iolo technologies is a company well known for its all-in-one system suite System Mechanic, but they also release various system tools as standalone products, and today I have to tell you a few things about their firewall solution, called simply Personal Firewall, which recently got a new update, bringing the current version number up to 1.5.1.3.


The proprietary IntelliDefense technology takes the prompts usually encountered when using firewalls to a minimum, because most programs that try to create connections to a network are automatically classified. Even more, the stealth mode makes your PC invisible to hackers, and the Personal Firewall doesn't interfere with full-screen applications such as games or media players.

To run this program, you need a computer having Microsoft Windows 98, Me, 2000, XP, or Vista, at least 256MB of memory (that should go up to at least 1GB for Vista, obviously), 10MB of disk space, Internet Explorer 6.0 with Service Pack 2 or later and an Internet connection, of course.

Priced at $39.95, iolo Personal Firewall comes with free updates, unlimited tech support through email, phone or Web, and a license can be used to protect up to 3 computers. If you want to try this first, feel free to grab your trial version from here. Stay safe!

Google Earth is an amazing product, but I consider NASA's World Wind to be even better. Leaving them aside, there are quite a bunch of stripped-down applications that allow you to view our planet from space, and nothing else, apart from minor view adjustments, or the ability to display cities/borders, and so on. If you simply want to have a simple program to help you use a view of our planet as a screensaver or as a dynamic wallpaper, I got some news for you...



EarthView, a program coming from DeskSoft, reached version 3.8.1 not so long ago, and since it appeared after Christmas, nothing stops you from grabbing it now. After all, there's a free trial version available for download, too, and there's nothing easier than getting it from here.

The feature list of this program includes the ability to switch on and off atmospheric effects, urban areas and city lights, clouds, location and local time for over 3000 cities worldwide, but that's not all! You also get multiple monitor support, additional maps to download (only available in the commercial version), and many more.

Priced at $25.00, EarthView also allows you to purchase subscriptions for real-time cloud data, starting at $5 per month, down to $3/month for yearly payments.

According to the official page, there are no special system requirements, so any computer capable of running Windows 95, 98, ME, NT 4.0, 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista and having 100MB of free disk space should be enough, but I can't help but wonder... what if I have an old 200MHz computer with 16MB of memory, and an ancient video card that runs Windows 95? Well, that's why you should always try before you buy, as long as this is possible...

No matter how big your hard drive is, it's never enough. For some people, this may not be the truth, but for me, unfortunately, it is. After learning how to disable hibernation and recover some disk space, now the time has come to take things one step further and remove old backups...

- Press the Start Orb, type "disk cleanup" in the search box, and then press Enter.


- In the window that opens, press the OK button or simply tap Enter.


- Open the More Options tab, as you can see below.


- In the System Restore and Shadow Copies section, press the Clean Up button.


- Choose to Delete old restore points.


Now, you have more free disk space. It was pretty easy, don't you think?