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Personal finance made easy

Money Decoder promises to help users sort out their complex mixture of income, bills, and debt for a clear financial status. With all the variables involved, this program makes organizing the user's future relatively easy, with one catch.

From the very start this program makes organizing assets, incomes, and liabilities very simple. The Help menu instantly advises users not to waste time searching for bills, but to take educated guesses and correct the work once monthly bills arrive. In addition, when the user scrolls over any of the boxes that need data, a screen at the top tells what … Read more

Quick access to windows

You can do nearly everything that Admiral does, but not nearly as quickly. This simple program works through hot keys and the context menu of your system tray icon to quickly open a specific window or program. We suggest you jump right in and start using the program before changing any settings.

The tabbed Properties window is initially intimidating, but if you've spent time using the program, they'll make much more sense. Here, you can set hot keys to activate the Window Management, Quick Opening, and Process Control features. You can also set hot keys that will determine … Read more

Nothing new here

If you're not interested in BitTorrents, this free toolbar won't offer anything the standard toolbar doesn't already have. If you are familiar with BitTorrents, you may be disappointed in this toolbar's relatively meager offerings.

The BitTorrent Toolbar adds a customizable toolbar to Internet Explorer. At first, only BitTorrent-related features appear, and they include a standard search field, and links to see sites related to BitTorrents or to sites that have them. The toolbar is on the plain side, but you can customize it with shortcuts to frequently used applications and programs, and all of the typical … Read more

Ineffective optimizer

Users looking for a fast, efficient program to get rid of clutter and speed up their systems will probably be disappointed by this feature-light program.

Speedup Wizard has a professional, functional look, but lacks any solid features. It offers a generic real-time view of system resources, such as CPU load, memory usage, virtual memory, and hard drive space, but lacks any way to measure these resources. The program claims to speed up a clunky system, but users have very few options to choose from to get the job done. Options include a normal- or high-speed setting and the capability to … Read more

Multioption desktop alarm

Alarm Clock Pro makes organizing your life via your desktop a breeze, assuming you can untangle the innovative options. By offering users a wide swath of date-keeping and time-monitoring options you can make your life simpler, however, learning the program itself may take up the bulk of this newfound time.

Alarm Clock Pro will appeal to anyone who is used to the multiple alarm features that Outlook offers. Unlike Outlook, this simple to install 15-day free trial is independent of a calendar or e-mail system. The many unique aspects are the alarm's capability to function on a specific day … Read more

Worth the effort

iMoney gives users an opportunity to manage every aspect of their financial world, from mortgage payments to budgeting their hair appointments for the year. With such great detail comes an incredible amount of work on the user's part, but the results are worth it.

The 30-day free trial's best features lie within its flexibility. iMoney allows users to review, manage, and budget their cash accounts, savings, investments, mortgage, lendings and more. Within the program there are several ways to run reports on these accounts and see where the money is spent, as well as projected worth. Some of … Read more

Pixel Qi talks up low-power displays

I got an e-mail from the folks over at O'Reilly Media mentioning that keynotes and other presentations from the company's ETech 2009 conference, held earlier this month, were now online at the ETech 2009 site. I missed that show, but I was interested in one of the keynotes, so I surfed on over to take a look.

The keynote I was looking for was indeed online: Mary Lou Jepsen, CEO of Pixel Qi and formerly CTO of the One Laptop Per Child organization, talking about "Low-Cost, Low-Power Computing." You can watch a video of the presentation … Read more

Sparse information tool

Users who want to learn more about their computer system's inner workings will find this program fast and precise, but may want to look for something with a few more features.

Spectra Hardware Information Tool is a sparse program with a very specific function: to find information about the system's hard drive and processor. This program does produce quick, accurate results, but lacks the common features of other information tools, such as real-time processor speed. While the program does exactly what it says, there are no extra features that might enhance the appeal of this product. During installation, … Read more