These downloads, mostly free, will help you optimize your communications with others, improve security, and generally improve your online life.Preston Gralla, PC World
Like most people visiting PCWorld.com, you most likely live on the Internet. And that means you need help--help with your home or business network for accessing the Internet, help with troubleshooting, help with downloading, and with e-mail, instant messaging, and security.
We've got that help for you--in 14 great downloads. Whether you need a universal messenger, a way to troubleshoot e-mail problems, or programs to keep yourself safe, downloadable software can come to the rescue.
General Networking and Internet Tools
Need to troubleshoot your network, manage your downloads, get a free alternative to the bloated Adobe Reader? Here's where to go. (And that's just the beginning of these nifty downloads.)
1 - PingInfoView
The simplest of all Internet tools is the humble ping command, which lets you use the command prompt to contact a Web site and see if it is alive and responds to your ping request. It also resolves host names to IP addresses--in other words, if you issue the command ping www.pcworld.com, it will tell you the site's associated IP address. And it also tells you the speed of the connection and response.
The free PingInfoView makes the simple ping command a lot more useful. It lets you ping multiple Web sites simultaneously, will ping the sites on any schedule you set, and displays the results in a graphical interface, rather than in a command prompt.
Is this an earth-shaking tool? Certainly not. But if you use ping at all, you'll find it a useful, worthy alternative.
| Price: Free
2 - VisualRoute 2008 Lite
Here's another update of a venerable command line Internet tool, tracert. The command line tool displays the route you take to contact a Web server or other Internet device--every hop on every server or router along the way, plus the server's or router's IP address, and how long it takes to get to each one.
This program displays all that in a visually appealing way, not just through the command line. It shows a map of every hop, and graphs it against a background that shows response times. Highlight any hop, and you'll see important details, such as packet loss and speed.
In addition, the program displays a narrative of the route, detailing whether the route has fast, average, or slow throughput, and highlighting any problems.
This version of VisualRoute is free, but a variety of for-pay versions is also available, with many extra features that display the network names of devices, test DNS services, and more.
| Price: Free
3 - Foxit Reader
What's the most annoying Internet-related application of all time? For many people, that question has a simple answer: Adobe Reader. Countless documents online are in the Acrobat format, so there's no way around it: You need Adobe Reader. But it's bloated and prone to crashes, nobody's idea of a good time.
Foxit Reader is a far better solution. It's small and loads much faster, so it doesn't take up much memory when you use it. It also doesn't seem to suffer from the same instability issues as does Adobe Reader. The program has some nice extras as well, such as the ability to embed comments. (However, when you embed comments, the page you mark up will show that you're using an evaluation version of the software. You can pay for the Pro pack to get rid of those marks, and get some other extras as well.)
Note that when I installed the program, it integrated directly into Internet Explorer as the default PDF reader, but it didn't similarly integrate into Firefox. To make it the default in Firefox, you'll have to select Tools, Options, and then click the Manage button in the File Types area. Double-click each of the files that Adobe Reader opens, and tell Firefox to use Foxit Reader instead.
| Price: Free
4 - Advanced LAN Scanner
If you're a techie and have more than one PC at work or home on a network sharing a single Internet connection, you'll welcome this freebie, which offers surprisingly powerful scanning capabilities. Use it for everything from troubleshooting Internet connections, to network configuration, to making sure your PCs are as safe as possible when they're on the Internet.
When you first run the program, you may encounter an error message, saying that a default configuration is being used. You can safely ignore that message. Simply click the scan button, and it goes to work. It looks across your network, finds all PCs on it, and then gives you quite a bit of detail about each. Besides the local IP address of each PC, you'll also find which ports on each PC are open. Armed with that information, you can use a firewall to close them down.
In addition to open and closed ports, you'll see lots more information, such as what services are running on each PC, the NetBIOS names (if any) associated with each, and even a list of users and groups on each system. If any machines have shared folders, you'll see those as well. All this data is immensely useful to those who want to keep their PCs secure, or need to troubleshoot networks or Internet connections.
Making the software all the more remarkable is that it's free.
| Price: Free
5 - FlashGet
If you live to download, this freebie is for you. It's a great download manager that will speed up the process, keep you safe, and help you organize everything that you've downloaded. Flashget makes downloads faster by using multithreading, and it lets you find downloads via many different protocols, including HTTP, FTP, eMule, and others. It's also terrific at file management, showing you all the files you've downloaded, including information about each. You'll even be able to delete downloaded files from directly in the program.
Making it even more useful is that it integrates with your browser, so whenever you download, it jumps into action. It will also pause and resume downloads, and works with your antivirus software to scan for viruses as it downloads.
| Price: Free
*** From: http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,147155-c,utilities/article.html
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