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Spam is a nasty thing. It clogs up your inbox; it takes your time and attention to get rid of it. There are lots of tools out there to help get rid of it, but many of them require that you change your email client to get that protection. True, that copy of EZMailDesktopClient you've been using forever could be replaced, but it works just right with your routine. How can you add anti-spam functionality to that old tool?

Spam Experts Home is an app that may be just the ticket for you. Instead of replacing your familiar email program, Spam Experts Home sits between you and your mail server. Whenever your email program asks the server to give it any new mail that has accumulated, Spam Experts Home intercepts that request, and it downloads the new messages. It then sorts through them, and sends the good ones along to you. It works with both POP3 and IMAP mail systems, so it will probably work for you.

Using a "training period", Spam Experts Home lets you teach it what is spam and what isn't. Over time, it learns your preferences, and will get better and better and trashing the real spam, and letting the good stuff come through.

Spam Experts Home is a free download for home use. It runs on Win2k or later, although they are still working on Vista compatibility.

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There are a lot of anti-virus solutions available out there. Unfortunately, they're expensive and they require a fair amount of horsepower to run them on your computer. It seems like a combination of low price, thrifty use of resources, and frequent updates might be just the ticket.

AVG Anti-Virus is a free solution for non-commercial home use. It isn't a resource hog, so your system won't get bogged-down while you protect yourself from nasties. With regular updates pushed to your system, you'll always be prepared for the worst that the Internet has to offer. AVG is constantly on the lookout for problems in real-time with its Resident Shield, keeping an eye on files as they open and applications as they run. The Virus Vault quarantines infected files, keeping them from wreaking havoc on your system. Email scanning keeps an eye on attachments that come along with your messages.

The Free Edition of AVG Anti-Virus is available for Windows (Win95 and later), and some flavors of Linux.

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Morning is a crazy time, with so much to do: roll out of bed, exercise, shower, newspaper, breakfast, kids out the door, off to work. The most hectic time of the day hits before you're really conscious, and doesn't let up until you've run through the list. Startup is hard.

Your computer thinks so, too. When you boot your system up, it goes through all kinds of tasks to check itself out, get situated, and get its head together. And then there's the apps you want it to run too. Maybe you have your email program start automatically. Maybe there are folders you have opened. Network drives to be mapped. Anti-virus and anti-spyware apps. The list goes on and on. Just like you, your computer may work the hardest as it's just getting going.

Did you ever wonder exactly what your system was doing while all this was going on? Run Monitor is a free tool to help you get a handle on start-up. It will provide you with a list of what exactly is happening during this very busy time in your computer's day. In addition, you can take control of the process by adding, changing, or removing tasks from your machine's startup regimen. Add an important new task to start-up, or remove an old one that you really don't need any more–it's up to you.

Run Monitor helps you take control of your windows-based computer's start-up process. If only it could help the kids get dressed faster.

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Just think how much information you touch each day. You log into your email program. You log into your bank's website. You log in to edit your blog. The list goes on and on. And you use a different, non-trivial password for each account, right? Or maybe not.

The best passwords are those that are long and random. It's easy to guess your dog's name, but a dozen or two mixed upper- and lower case letters, a few digits, and a couple of punctuation marks thrown in for good measure? Pretty secure, both from the "bad guys", but also from you. How can you remember that great, unbreakable password? Maybe you shouldn't even try. A tool like Password Prime may be the best way to deal with all the complexity.

Password Prime allows you to create the complex, not-so-easy-to-crack passwords that you really should be using. Rather than having them all jotted down on PostIt's around your monitor, your passwords can be carefully tucked into Password Prime, where they await you, encrypted, and hidden behind just one password. Rather than having to remember all of those passwords now, you have only one to keep track of.

Password Prime lets you sort to find what you're looking for. Links to your sites are included, so one click takes you where you want to go. Built-in copy and paste functionality makes it easy to log in once you're there.

Isn't it time for some real protection for your information?

Download Password Prime

It's a dangerous world out there. Porn sites, chat rooms, websites that want to install questionable apps on your system. You don't want keep your kids completely away from the Internet, but you don't want to give them free rein either. What's a parent to do?

While it's called "Crawler Parental Control", it might be better termed "Access Control". Not only will Crawler Parental Control help keep your kids away from seedy- or dangerous neighborhoods online, but it can also be part of your overall system security regimen. While preventing visits to places you'd rather not have your system go, but you can also block installation onto your computer of unauthorized applications–or the accidental removal of programs or data that you want to have on your system.

Crawler Parental Control also allows you to better monitor the amount of time spent online by setting limits for when users can use your computer and how long they can stay on. Detailed activity reports let you know exactly what's going on with your machine, helping you to maintain better control.

Crawler Parental Control is designed for Windows machines running Win2k or WinXP.

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The name says it all: PC Decrapifier gets rid of all the crap on your system.

When you buy a new computer, you get not only the computer, but also demo versions of every kind of software imaginable. Some of this may be good–you might actually find something useful in the array of stuff on the system. Most of it, however, probably really isn't what you had in mind, and you might be better served to get rid of it. This is where the aptly named PC Decrapifier comes in.

PC Decrapifier is designed to seek out and remove items from a huge list of typical extra stuff that comes loaded on new PCs. User configurable, you can choose what to remove and what to keep in place. You may want to take advantage of the free six months worth of antivirus that came with your new system, for example, but have no intention of ever signing up for the cheap-o dialup ISP that is featured prominently on your desktop.

PC Decrapifier is aimed at relatively new systems, so it knows what to look for on those machines. Older machines probably can't take advantage of its features, however, since they had their own list of "can't live without it" apps from back in the day.

PC Decrapifier is a Windows app aimed primarily at XP or later.

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How much sensitive data do you have on your system? Can you be sure it won’t accidentally–or otherwise–fall into the wrong hands? Passwords, financial data, the list goes on. It’s just too dangerous to have that kind of stuff sitting around. You need some way to protect yourself and that important information.

File Waster securely encrypts your files, using state-of-the-art encryption methods. You can also choose to compress your files as they are encrypted, saving space at the same time that you are protecting your sensitive data. And File Waster will recurse subdirectories, so you can encrypt multiple files or whole projects all at once.

Secure data is not much good, though, if the original files were just deleted at the operating system level. After it’s done encrypting your files, File Waster goes back and wipes the originals, making it impossible for anybody to get them back. You can even use this cleanup facility if you aren’t encrypting your files, so you may want to integrate it into your regular machine maintenance routines.

File Waster will run on any Win32 system from '95 up to Vista.

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Your computer's a busy place. Things happening, data coming and going; how do you keep track of it all? CurrPorts is a good place to start.

CurrPorts keeps track of which ports on your system are open and who is using them. For all TCP and UDP connections, you can see instantly which process–by name and PID–is using it, who owns the process, and when it started. Suspicious processes, those without version information or application icons, are highlighted so that you can pay special attention to them.

If you see something unwanted happening, you can choose to close a given port, or even kill the offending process. Along with monitoring activity on-screen, you can also save log info to .html or .xml files, or as tab-delimited text files.

CurrPorts doesn't support Win98/ME, but it will work with NT, Win2k, and later.

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Viruses, spyware, phishing, zombie computers–it’s a jungle out there. By the time you add enough tools to your system to keep the “bad guys” at bay, there’s no room for you to actually work with your system.

Blink Personal Edition is a soup-to-nuts security solution for personal and home office use. Incorporating tools that protect against viruses and spyware, firewalls for system and applications, registry protection, and much more, it can replace a host of other tools, and since it has a much smaller footprint than those other apps, your system won’t become overloaded and you will actually be able to work, rather than dedicating all your resources to protecting your system.

Available as a free, one-year subscription, Blink Personal Edition will run on a P2-233 at 233 MHz, and only requires 60MB of disk space. It is compatible with Win2k and later.

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Can you ever be too careful? Most new OS’s have built-in firewalls, but many older systems don’t. It’s just too dangerous out there to connect to the Internet without at least a software firewall between you and the bad guys out there. Enter Jetico Personal Firewall.

This application does all the things a good software firewall should do: it’s a packet filter that can hide you from non-trusted machines, it monitors applications as they send data out from your system, and keeps you informed at all times about what your system is doing, so you can stop it if Trojans or other bad things are trying to “phone home” or involve you as an unwitting participant in the next great DDoS attack.

Along with keeping track of packets and applications that come and go, Jetico Personal Firewall logs significant events. The end user can enhance the predefined set of policies, allowing just the right level of firewall protection.

Jetico Personal Firewall has been localized in several languages, and is compatible with Win95 and later.

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