5 Days a Stranger is a great reminder of the old-school games of 2.5 dimensional gaming. You may not be old enough to remember games like King’s Quest, Space Quest, or other titles from Sierra, but 5 Days a Stranger has the same type of game play. That is, you are a character who can move within a semi 3-D lanscape, interact with items and people, and eventually work your way toward a game goal. 

In the case of 5 Days, you play a cat burglar named Trilby.  The name is more of an alias, really, and you make your living going to places and ripping off valuable goods. This time, you are at the estate of Clearance DaFoe, a rich man who was recently found hung. His wife was also killed as well. Triby’s only goal is to get the goods from the place and go. 

Unfortunately, there is a complication. Once you get in the house, you are locked inside.  It doesn’t look like you’re alone. There are four others trapped inside with you. The question is, can they be trusted? Probably not. I’m not too far in the game as yet, but something tells me they got their secrets. In a way, this game is like being on the show Lost, but it’s all indoors.  (more…)

TextEdit is the default text editor packaged with Macs, and though it isn’t quite as bad as Windows Notepad, it’s close. Since I keep lots of notes in text files on my computer as well as using a text editor for some web development, I found it necessary to search for a replacement.

What I found was a free program from Bare Bones Software called TextWrangler. This program is actually a sort of light version of their famous (in the Mac world) advanced text editor called BBEdit. TextWrangler is freeware while BBEdit is not.

I’ve had trouble from time to time when trying to copy and paste text from TextEdit into my wordpress blogs. Sometimes junk characters were included because of the default rich text formatting of TextEdit. This is one of the basic problems that TextWrangler has solved. The file stays in plain text with no extra characters or formatting included. (more…)

How much does it cost to buy the latest version of Photoshop? As of this writing, you’ll have to pay almost $600. I don’t know about you, but that’s a lot of change for me. The good news is that there’s a free alternative available: The GIMP.

The question always comes up (and with good reason) about the name. What the heck does it mean? It stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The GNU part refers to the licensing of the software and just means that the software can be free or for sale, but must include the source code or access to it so that users can modify it if they want to.

The GIMP is available free for Windows, Mac, and Unix systems, but the Windows version was used for this review. Installation was simple after downloading the installation package. Before the program itself can be installed, though, a separate file containing necessary libraries must be downloaded and installed. Each of these files installed in just a couple of minutes without trouble on my test machine. (more…)

C Cleaner is an all in one Windows disc cleaner. It’s a freeware system optimization and privacy tool, which means in real terms it flips through your system and fixes anything which shouldn’t be there or be configured that way.

It deletes unused files from your system, speeding things up a bit, but also removes traces of your online activities such as your Internet history. Now… we all know you don’t go anywhere you shouldn’t. But if you DO then this will remove all traces. From your computer anyway. Server logs are another problem.

But C Cleaner is really cool and very fast. If you own and use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, it’ll take out the trash of Temp files, history, cookies and so forth. Plus it will stick a loo brush up Windows, going through your Recycle Bin, Recent Documents, Temporary files and Log files etc. There’s a bunch of other stuff it does too, it’s very comprehensive, and according to the writers 100% Spyware FREE. (more…)

Winamp is a very popular music player for windows. Chances are you’ve heard of it by now if you’re into using your computer to listen to music, so i’ll save the big introduction. I’m gonna share some (hopefully) useful tips from my experience of using it as my main music player.

Skins:
I’ve downloaded a lot of skins in the past in my neverending quest for the perfect skin.The novelty value soon wears off after a few minutes of use with most of these. So in the end i decided to settle on the default “modern” skin. I didn’t like the default color of it, but i found you can easily change this in options. This way you’re sure to have the most compatible skin (since it’s the default one as standard) but in a color more suited to your taste or desktop. If you’re on a slower computer, i recommend you stick with the “classic” skin as it uses a lot less resources. (more…)

Another free little program from the same people who bought you bootskin. This is a similiar thing, working in much the same way, but allows your to change your windows log-on screen. You can actually create and edit your own screen if you are feeling creative. If not, don’t worry! If you don’t feel up to the challenge of making your own there’s a lot of bootscreens available here .

Both bootskin and this program work great together for anyone who wants to add a more personalized touch to their computer, and who realises there is life past default blue color schemes and windows logos. : ) (more…)

Years ago, when the world of computer games was young, a little computer gaming company created a game called Zork. This game was one of the first text-adventure games.  In other words, the computer told you in text form (no graphics required) where you were, and you were a character in the midst of it. You entered in commands like “North” or “West” or “Down” to go places, and other other basic commands such as “Look at” or “Open” to interact with the environment. You had to use your imagination to see where you were, and your mind to solve the immensely hard puzzles therein. 

In the mid-80’s, these text adventures were the best around, and Zork led the pack.  These games cost you 20-30 bucks back then, but now they are available free online. 

I suggest starting on Zork 1, where you are a character exploring dark caverns. You get to meet a lot of interesting creatures, including a theif, a troll, and a cyclops. You also amass a lot of treasure along the way, which is the whole point of the game. There’s a lot of puzzles to be solved, and some of them are very difficult. There was one which I almost had, but could never get until I got the strategy guide. That was the one obstacle which kept me from solving the game. (more…)

PC problems stem from a variety of sources. Discs get fragged, memory too, systems get bloated by software and installed and deinstalled leaving traces of DLLs and other stuff lying around in your directories and most importantly in your registry.

With Registry Mechanic you can clean, repair and optimize the registry with a few mouse clicks! Not only could registry issues cause crashes and other major problems, just on a day to day basis registry clog could be the cause of general low level poor performance and execution errors.

There are a number of things you can do to improve performance, add RAM and carefully deinstall any non-essential programs. You can install an additional drive so you are not using a system drive as a data drive. You can defrag and disc repair it. You can sweep your machine for spyware, and that’s a good one. But those are all things you can do manually yourself. Registry repair is a black art and you really need some help if you are not an expert.

Go to http://www.pctools.com/ for a download.

VLC is the best cross platform media player for both PC and Mac. It’s special because not only does it play a fair few different types of media, but it also allows you for the most part to circumvent region coding on DVDs. Yes it true, on the Mac version if you have any DVDs which are region 1 and your drive is hard coded to region 2 you can actually play it.

Okay so sometimes the DVD menus don’t work properly, but they do mostly work, which is more than you can say for other media players and region coded DVDs. Hmm.

The program is very useful for playing files which won’t play elsewhere, it is VERY forgiving, and even plays subtitle formats which makes viewing divx movies in foreign languages all the more doable.

VLCis available for many platforms (some you will be aware of and some you may never have heard of) and is obtainable over at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. Respect due.

If you want a change from watching the same old “Microsoft Windows XP” standard bootscreen that comes with windows, it used to be a tough procedure to replace it with anything else (I should know, i tried one time back when i had Windows 98 and nearly locked up my windows from even loading!)

Thankfully this little program does it for you, easily, safely and free! So, for example,whether your feeling nostalgic for the good old days of your commodore 64,or you want something a little more hi tech,theres lots of free bootscreens of various styles to choose from here to get you started.The program can be downloaded for free from here. ………(and here‘s one of my personal favorites ; )