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It's a phenomenon - but is it good software? Click the link to find out more.
It's a great idea - check and read all your POP3 and web-based email boxes from a single interface. But this product is not a professional product. Its UI is messy, it uses gobs of temporary files which it leaves cluttering your disk, and - worst of all - it depends blindly on IE components. Sorry.
Far better results than WebFerret, written in Delphi and therefore bloated, and it's amazing what Borland (oops, Inprise, sorry) can do for standard controls. But this latest version, with its bloated HTML results files which are so clever at crashing browsers, makes you wonder. Alta Vista produces far better results in a fraction of the time. All Copernic does is assemble the same kind of results file on your local machine and waste your local CPU clocks instead of the search engine server's.
And what with Copernic Technologies' policy towards memory leaks - well this constitutes monster bloatware - and the most dangerous kind.
We use to like it. One has a tendency to like things that are free. But of late we've seen just what a monster this program is. It turned out to be more work editing the junk out of Fp files than if we'd just gone the hard route in the first place. This application is guilty of a lot of that MS 'moronization' John Walker talks about and hates so much. Avoid this one.
There are a lot of download managers out there, but not many that don't come with strings attached. GetRight used to be one. Now it's gone the way of adware too. So caveat emptor.
Oh please. The world's fastest modern browser? Oh really. We've had enough of IE - and Microsoft, and their plumbing tactics - to last a life time. Like watching when a period ('.') is added to the end of a URL and the whole operating system comes crashing down. For that matter, almost all of the misery on the net today is caused by Mr. Monkeysoft, so get with it. If you want to get on their bandwagon, leave us out, and don't come crying to us afterwards asking a lot of silly questions. IE is a waste and never will be otherwise - and it doesn't matter that corporations have bought into Microsoft's 'embrace and expand' on this one. Keep the Internet free - get yourself another browser, any one at all.
A classic case of bloat, and what can and does go wrong with the industry. The earliest releases of this program were well under a megabyte to download. Current releases are over five times as large. All the while the product loses stability and gains a whole planet of dangerous bugs. Plus Steve Case, considered by many to be BlunderMaster of the Universe. This is no longer a valid piece of software. You might succeed in using it without major disasters occurring - but you're lucky in such case, you've inadvertently steered clear of the gaping holes in the foundation of its design. ICQ is today a piece of junk.
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Another example of what can go wrong in the industry from the end user side of things. This author woke up one day and saw a computer sitting on his desk and never once suspected others out there might be using them too. This product is the software equivalent of the news group contributor who refuses to read the FAQ before joining in. In general, beware of all those 'Notepad replacements' out there. Most of them are anything but - if you want a 'real' powerhouse source code editor, consider CodeWright from Premia - but that'll cost you (and if you're into that sort of thing, it may still be worth it).
Sorry. Nothing significant here not found on several dozen other Winsock utilities - that is if you don't count the hundreds of kilobytes wasted trying to outwit you from stealing the program. This is so overdone it's actually rather pathetic. Get CyberKit, NetLab, Sam Spade, or Spike instead and save your money. Kirk has another product which he doesn't release as shareware - it comes on CD to your door - and Kirk does know his stuff about the net. But even so both products smack of too much bloat and too much anti-hacking code, as if the author is himself a former hacker and sees too much of the 'dark side' in things. Hackers really respect Kirk because he gave them such a challenge (but yes they did crack NetScan Tools in the end, of course they did). But you're not paying for anti-hacking code - you're supposed to be buying an Internet utility bundle. So if you've already started that multi-megabyte download, think about it - think about what you're downloading, wasting your online time for.
Wasn't Norton the guy who wrote that Unerase program in Pascal that kept getting knocked out of the machine because of stack overflow? Who says they're any better today? We sure don't. Norton Speed Disk is a big disappointment. One thing that a disk defragger needs is fluff - as you're going to be sitting there staring at your monitor you need to have something halfway entertaining and informative. NSD's display is atrocious - it might or might not do a good defrag, but who has the patience to wait? NSD also is guilty of one of the basic bloopers in this field: it actually fragments files and directories on its way to perfection. And when you're supporting NTFS, why for goodness sake supply a 16-bit install program? For now, we say 'defer'. Maybe in a while it might be profitable to try again.
Sorry. This is not a defragger. Diskeeper might not shine on the UI, but Executive Software knows how to optimize an NTFS disk. The authors of O&O Defrag don't have a clue. Expect to wait a long time for anything to happen - and then get butted out for lack of memory.
Impressive site, Novell programmers, blow-your-mind-away white paper - are these the pretenders to the throne in NTFS defragmentation? Hardly. When you finally have the 6MB bloat monster on disk and install it, run it, throw tomatoes at it, and in the end give up on it and revert to Diskeeper, you'll see what a horrible mess it's made of your disks too. Check Raxco's own user forums for further nightmare testimonials - the few letters they receive testify to the horrors that await.
Casey has done his homework, but this app is burdened by its VB code. Our CIP can blow TweakDUN away on URL resolution and VB can't get TweakDUN any closer. Also, a subtle and potentially dangerous bug: watch out for disabling your hosts file with TweakDUN - the only setting it's interested in is its own and things can get screwed up. And if the program ever crashes on you, you've had it. You'll have to go in manually and find what it did with your hosts file and find some way of restoring it (tsk tsk, Casey). We've tried using TweakDUN to improve our transfer rates and haven't noticed a difference, but minions swear by this program.
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