Brandon Dimmel

Think your Mac is invulnerable to spyware or viruses? That depends on your morals. According to recent reports, a pirated version of the popular iWork '09 suite contains a nasty trojan that has been startling hoity-toity Mac users. The Apple iWork ... '09 suite is fairly self-explanatory. Introduced shortly after the New Year, it performs many work functions, including the construction of documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. It's a slicker version of Excel, in other words. Users can try a trial version for 30 days, or shell out about $80 for the full edition. Making the decision to not ... (view more)

Menu Maid An Excellent Utility! Are you looking for a fast and easy way to clean up your Window Explorer and Internet Explorer right-click (context) menu? Look no further -- MenuMaid makes it simple! Just uncheck the items you don't want to show up. ... Restore them at any time. http://www.sdsoftware.org Data Terminator Data Terminator is specially developed to protect confidential data files from being accessed by a stranger. Data Terminator permanently deletes selected files from your computer. You can actually specify what you want to happen if your laptop or computer is no longer under your ... (view more)

Audacity Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to Record live audio, convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs, and edit Ogg ... Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files. You can even cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together and change the speed or pitch of a recording. And there's more, so check out the complete list of features. http://audacity.sourceforge.net Cloudo Sign up for the beta test of this new web-based operating system. It might just give you fewer headaches than Windows ... (view more)

Everybody was talking about Barack Obama's inauguration on Tuesday morning, and it showed. According to reports, a number of mobile phone networks faced overload circumstances that day until late afternoon, when the chat sessions finally began to ... dissipate. Having the most trouble that morning appears to have been T-Mobile, with PC World reporting that one customer complained they were unable to make or receive calls throughout the entire morning leading up to Obama's appearance. With cellphones an often necessary lifeline for personal and business purposes, the victim's disgust is certainly ... (view more)

Sometimes a recession has its benefits. Some retailers have little choice but to drop their prices in a desperate attempt to win that hard-fought consumer dollar. Take the case of Intel, which recently revealed that it will be dropping the prices of ... several of its popular microprocessors. On the chopping block is the popular high-end Core 2 Quad processors for desktop computers (roughly 4x the power of a single processor chip) and the company's Xeon line of chips, specifically engineered for single-socket servers. Officially, the cuts stem from a desire to clear out inventory space for a ... (view more)

Create Shortcut There This is a simple-to-use program that helps users customize their shortcuts in just a click. How does it work? Right click a file, select the context menu item, and CreateShortcutThere to choose where to place the new shortcut. ... http://www.donationcoder.com Click To Desktop Click on the desktop to hide all windows quickly and easily. This first version of the program makes switching between different browsers, windows, and programs easier than ever before! The perfect solution for the web surfer extraordinaire. http://www.donationcoder.com Today's fresh software picks were ... (view more)

Virus Effect Remover Virus Effect Remover helps you to remove the effects of viruses from the Windows Registry and file system. It also detects registry errors caused by viruses, and more. http://viruseffectremo.sourceforge.net WinCDEmu WinCDEmu is ... open-source software that allows for mounting CD and DVD images by clicking the image files in Windows Explorer. It supports both Windows XP and Vista and completely freeware. Version 2.0 supports ISO, CUE, BIN/RAW/IMG file formats as well as SMB network shares and includes a workaround for Windows cache bug. Each mounted image will be represented ... (view more)

Popular network hardware producer Belkin is facing some serious flak this week after an employee told the media that the company has often paid Amazon reviewers to post positive fan-fare for its products. The outcry started this past weekend, when ... The Daily Background's Arlen Parsa reported the case of one Michael Bayard, who -- according to the Background -- had posted requests to Belkin's company website The Mechanical Turk searching for anyone willing to write a positive product review, regardless of whether or not they had actually tried out the device. According to Parsa and the ... (view more)

Tray Prodder Tray Prodder is a Windows XP shell expansion tool. It allows you to select multiple files in Windows Explorer using checkboxes, instead of having to tediously press CTRL + left to select file after file. Tray Prodder also shows full ... column selection, so you can (for example) highlight files in a folder according to date. http://www.everator.com Ultimate Windows Tweaker Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a freeware Tweak UI Utility for tweaking and optimizing Windows Vista, 32-bit ... (view more)

The long-rumored end to Circuit City has finally arrived. Beaten down and finally booted by Best Buy over the holidays, the electronics retailer has begun liquidating its assets in stores across the United States. In November Circuit City revealed ... that it had entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection , but no one really knew what that meant for its remaining stores. Most employees appear to have been completely unaware that their stores might be closing, with one Circuit City worker telling CNET's Brooke Crothers that he didn't expect his place of employment to shut down for a long, long time ... (view more)