Here's A Useful Collection Of Utilitites That Just Might Get You Out Of Trouble! We are NOT affiliated with ANY of these companies or their products in any way, nor do we replicate any existing sales banter - we just think they're good - period.

Winsock Fix - DCHP - NO IP ADDRESS - NEWDOTNET

All we can say about this is if you tried to delete 'newdotnet' manually from your registry instead of uninstalling it, and then found you can't get an IP address and no joy when you click 'repair' then chances are you're reading this page from a friends or a second PC and totally bewildered as to why your network connection won't give you access to the Internet any more. This works for Windows 95,98,NT,2000 and XP. It repairs the damage done caused by the changes you inadvertently made to the registry - few reboots and persistence and you'll be back online in no time: winsockfix.zip

Tool Bar Cop - You'll often find you're having to 'disable third party extensions' on your browser simply because its running like a slug. Heres a way to check through and see exactly whats hogging all your resources so you can disable those you don't need.

Sheilds Up - Check your ports and general PC security. Always good to know how secure you are.

Trends Micro Housecall - A very good online virus scanner. There is no real subsitute for onboard virus protection since if a virus is already indemic its much harder to eradicate but this one is constantly updated and is very thorough.

Color Schemer Online - Stuck for a web site colour scheme? Surely not. Come to think of it this is also good if you just wanted to repaint a room.....

Hmmm, we've tried quite a few reg cleaners - sometimes with disastrous results. This one has got us out of more nasty scrapes than we care to mention and it is reassuring to know that you do have a backup to fall back on. Windows is er.....far from fullproof.

Freeware World Team - Very useful collection of freeware applications.

The Way Back Machine - Great for seeing how sites have changed or er...if you've lost one!

The Free Anit-Virus app that is free for personal use and with very little in the way of system overheads. Oh, its damned good too!

Powerdesk has changed ownership a few times over the years and we always felt the marketing was poor considering what this program can actually do. If you're not a lover of the Microsoft "Are you sure you want to do this?" approach then you'll fall in love with this. Total file management with POWER. Our Editor has used it for well over five years (thanks Bob G) and says he can't use a PC without it now.

Ewido Security. An online malware crusher. As far as we're concerned, this beats the pants off Spybot - prove us wrong! This found well over 600 malware items on one of our systems when Spybot (even with the updates) missed them entirely.

Acronis Migrate Easy. Now called 'True Image' and other titles. We can't rate this highly enough! Scenario: C drive goes AWOL (I mean its just corrupt beyond belief). We used Easy Recovery Pro to claw the data back (intact) to another drive then Acronis to transfer the data back to the corrupt drive and it makes it bootable again. No reformat, no lost data and back up and running (on a 120GB drive) in around 6 hours - we're impressed!

Doctor HTML