Sometimes you need to capture a screen. The easy way of course is PrintScreen, but sometimes that is bamboozled by software taking over the keyboard map. An easy way to capture those hard to get images, especially scrolling pages, and even audio and video is CaptureWizPro.

The new Windows Vista compatible version has a pop-up capture toolbar with easy to use tools, easy to see visible over any screen, and simple three step capture process thats easy to follow. You also have additional utilities like sticky notes, a thumbnail viewer and programmable hot keys.

Go here to get it and find out more. And here you can find out some useful tips.

Navy Field is a fantastic new multi-player seasfaring online combat game. It differes from alot of online strategy games in that the scenarios are based upon actual World War II naval battles. One fo the defining qualities of this software is that it’s very authentic and a lot of thought and research has gone into it.

You’ve got actual WWII ships, weapons, and aircraft at your disposal,and you can play as the allies or Germany and Japan. It’s like SimNavy. You build the ships, add weapons and order your sailors around. Large download, about 350Mb orso, but worth every second of download time. If you are a strategy nut, which I am, you are going to love it. Superb.

Run over to the official web site for more details.

I don’t know if you tried Google Notebook yet, but it’s REALLY cool. It’s like an online word processor, actually I take that back… it’s more like an online OUTLINE processor. That is to say it allows for a series of notes, which can expand and contract and can be ordered, so you can write first and set the running order of the notes later.

This makes it very easy to organise ideas and assemble them into a coherent whole. If you are writing documentation, essays, or ebooks, outline processors are the thing you would use to get your ideas started. And being online of course means you can continue working anywhere where there is a web browser and a keyboard.

Go to Google Notebook and try it out. It’s FREE!

The latest in the Mystery Case Files series, Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst. This popular graphic adventure puzzle game series adds a new adventure, and like the others it’s a free download for the 75Mb demo files, but you have to pay for the rest of the game. Very shrewd strategy, because once you play the demo through you really start to want the rest.

You see there are rumors surrounding the history of stately Ravenhearst Manor. The diary of Emma Ravenhearst holds the key to the story behind the manor, but conveniently some pages are missing… Gasp. But you are the Master Detective and it is up to you to unlock secrets of Ravenhearst, searching over 30 rooms for graphical clues.

Elementary!

Halma is a game played on a solitaire type board with 10 pins by 2-3 players. These players can be either computer or human, and you can save games to pick up later if you wish. It’s identical to the board game Halma.

The game (named from the Greek word meaning “jump”) is a board game invented in the 1800s by a surgeon at Harvard Medical School, a guy called George Howard Monks. There was apparently an English game called Hoppity before this but Halma was different. You use a checkered board, divided into 16×16 squares, and playing pieces are of course black & white for two-player games, and of various colors in games of four players or more.

Curiously addictive. Oh and there’s no Hippos in the game. In fact it’s just the name of the software company. Also no hippos were harmed in the making of this game. 🙂

Trend Micro Anti-Spyware for the Web is an online tool that checks your machine for spyware, and helps remove any infections it locates and identifies. The software displays a report when it’s done listing the spywares detected and asks you if you want removal. Trick question.

You may have spyware if you machine is slow when opening programs or saving files, you suffer from interminable pop-up windows, you have a new browser homepage, or worst of all new and unexpected toolbars in your browser. The online spywarre checker fixes all that.

Spyware is more widespread and more dangerous than viruses these days so be safe. Go to Trend Micro for more.

Keeping track of employees or children? Want to know where they’ve been, what they’ve typed, what files they created? Ah how cynical and suspicious the world is, but with good reason. People do things on the Internet they wouldn’t like someone else to know about. And sometimes YOU need to know about it if you are a parent or an employer.

Keyloggers are good, but they take time to set up. Sometimes you don’t have time to install one. Sometimes you need SpyArsenal Detective. A simple EXE file, you can even have it on a memory stick. Run it and you get full information about the user activity on a target PC in just seconds. All the recent activity in a form you can explore and print. You can be in and out in moments and the machine is back to normal. And the price for this wonderful utility? Free.

Go to Spy Arsenal to find out more.

Bluebottle Freemail is the free version of the paid service, but you still get a lot of the cool features. You get a Spam Free Email, what they call “Trusted Delivery Anti-Spoofing” which filters out spam, access via webmail, POP3, and smtp, around 250Mb of storage and up to 10 Mb worth of attachments.

For a mere $9.95 you can sign up for virus checking and bigger limits, and for $24.95 you can go top of the line with 1Gb of storage, phone support and 30Mb file sizes. All sounds very nice, and I love the interface. Try the free opne for a while and see how you go.

Check it out at Bluebottle.com

Genie Soft has a great program which solves a problem I’ve had many times in my tech support career: how to back up Outlook Express. Yes, you can search the folders for where the files are hidden and copy them to another computer. But that’s a pain.

This super little program supports backing up the data of all the identities in Microsoft Outlook Express in the same backup file. You can even backup as a self-executable EXE file that can be run on any machine even if the main Genie Backup Manager isn’t running or installed. That’s very cool.

Unlike other backup methods you can copy Multiple Identities, Message Rules, and All accounts and Preferences, as well as Signatures, Stationery, your Address Book. It’s a marvel.

Take the high road to Genie Soft for more…

Based on the excellent Ewido Anti-Malware package, this new AVG offering is a do-it-all solution against viruses, worms, trojans, spyware and adware.

The software is active for 30 days, so you can try out all the features before you buy, and buy is what you will probably do. It’s not wildly expensive and as far as I can see is very effective against keeping spyware threats at bay. Some of the threats I tested it on, like Spy Sheriff and Brave Sentry were not completely removed, but I think more needs to be done to free your machine of those nasty bugs.

Head over to Grisoft for more…