Recommended Software

This page contains details of a number of software products recommended by the FileSaveAs team.

PDA Software

TomTom Navigator. Excellent route planning software from mobile navigation experts, TomTom.

In-car navigation is big business with satellite navigation systems running into thousands of pounds. If you happen to have a Pocket PC, you can achieve the same results for a fraction of the cost, thanks to TomTom Navigator.

You can use this software to replace your in-car map books, and as a searchable street directory, but it comes into its own when coupled with a GPS receiver. You can plan a route to your chosen destination, and when your journey starts, see a moving representation of your car as you travel - best of all, you'll get spoken turn-by-turn directions. Also runs on Symbian devices and Palm OS PDAs.

For more, see our TomTom Navigator page.

MiniGPS / Where I Am - For Symbian OS phones such as the Nokia 7650, 3650 and 6600, as well as the Siemens SX1, and Sony Ericsson P800/P900, this impressive little application lets you work out where you are from the nearest cellbase. OK, so it's not true GPS satellite technology, but clever enough to use local GSM base stations to work out roughly where you are. In a city like London, it's surprisingly accurate, able to pinpoint you to a street corner!
For each cell, You can add a description of each cellbase (i.e. "Work", "Home", etc). So, what's the point of your 7650 knowing where you are? Well, the application lets you do things with this information, such as send a text message to someone when you enter or leave an area, sound an alarm when you reach a cell, change your profile or background image when you get to work, or switch off the phone when you leave an area. I've used this excellent app to wake me up when my train's nearing home, send an "I'm home safely" text to my other half, and send progress reports when I'm completing a journey. Very clever, and with a host of uses! O2 customers can enter cell IDs at the following site, to view the location of the cellbase on a map: www.webmap.o2.co.uk/.

Available from: handango.com. For more on location services, see our Locatepage.

Crypto - Password protect any EPOC file - Freeware file security utility for the Series 5 and Revo family that lets you lock individual EPOC files.
Available from salvis.com

Pocket Diet Tracker - Keep in shape If you're looking to shed a few pounds, but lack with willpower, a little help from some software may make life a little easier, and having it on hand helps to ensure that you keep a log of what you're eating, and how much exercise you do. This Pocket PC app allows you to create a profile with details of your age, height and current weight, then estimates what range you fall within. You can set a target weight (or ideal weekly loss), and track this against your actual weight. It comes with a built-in database of common foods (although this is an American list), and you can add your own foods to this list. It's then a case of adding your food intake, exercise and weight, and running a range of reports on the stats to see how well you're doing. You can see from the screenshot that I'm slightly off-target!

Useful popups tell you if you're exceeding your fat, carbohydrate or calorie intake, look at performance over a date range, draw graphs of intake vs energy expenditure, and keep an eye on your body fat percentage. Superb little app that makes the process slightly less painful by always being on hand, easy to use, and with a little red line showing you how well you're doing.
Available from the following link at www.handango.com

eWallet - Pin numbers, passwords, email accounts, passport and driving licence details. It's getting difficult to keep track of the various usernames, passwords and other confidential details that you need to live in today's world. If you have a Pocket PC, this is the application you need. This lets you store all of your confidential details in a secure, encrypted format. There's also a PC version of eWallet available, so you can use ActiveSync to keep a copy on both your PC and Pocket PC.

Highly recommended, and available from the following link at www.handango.com

Live traffic news to your mobile with Traffic-i

Traffic-I lets you receive live road traffic information from the Trafficmaster network direct on your Nokia 7650, 3650, 6600, or SonyEricsson P800 / P900, over GPRS. Find out about road issues in your area, plus get an indication of the speed of traffic on motorways and major A roads.

For more details, see our Traffic-I page

BankPlus - Bank Account Manager. Keep your bank, building society and credit card accounts in check with this small program for the entire range of Psion machines. Standing orders, balances, categories and graphs make this an excellent application.
For details, go to www.bankplus.co.uk

DigiGuide, via Avantgo - Forget buying TV listings magazines, or struggling with the TV section of the daily newspaper, by getting daily TV and radio listings synched to your Pocket PC or Palm PDA. There are two offerings, the Radio Times handheld, or DigiGuide. Our favourite is the digiguide offering. Firstly, it's cheaper than the BBC's offering, but it offers up to a month's worth of programme listings, allows you to mark your favourite shows (and get an email reminder if you like), and it has a companion online service, so you can search listings from your web browser. Best still, if you have a complex channel line-up (such as a Sky package), you can type in names of favourite series (past and present), and see if and when they get repeated on any channel - occasionally that old classic sitcom will get repeated somewhere - and you'll be in the know.
For details, see the Radio & Telly Guide page

PC Software

System Mechanic 6 Review

Keeping your PC running smoothly can be a pain - hard-disk problems, registry issues, system slowdowns, unexplained crashes and low disk space. Taking control of problems, or keeping an eye out for potential problems can be time-consuming, and that's where System Mechanic from Iolo can help. In the past, we've used a couple of different products to keep our office PCs tidy, including the Norton products - this solution combines the best of some of the apps we've tried, and adds a few nice extra features - with System Mechanic 6, you feel in control of maintaining your PC.

After installation (and a reboot), the application performs a scan on your PC, and reports on what it finds (see the screen below)... System Mechanic Summary

It's then a case of selecting any problem areas, and taking the advice given. Areas where System Mechanic can help, are as follows:

Clutter - The allows removal of junk, temporary, old and cache files to recover space. It can also clean out Internet cookies
Optimisation - tweaks Internet & download performance, disable any unneeded startup programs, defrag system memory and check whether the harddrive needs to be defragged
Security - on our machine, it fixed 19 dangerous file associations and 4 Denial of Service attacks (although we couldn't actually see what the problems were)
Disk health - Performs hard disk tests and repairs
Spyware - Detects and removes spyware (with Spython)
Allows you to customise windows preferences
Dupes - Check for duplicate files that may be wasting space
Registry tools - Our favourite - it allows you to backup, compress, repair and optimise the system registry
And, as they say, a whole lot more

Our verdict? We found that on a machine we thought was pretty clean, we had an awful lot of clutter, a disc error, a good number of duplicated files, a heck of a lot of registry issues, one "key logger" infection, and an urgent need for a defrag. A fresh scan after taking the recommended advice, and the main console reports a happy PC. If we had to make a criticism, it's that System Mechanic doesn't always give you a clear feeling for what it's up to - being told that "64 problems solved" is great, but we're a technical bunch here at FileSaveAs, and we wanted to know what it was fixing under the hood. I guess most people will be happy with just knowing there's 64 less things to worry about!

We're pretty impressed with System Mechanic, and will certainly be using this as our number one PC maintenance app. If you want to give it a try, go to www.iolo.com

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