In a world of mediocrity and indifference, good products and helpful vendors are not easy to come by. The products and vendors represented on this page got "on our list" because they represent the kind of commitment to quality and service that we feel you deserve. Hopefully you will be as pleased with them as we were.

With Microsoft literally giving away its state-of-the-art Internet Explorer (IE) browser, it's hard to understand why anyone's using anything older. If you're not browsing with IE or Netscape's Navigator (see below), it's as if you were reading a book with 30-70% of the pages glued together! See what you've been missing: download a new browser today!

Which to choose, IE or the Navigator? If you must make a choice, we suggest IE, which not only is the de facto browser of choice for most online services (AOL, CompuServe) and Internet Service Providers, but in release 5.0 has achieved a level of compatability and ease of use enequalled by any other browser.

If Microsoft didn't already have a catchy motto they could use this one: "You'll come for the browser and stay for the service." Besides free downloads of the IE browser, the Microsoft site offers free drivers and patches to make your version of Windows or Word or Excel, etc. run better. And there's help, lots of help searchable in lots of ways. If you have a problem with or a question about using a Microsoft product, the chances are pretty good that the answer is waiting for you on the Microsoft site.

Netscape's Navigator/Communicator is now available free in all but professional versions. Is the Navigator better than IE (above)? In a word, no. The two are largely equivalent, with one sometimes faster, and the other sometimes "prettier". Our recommendation: get 'em both. There are websites optimized for one and not the other, and having both literally means enjoying the best of both worlds.

Get That "Just Booted" Feeling with this Free Download! MemTurbo does for your active memory -- RAM -- what ScanDisk and Defrag together do for your hard drive. It organizes and compacts RAM to make the maximum amount available to the programs you're running now. MemTurbo, from Silicon Prairie Software, can be set to run automatically or manually and also includes, in the $20 registered version with unlimited upgrades, cache tuning for your Windows file system. Before MemTurbo, we used to reboot every twenty or thirty minutes to free up RAM. Now we can work for hours without losing operating speed! Try it for free, and while you're there, check out Dave Plummer's other well-written products.

There are other good anti-virus programs on the market -- notably those from Symantec (Norton) and IBM -- but McAfee (now a part of Network Associates, Inc.) is the source for software to detect, remove and protect against computer viruses. This company takes it seriously! They have product versions for virtually all platforms from DOS to Windows NT, for individual users, for networks, for servers. And they update their products as new viruses are identified, never less often than every three months.

McAfee products are available for download at no cost for a 30-day evaluation period. After that the cost is very reasonable -- $40 for a product (VirusScan) that will be updated for two years from the date of purchase. Do it now! You can't afford to be without this software.

Most of the programs available for download consist of several files which have been compressed to save space and then packed into one archive file for simplicity. The two main types of archive files are the self-executing and the "zipped" files. Self-executing archives have the EXE extension, e.g. ARCHIVE.EXE, and they "explode" into the original collection of files when the archive is "run". The second type, marked by the ZIP extension, e.g. ARCHIVE.ZIP, require an external de-archiving program to unpack and restore the files.

In the past, we recommended WinZip as simply the best Windows-based unzipping facility currently available. It is, and for users who want an intuitive and foolproof program to perform sophisticated archiving and de-archiving, it's the right answer at $22 after the evaluation period.

These days when the question is ZIP the answer is FreeZip. Kudos (that means loud applause and happy whistles) to Dariusz Stanislawek of Australia who wrote FreeZip and, as its name implies, offers it as freeware for all and sundry. This little Windows 9x program is just what most intermediate and experienced users need and want. To use it, right click on a ZIP file in Windows Explorer and pick your option from the pop-up menu. We suggest you read the entire Help file first. It takes a no more than two minutes. If you don't understand the Help file, get WinZip and uninstall FreeZip. If you do, rejoice. For once, life got simpler.

When you've outgrown PaintBrush but don't need Corel Draw 7.0, Paint Shop Pro is the answer. This elegant, beautifully executed image manipulation program from JASC gives you all the tools you're ever likely to need to create, modify, transform, and browse images from two-tone to 16 million colors. The current version includes GIF and JPEG optimization and an excellent image animator! Too bad the product, now at version 6.0, is nearly perfect, and the price -- $99 after a 30-day evaluation -- is right. You'll have to find another excuse to get to know the caring and professional folks at JASC who produce it.

These days, if you own a PC, it's a pretty good bet that you have a hard drive full of pictures. But which is which? If you double-click on an image in Windows Explorer, it'll probably open in your browser or in your graphics program. But who wants to wait? And wait again for the next image? Carsten Paasch of BAxBEx Software knows nobody likes waiting. He created Shell Picture, which displays an instant thumbnail preview when you right-click on an image in Windows Explorer. Then click on the thumbnail and it opens in a fast, internal view or in a viewer of your choosing. The pop-up menu provides picture properties (size, colors and type) and lots of handy options from file type conversion (Shell Picture handles 29 formats) to controlled printing, from copying to setting the picture as your Windows wallpaper. Oh yes, and it previews text files too! At $29 registration after a 30-day evaluation, Shell Picture is a bargain for anyone with a PC.

The folks at Alchemy Mindworks, who have a delightfully irreverent and ironic sense of humor, have put together the perfect professional accompaniment to your photo editor -- or for that matter, to their own Graphic Workshop for Windows, another fine shareware image manipulation program ($20 registration). The GIF Construction Set is just what you need to put together (and take apart or rework) animated GIFs. And now, with their Animation Wizard, it's even easier. Available in 16-bit and 32-bit versions for Windows 3.x and Windows 9x, it's a gift at $20 registration.

We're not overwhelmed by Tay-Jee Software's PigPen logo (or their visually-noisy website), but their PictureXchange application is another story entirely. If your scanner gives you TIFs (and grief) when what you want is JPGs and GIFs to post on the WWW, PictureXchange is the application you need. Or maybe your offspring got creative in Paintbrush, which makes BMP files, and to embed young Picasso's work in your letter to Grandma what you need is a PCX version. Again, PictureXchange to the rescue! PictureXchange reads, resizes, prints, and writes eleven image formats. At $14.95 for the shareware registration, that's about $1.37 per format, but who's counting?

It's hard to imagine why anyone wouldn't want a copy of Paint Shop Pro (above), but if all you want is to capture what you see on your screen in professional style, HyperSnap-DX by the creative Greg Kochaniak is for you. Having tried and rejected probably dozens of shareware screen capture utilities over the years, we can tell you this one is right on. HyperSnap-DX lets you capture the whole screen, the active window, or any region of the screen, including DirectX or 3Dfx GLIDE images to BMP, GIF, and JPG formats (more with free pro options), crop your image and print it with no fuss. The Help file is well done and fun. The options are the ones you would have designed into it yourself. And at $25 for quick email registration, you'll be a happy snapper.

You say the sights on the Internet are just great, but what's all the hype about "multimedia"? The only sounds you're getting are the annoying "wave" sounds some sites use to call attention to their advertising messages. You need the Real Audio Player, a "plug in" software application that works with most current browsers. Download and installation are simple and quick (10-15 minutes) after which you can listen to the astronauts live on the NASA site, get sound bites, if you want them, at The New York Times, listen to the music reviewed by the L.A. Times, and, if you must, play Bloomberg Business Radio in the background while you work.

The Real Audio Player requires a 28.8 kbaud modem and a 16-bit sound card with speakers. Since in most instances you'll be playing a continuously downloaded audio information stream while doing text and video processing, this plug-in works best on faster PCs (486/66 and up) with plenty of RAM (16 mB or more).

So you've graduated to an Internet Service Provider and now you need software to handle your email and newsgroups? You can use the excellent capabilities built into Netscape Navigator, or the even nicer facilities supplied free of charge by Microsoft as Outlook Express (companion software to Internet Explorer), or you can download Eudora Light from Qualcomm. Eudora Light, which is "postcardware" (they'd like to hear from you but it's not required), is fast, full of features, and performs more mail functions than most folks ever need. This is the mailware for folks who expect their email correspondence to grow into the 10-100 messages per day realm. With so many features provided in Eudora Light, it's hard to see how Qualcomm sells any of its Eudora Pro software (currently $40 for a single v4.2 license), but it's good to know that Light migrates painlessly to Pro when you need fancy filtering and sorting, multiple internet accounts, spell-check, etc.

We hunted down this shareware application by student author Alex Kaufman because we wanted small, fast software to use on clients' PCs when we're "on the road". Mail Warrior is small -- it fits easily on a single 1.44 mb floppy disk -- and very fast. And yet it has many of the features you'd expect only in "pro" version software, such as filters, templates, signatures, and the ability to handle multiple email accounts. Although we have Eudora Pro available (see above), we find ourselves using Mail Warrior not only on the road but also in the office and shop too, since it chews up far fewer resources and never seems to get in the way of other applications. A $25 suggested registration will encourage Alex to continue to improve on his already super product.

File-Ex File Dialog Extensions from Cottonwood Software isn't for everybody. But if you're a wee bit of a power user, File-Ex may be the best utility you've encountered in months. File-Ex makes the Open and Save As dialogs accessed from the File menu of most applications positively friendly. It stores recent files and folders used (lots of them) and favorite files and folders, so your hunt for a document or where to save it is shortened considerably. It also allows you to delete, rename, copy, move, and search for files from the Open and Save As dialogs; you can make new directories as well. The 32-bit File-Ex works with most Windows 9x applications and "trains" 16-bit Windows applications to work like Windows 9x. The 16-bit version juices up Windows 3.xx. File-Ex is cheap enough for anyone who needs these super facilities -- registration is only $30 -- and the author provides a constant flow of updates to keep File-Ex compliant with new applications.

Macro Express 2000 from Insight Software Solutions, Inc. is -- sorry folks -- another Windows utility that isn't for everyone, but is for those of you who spend many hours each day driving a keyboard. If you've used macros in a word processor or used a programmable keyboard such as those that came with many Gateway PCs, then stop reading and order Macro Express (ME) now. ME, which is available in Windows 3.1 and Windows 9x versions, allows you to store the words, phrases, and keystroke sequences that you use over and over again (your name, your email address, your fax number, the keystroke sequence for inserting a database field in a merge document, etc.) and play them back by pressing programmable hot keys combinations. For example, you could program CTRL+N to type your name, CTRL+E to type your email address, and CTRL+W to type the URL for your Web site. ME macros can be used to launch programs -- ALT+S might open your Web browser and bring up your favorite search page -- and to perform timed operations. If you're still with me, go order ME. You can download a shareware copy to try, then when you've become impossibly dependent on ME, $35 will make it yours. If you're lost at this point, not to worry. Remember we said ME isn't for everyone?

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