This is somthing I wrote a while ago for another forum, I'm just checkin if the BBCode on Rosetta is up to the task.



<a name="top"></a>


<a href="#avg"> <b>AVG</b>, what is it</a>
<a href="#avast"> <b>Avast antivirus</b>, What is it?</a>
<a href="#smoothwall"> <b>Smoothwall</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#sygate"> <b>Sygate Personal Firewall</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#zonealarm"> <b>Zone Alarm</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#adaware"> <b>Ad Aware</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#sbsad"><b>Spy Bot Search & Destroy</b> </a>
<a href="#audacity"> <b>Audacity</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#cdxtractor"> <b>CD DA Xtractor</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#winamp"><b>Winamp</b>, What is it? </a>
<a href="#openoffice"> <b>Open Office</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#thegimp"> <b>The Gimp</b>, what is it? </a>
<a href="#zipgenius"> <b>Zip Genius</b>, what is it?</a>
<a href="#foxmail"> <b>Foxmail</b>, what is it? </a>

</i>



<a name="avg" href="http://www.grisoft.com">AVG</a>
Is an anti-virus programme, that <b><i>for personal use only</i></b> is free to download and free to update.
It has automatic updating, e-mail scanning (both incoming and outgoing), a scheduler (for scanning your computer at some other time, I set mine to 2:00AM daily), A virus vault (somewhere to stick files it cannot fix, so they do no harm) etc... The only problem I've found is that it can't (or wont) edit/fix the <b>Restore Points</b> it just keeps coming up with <b><i> found XXX </i></b> then when you run the scanner it finds nothing which is slighly annoying, but maybe I havn't set an option properly (I fixed this by turning off the restore points, restating, and then turning them back on again and making a restore point straight away) ie I nuked all the restore points, so if my machine died I would of had to re-install

Rates 9/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="smoothwall" href="http://smoothwall.org/"> Smoothwall</a>
Is a <i>hardware</i> firewall, that sits between your computer(s) and the Internet. It can also act as a Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) server (this means your computer(s) get served their IP and lets them know where the "default gateway" (Internet) is) a router, a cache etc... It also cuts up your network into <b>zones</b> Green for the safest, Orange for web servers & mail servers, Red for the big bad internet, and Blue (mod) that handles wireless computers

There is a down side to this type of firewall, and that is that you need and old computer to install it on. <b>It completly wipes the hard disk drive during the install, so don't have anything on it that you want to keep!</b> The minimum computer that smoothwall will work on is a


With this setup you may have some problems with logs getting too big, and you wont be able to run the cache
150 MHz Pentium1
32Mbytes RAM
540Mbyte IDE Hard disk drive
One network card per the zones you want (Red is or course, how you join on to the Internet, and is possibly a network card)
IDE CD-ROM



A more resonable computer
150 MHz Pentum1 or up
64Mbytes or better
1Gbyte IDE Hard disk drive or up
The network card(s) as above
IDE CD-ROM



Any video card will do, that goes for keyboards and monitors too, it's also a good idea to have a floppy disk drive so that you can back up your settings once you have them perfect

Rates 8/10 in the Hugo rating system -2 for being hard to get going with USB->ISND plus 10 for what really is industrial quaility software being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="sygate" href="http://soho.sygate.com"> Sygate Personal Firewall </a>
Is a free <i>software</i> firewall programme, it can <b>Block</b>,<b> Ask</b> or <b>Allow</b> programmes IP/ IP range/ Protocol and MAC address that attempt either to come in or go out of your computer (that's a bit of a mouthful ain't it)I like this particular programme as it is very easy to use for beginners (there's an advanced section if you ever need it), I know that the first time I installed a firewall, I sat there being very confused for most of the time, not understanding any of the questions I was being asked, and being truly daunted. It lessens this greif considerably.

Rates 9/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free note some Win 98/98SE computers have dificulty with it, I had it on my 98SE computer and it worked fine, but it was a menace on my father machine <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="zonealarm" href="http://www.zonealarm.com/">Zone Alarm </a>
Is a free <i>software</i> firewall programme, it does much the same as <a href="#sygate">Sygate Persomal Firewall</a> but I think is a little harder for beginers to setup, though I must say there's talk about the new one being a breeze to install and configure. More power to them :thumbs up:. The old version also had a problem of not being able to capture the screen all of the time, so if you started a computer game and then tried to join or host the game, everything would stop... It had it's popup window asking do you want to allow this programme to talk in/out, but unfortunatly was under the game screen, so you had to guess how many tabs it was for "yes" or "no" then cross your fingers and hit enter .

Rates 8/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="adaware" href="http://www.lavasoft.com">Ad Aware</a>
Is a programme that cleans up malware (malicious software), spyware, tracking cookies etc... It is a must have, literaly if you don't have it yet, get it, install it, update it, and run it now.

Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

[size] <a name="sbsad" href="http://www.safer-networking.org/en/download/">Spybot Search & Destroy</a> [/size]

Is another type of programme that cleans up spyware etc... Sort of like <a href="#adaware">Ad Aware</a> but if you install it with the <b>tea timer</b> option, it will also stops unaurtherised changes to you registry, this stops Win IE home page hijacks, home page hijack and lock (to that page) and a vast array of spyware / malware affecting your computer. It's another "if you don't have it, get it now" programmes.

Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="audacity" href="http://audacity.sourceforge.net/">Audacity</a>
Is a programme that anybody who plays around with sound, be it a musician, garage band or you just want to add new sound effects to somthing (without a Macintosh, which has <a href="http://www.apple.com/ilife/garageband/">Garage Band</a> that by all reports is even better) should have, it saves output (from your cd etc..), it saves input from your microphone, MIDI etc... all on new tracks that can be adjusted in volume, muted, just too much to try and list... each time you record a new track it will play the others if you want, like I said too much stuff to list, an excellent programme if you want to record music/sound effect or just want to see just how badly you sing

Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="cdxtractor" href="http://xtractor.sourceforge.net/">CD X-Tractor</a>
Is best explained by it's own info which is below
Quote:

CD-DA X-Tractor is a lightweight, fast, and free program for digitally extracting audio from CD-roms, written for 32-bit Windows platforms (95/98/2000/NT). If the CD-rom unit on your computer supports Digital Audio Extraction and has an ASPI manager installed, CD-DA X-Tractor can directly read the audio from your music CD-roms and store it on your hard drive in either WAV, MP3 or Ogg Vorbis format. Under Windows NT and 2000, it can even work without an ASPI manager via the SCSI passthrough interface. For MP3 encoding, the BladeEncoder DLL and LAME Encoder DLLs are both supported. It works on most all ATAPI (IDE) CD-roms, and on some SCSI and CD-R/RW devices.CD-DA X-Tractor has its roots in AKRip, a small, command-line based ripper. It's main goals are to be small, fast and free.


Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="winamp" href="http://www.winamp.com">Win amp</a>
Is a free media player, that is better for some things than Microsoft's Media Player.To start with it will play the "ogg Vorbis" format. The equalizer has 60 170 310 600 1K 3K 6K 14K 16K independantly -12db to +12db adjustable. The ability to play all the media in a directory (folder) and it's subdirectories (sub folders). The options for local media are Audio, Video, Most Played, Recently Added, Recently Played, Never Played, Top Rated. It of course has streaming media, Internet TV, Internet radio, it also has Winamp.com audio, Winamp.com Videos. Let's just say there's a lot to this app and all of it good.

Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="openoffice" href="http://www.openoffice.org/">Open Office</a>
Is a open source platform independanet programme much like Microsoft Office.It has a Spreadsheet, Document Editor, Presentation, Labels, HTML editor, Business Cards etc.. All for free, it can also save in Microsoft Word formats, StarWriter formats, Rich Text, Text, Text Encoded and Web page (that's just the Text editor, the speadsheet can of course save in mutilple formats too and so forth). It has a dictionary (spell check on the fly etc...) that can be added to, though the offered words are worse than Word, being a bad speller I know I sometimes guess and wait for the options to come up, where Word would almost always have the word I was looking for, I confuse the hell out of Open Office.

Rates 8/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="thegimp" href="http://www.gimp.org/">The Gimp</a>
Is a open source platform independant graphics editor, far better than anything that the majority of us use. Of course if you already have purchased something like Photoshop this isn't for you. I've only played with this in Linux, but it's something to see, one screen full of options and another with the image I'm editing, I particulaly like the slider bar when saving Jpeg files, slide it one way and the quality and file size goes down, slide it the other quality and file size goes up, great for keeping web pictures small but of good quality. Has the full gamit of options you would expect, layers, transparancy setting, merge all the layers together, anchoring etc... Has some stablility problems, or so the blurb says, it's never died on me but like I said I only use it in Linux, so the Win code may be a little buggy.

Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="zipgenius" href="http://www.zipgenius.it">Zip Genius</a>
Is an compression / decompression programme, that handles


7z
ACE
ARC
ARJ
BZ2
CAB
CZIP
GZ
JAR / WAR / EAR
LZH / LHA
MIM / B64
PAK
RAR
SQX
TAR
TAS
TGZ
UUE
XXE
YZ1
Z
ZIP
ZOO


It has options galore, and so far it has never had a problem <i>I've been using it for about 6 months</i>.

Rates 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="foxmail" href="http://www.foxmail.com.cn/english/index.htm">Foxmail</a>
Is a programme that gathers E-mail from both POP3 and web mail sites, you of course can have multiple POP3's and web mail sites for it to connect to, I must admit I've been a little reluctant to mentions this one for a while, as I thought it might be Chinese government attempt to collect mail / monitor web mail, still not sure, but then again what do I have to hide from the Chinese government hey? It's slick code, it picks up my Hotmail and Yahoo mail with no trouble at all. With the added benifts of, not having to log in and look at their ads and it downloads everything (deleting it at the web mail site) so I can use a Win Express type environment, Sent Items, Drafts etc... I also told it to chuck hotmail <i> news </i> in the trash. Ive done a bit of packet sniffing and have found no <b>dodgey brothers</b> at all. The only problem is that Ad Aware thinks that the Chinese encoding <b>3721 Cmail</b> is the spyware company 3721, but it's not. Just goto Tools->Options uncheck the <b>enable 3721</b> check box, and let Ad Aware do it's thing.

Rates <b><i>scratches chin, possibily</i></b> 10/10 in the Hugo rating system plus 5 for being free <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

<a name="avast" href="http://www.avast.com/eng/down_home.html">Avast Antivirus</a>
is free for home use. You register at the site, they provide you with a registration code that you enter into your program. It automatically updates, or you have the option of updating it manually (or you can do both). It gets very high ratings from most of the rating sites, and the major pc mags. The last time I looked, it rated as high as AVG, Norton, or McAffee. It's easy to use, and it works. I haven't had any virus problems since I started using it over a year ago, and it has caught 3 or 4 viruses before they made it onto my machine. It has all the normal bells and whistles, including e-mail scanning, and removable media scanning. I tried it originally because my computer didn't seem to like AVG.

x/x in the Huh...what rating system gets 5 form hugo cause it free;) <a href="#top">back to the top </a>

---

This post has nothing to go with Rosetta I hope a mod or dev can amd will delete it......

---

BOINC Wiki

This post has nothing to go with Rosetta I hope a mod or dev can amd will delete it......

No, sorry - he's working on BBCode for use by the forums on Rosetta. Approved purpose, and the thread title _was_ "testing", and it's in the right place...

---