Monday, August 20, 2001		Downloads of the week

Have you ever been on a site that was so big you got lost? Did you ever want to clean up the taskbar of browser windows because you kept shift-clicking sites not to lose your place? Did you ever want to split a browser window so that you can see two different views of a site? Have you ever wanted to have a page to auto-refresh a certain amount of time? Well, Internet surfer was designed to do all the above things and more! It requires Internet Explorer 4.0 or higher and Windows 95/98/NT/2000/ME. Here are some of the tricks you can play with this program. You can easily switch between views by doing Ctrl+Tab. To view links from one view to another, simply click, hold, drag and drop a link from one view to another. To quickly enable or disable the MultiView Loading feature do Alt+M. To quickly enable or disable the AutoRefresh feature, do Alt+P. When splitting views, you can put a search engine on one view drag links over to the other view. Quickly navigate to a site by pressing F4. You can quickly navigate to a site while another site is loading by pressing F1 and F4 in quick succession. Opening History items is easy. Just click hold drag and drop a link from History to the Internet Surfer. To add a favourite site just right-click on the view and click on Add to Favourites. You can still gain access to Links in IE support mode by pressing Alt+L. Place the Internet surfer in the "Send To" menu and see how it can open up almost any document. Download from  www.geocities.com/jackflacco/InternetSurfer.zip

Popcorn is a freeware ultra-lightweight POP3/SMTP e-mail client, free from unwanted and useless bloat ware features. Being a true client and server application, it does not work the same way as a typical mail program. This means that you can read mail from a POP3 server directly, without downloading it to a local mailbox on your PC (although you can save mail messages locally if you want to). This makes it ideally suited for "on the road" mail access and for scanning, reading and sending mail over the slow Internet connections. Popcorn supports multiple user profiles, enabling you to read and send mail from any number of different POP3 accounts. It is a small, portable e-mail client, and the kind you can carry on a floppy disk or download quickly from the Web without having to go through any installation procedures. The user profiles and account information is not saved in the local registry, but in a small, portable .INI-file that accompanies the application, enabling you to easily move between locations. Using Popcorn you can check and send mail from anywhere as long as you have an Internet connection. You can also delete, spam old messages or see if a message has attachments without downloading the messages from the server first. It is perfect for cleaning up and administering multiple POP3 accounts. It requires Windows 95/98/Me, Windows NT 4 or Windows 2000. Download available at www.ultrafunk.com/products/downloads/popcorn.zip

This unique Internet utility allows you to translate between IP address "synonyms." Equivalent IP Address Calculator offers a variety of uses. For example, you may use it to create a "dotless" IP address or to simply make your IP address more difficult to read. By punching in your current IP address, it will list 12 of approximately 120 different formats for IP addresses. Any of these formats will work because they are all recognised by Windows’ ping command. It should also work with other platforms and the Internet software. The program provides instructions on how to use 108 other formats. In addition, the Calculator supports IP addresses with one, two or three lines. It’s a freeware. It works with Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, and 2000. Installing this program couldn’t be easier. Just put IP.exe where you want it to be. There are no other files to worry about. There is no set-up to mess up with. When you are done with it, simply delete or move it elsewhere. Instructions for using this software can be found in the program’s help menu. The current version can be found at http://mark.thecomputer.com/ip

InComp Dial-Up Performance Monitor is a replacement for Windows Dial-Up Status Monitor with more useful things like showing transfer speed in bytes per second etc. It can be used with Windows 95/98 and NT. Dial-Up Performance Monitor is currently in 1st beta version. Simply extract files from the archive to any folder you want. If you use ICQ Net Detect, it is recommended that you add this program to its Launch List. If you want to uninstall Dial-Up Performance Monitor in future, you must only delete that folder where it is installed. If you want, you can also delete settings that are in registry under key: "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\ SOFTWARE\ InComp\DUN Monitor". Download the latest version of Dial-Up Performance Monitor from www.incomp.cz

This program monitors physical memory as you use your computer, defragmenting memory as it deems fit. As your computer runs, programs allocate and then de-allocate memory. This causes parts of your memory to get fragmented, much like the hard disk does. Sometimes even programs

fail to free all memory they used. This situation is called memory leak. RAMeSize helps stop these memory leaks from crashing your system. As an example imagine you have 64MB RAM and you load Program A that uses 20 MB RAM. You then load Program B, which uses 8 MB and then Program C that uses 12 MB further. After exiting Program B you create a hole in memory. If you now attempt to load another Program D which will use 32 MB RAM, it will load but Windows will have to allocate a non-contiguous block to it, or use swap space to move a program out of memory, as either would result in slower performance which is undesirable. This is where RAMeSize can help, by routinely defragmenting memory and forcing Windows to update it’s own records so that programs can be loaded reliably. Download available at http://bluedice.dhs.org

— Raman Mohan