as [...]
