I don't know how lucky were you with floppies, but I will alsways remember the floppy disks as a storage nightmare. I am not talking about their price/MB ratio or their size, since reliability is the first thing I have in mind most of the time. I would sacrifice money and performance to get a product that I can trust, but I wouldn't ever go the other way around.

Despite the technological improvements, even memory cards or Flash drives today can lose data, and I am not talking in theory here. Once, I had the occasion to witness a SD memory card "dying" after less than 2 months of use. Of course, the shop replaced it with a new one, and the pictures were - fortunately - recovered using a specialized program, one similar to BadCopy Pro, the application I am going to review now.

Setup

BadCopy Pro has reached version 3.81, and its trial version can be run for ages, because it has the most important feature of such applications disabled, so it can't save any of the data retrieved on your defective media. Anyway, you can use it to check if your data can be recovered and approximate the amount of data loss you'll have to face. After all, in most cases there is some data damaged beyond any hope of recovery...












The setup package of this program is very small, having less than 1MB in size, and you shouldn't have any problems while installing it, because there's nothing special for you to do during the installation of the program, just press some "Next" buttons, as usual.

Interface

The interface of this program looks a bit old, but it's very easy to use and well organized. All the tools are available in the Recovery menu or by using a button from the Recovery Source pane, located to the left side of the main window. The graphics are average, and the overall feeling I get from this program is, just as I said, that BadCopy Pro's interface comes from the past. The good part is that everyone should be able to use it without getting into any dead ends, and that's what most people are looking for - ease of use first, while the eye candy can wait...

Features

The basic feature of this program is - obviously - to recover data that seems to be lost. Now, let's see what can be done and what can't, shall we?

It all starts with the floppy disk, of course. All you have to do is pick it from the Recovery Source pane or click the Floppy Disk Data Recovery item in the Recovery menu. Once you do this, the wizard starts to ask your input in the pane to the left. No matter what kind of storage device you are using, there are 5 steps to perform, and because I don't have a floppy disk drive on my computer anymore, I used my Flash drive to go through the entire process.

Once I selected the Flash Drive option in the Recovery Source pane, the first step of the wizard required me to select a drive. Well, I only have one USB drive, and it would be nice for the program to choose it automatically. Also, you have to pick the recovery mode. There are two modes available - one allows you to rescue corrupted data, and the other recovers deleted files.











After you press Next, the scanner appears so you can set the scan options (for example, to look only for a certain file type) before proceeding. The funny part is that I selected a partition of my hard drive as Flash device...and now the program is scanning it! Well, back to the start...especially since the producer says this program doesn't recover data from hard drives.After performing a scan of the right device, which was pretty fast, I noticed that the wizard jumped to step 4/5 already, asking me to preview the recovered files (this option works with the trial version) and select destination folder for saving recovered ones (obviously, this is useless, since when you press Next, you're shown a message about using the trial version).

This is it, and the funny part is not over yet, because when I press Back in the 4th screen of the wizard, BadCopy Pro takes me back to... step 2. Pretty confusing, don't you think?

The Good

BadCopy Pro is fast and I got previews of data that I thought forever gone while using this limited trial, all after a pretty fast scan process of my USB drive. With a bit of luck, even my mother could use this program!

The Bad

Luck shouldn't have anything to do with using a program, but I found that BadCopy Pro's interface has some issues. If this program doesn't work with hard drives, why was I allowed to scan my fixed disk drive? Even more, the wizards jump from a step to another and tend to confuse the user. Since hard drive data recovery doesn't seem to be one of the features, I think that almost 40$ is too much!

Conclusion

I heard a lot of good things about BadCopy Pro so far, but this was my first close quarters encounter with it. Sadly, I am not impressed at all. In fact, I am disappointed. I know that data recovery is usually done by power users, or at least by people that have enough experience with various Windows programs to overlook the drawbacks of this one, but I want to get the best value for my money, and this is not true this time.

Developer: CSoftLab
Price: 39.95$
Trial Link: Download

If you need to choose a BitTorrent client for Windows which won’t eat too much memory or occupy lot of space in your PC, you may try µTorrent as it’s known as sporting a very small footprint.

It’s an advanced feature rich client, supports 49 languages, and has a very friendly interface which can be understood easily by beginners.

As its main features I am enumerating multiple simultaneous downloads, smart bandwidth usage, file level priorities, configurable bandwidth scheduling, global and per-torrent speed limiting, resuming interrupted transfers, UPnP support (for Windows XP only), popular protocol extensions support and less than 4MB memory usage.
As you can see, it has the most common and base features of a Torrent client.

Version 1.7.4 was just released with a crash bug fixed in Mainline DHT compatibility.

The early 1990s had seen a photo editing software scene dominated by Adobe’s Photoshop and Corel’s Photopaint, but all that started to change when shareware programs emerged to the delight of users who couldn’t afford to pay much for decent quality tools. One of the first shareware photo editing programs, Paint Shop Pro, was developed by Jasc, a small company which aimed at transforming traditional image editing features into much more affordable and user friendly ones. A few years ago, Corel, set on an acquiring mission, realized that Jasc’s program has great potential and bought it in order to fine tune the photo editor to their standards. Adobe immediately understood this strategy and began to offer simplified versions of its well-known Photoshop.

In the latest version of Paint Shop Pro we find the Express Lab, a batch processing tool that can apply certain tasks across multiple images, including cropping, rotating and color adjustments. In addition, Corel thought it would be a good idea to implement some advanced features that professionals find very useful in Photoshop: layer styles, an auto-preserve feature for originals and HDR photo merge. This last feature combines multiple images with different exposures into one image and it is currently considered to be one of the most significant trends in digital photography. As related to the HDR effects, Corel mentions that the X2 version has a "Clarify" feature to automatically “dodge and burn,” bringing out the contrast in HDR images.

Interesting enough, Corel also included some exotic functions such as the "thinify" tool that can make people in pictures look thinner than they really are. Features like this are actually part of a range of "makeover" tools, which also includes a new "Eye Drop" tool for eliminating the red out of bloodshot eyes, as well as an enhanced "Suntan brush" and a "Blemish Fixer”.

The new X2 version of Paint Shop Pro is the third one under the Corel brand. The Canadians have decided once again to keep the $100 price, adding a series of features that will most likely be appealing to casual photographers.

On Tuesday, Corel announced the creation of a new module for WordPerfect Lightning that allows importing the information collected into Microsoft Office.

Navigator, Viewer and Lightning Notes are the modules which come with Lightning.
Navigator is used for assembling and organizing content, Viewer opens documents in Word, WordPerfect and PDF, while Lightning Notes is a word processing and note-taking utility.

Lightning is an expensive alternative to Word but in Corel graphics and productivity head Nick Davies’s opinion, "Adapting WordPerfect Lightning to work with Microsoft Office is an important development for Corel and for the millions of Microsoft Office users worldwide who can now benefit from WordPerfect Lightning within their existing workflows".

The beta version of the WordPerfect Lightning is available here and includes the Notes tool, Viewer, Navigator and a free online account with 200MB storage.

When I got my first computer, I was 17, so the coloring books age was behind already. If I think a little, I wouldn't change things, if I could. Violent games at early ages can change kids a lot, and also their personalities can be deformed by the lack of childhood's simple things, as hand drawing or playing with other kids outside, not on a network...

It's really hard to keep your kids away from computers these days, and since most of them start using a computer before learning to read, or use it as a tool for learning the alphabet, the best thing to do is give them something to develop their creativity and allow them to have fun in a really peaceful way. This takes us back to the coloring books I was talking earlier, and to be more specific, to a software called Creative Painter.

Setup

Creative Painter was released back in 2006, and I couldn't find any specific information about its current version. Anyway, I don't think that your kids will have a problem with that. The trial version available for free comes in a 14MB setup package and has some functional limitations, but I think there is plenty to be done with it, even this way.












As you can see in the screenshots above, installing this program is just as easy as it is with most usual Windows programs, and since I am sure you're going to do this part, and not your kids, I don't think someone will run into any kind of problems while installing Creative Painter.

Interface

The first thing I really enjoyed was the intro movie that plays before the program starts, because it reminds me of some TV shows for kids I used to watch almost 20 years ago. Other than that, the interface of this program is done so even those that can't read yet should be able to use it. I don't say this program looks perfect, but it's very good, in my opinion (I'll tell you what I don't like in the last part of this article). After all, it's not me who should like it, but those aged between 2 and 15 years, as specified on the official website, and I am sure they won't have many problems with Creative Painter's interface.

Features

Creative Painter allows your kids to create paintings in three ways. First, they can grab one of the available sketches and fill them with colors, just like using a coloring books, but they can also add different objects. Second, they can simply use the built in objects and backgrounds to create nice scenes. At last, there's also possible to create a new work from scratch.

For those that already know the alphabet, a text tool is available, together with the usual painter's tools - paintbrush, pencil, marker pen, crayon pen, or eraser. Once you select a tool, you can choose various effects for it.











The default settings of the program will start playing some nice music each time you start using it, but the drawback of this feature is that when using the eraser for longer periods, the sound made by the tool becomes really annoying.The cartoon pictures included are excellent, and I must confess it was really fun to play with those built in background pictures and cartoon characters.

At last, to make this experience as close to the real thing for your kids, you can also get a graphics tablet for them, because Creative Painter allows them to work with such devices even without a hardware driver.

The Good

Creative Painter is an excellent tool for kids, and even adults can spend some quality time with this program, while guiding their children's first steps into the computer graphics realm.

The Bad

The button used to close this application is not intuitive at all (an icon similar to the Power indicator on TVs and other electronics would be much better), and I don't like to bump into features not available in the trial version, because if a kid that can't read gets to face such errors, there are some serious chances to ruin his day. Also, it would be a really good thing to be able to run this program in a window. On my 1280X1024 resolution, the program doesn't look so good, especially since I can't resize it.

Conclusion

I am not one of those that would drop their kids in front of the computer, fire up Counter Strike, tell them "play now, daddy is going to a meeting", and go away without thinking about the possible consequences. Anyway, let's leave this problem aside, because we're talking about Creative Painter here. For 29.95$, this is one of the best gifts for your kids, and even if you are not going to purchase the program, the trial version can provide some quality time spent in front of the computer to children and, why not, adults.

Developer: Moko Systems, Inc.
Price: 29.95$
Trial Link: Download