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Tuesday of this week saw Google release their own web browser! Arguably the best search engine on the web has produced a very nice browser. I have only been using it for a few days now but I am loving it. Most noticably two things visually that stand out to me are

• There is not a big toolbar at the top, so more of my screen is filled with the web page, therefore less scrolling so that is great!
• When opening the browser you get your most recent websites shown to you with little scrrenshots!

You may or may not realise that Windows Vista Home Premium and Vista piece of Ultimate includes Windows DVD Maker.  Windows DVD Maker is a software which enables you to create DVD’s which are not just personalised but look professional too!

You can add a variety of media, such as; pictures, music and movies.  However….the DVD Maker doesn’t support some media format, for example: it doesn’t support music file formats which itunes use.  A way to over come this problem is on itunes make a playlist of the tracks you would like on the DVD, make a copy of the playlist on a CD.  Then import the CD using Windows Media Player ensuring that you don’t protect the files because that would prevent from being used in the DVD Maker.  Then insert the tracks that you imported through Windows Media Player.  (Make sure you don’t break any copyright laws when doing this!)

The thing I found most fustrating in the DVD Maker was that your ability to modify the actual movie/slideshow was very limited.  You don’t have much influence on the chapter/scene organisation and the transition between features.  I suggest that if want to produce a detailed and very personalised DVD then produce the actual movie on Windows Movie Maker and then import it into Windows DVD Maker to produce the menu’s and the physical DVD.  I’ll take this moment to remind you that if you don’t have a DVD burner you won’t be able to put the movie onto the disc.

You can download Windows Movie Maker for free for Vista or for XP.

Some ideas for using DVD Maker:

• Make a holiday DVD
• Birthday presents
• Birthday DVD
• Wedding DVD
• Baby Photos

We think using DVD Maker is a great way of bringing the nation to the 21st century, why not watch a DVD of your holiday snaps instead of everyone crowding round the pack of photos!  It’ll probably work out cheaper too!

How do you make your DVD’s?  Would you like a tutorial?

Over the past week I’ve reviewed the top three Web Based Email Providers, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Live Mail/Hotmail. In my opinion they are all good providers have their pluses and minuses. For example; Hotmail/Live Mail is the most user friendly and has the most stylish layout, whereas Yahoo! Mail has unlimited storage space, although with a gmail account you can use loads of great features like Calender, Documents, Photos, Reader, Images, Maps, Books, Shopping and much much much more! In this last review I’m going to do a comparison between the three providers. To save all the confusion, I am only going to refer to the free editions unless I mention otherwise.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday I started the series of Web Based Email Reviews. Over the series I am reviewing who I consider to be the most popular Web Based Email providers, Microsoft Live Mail/Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and Google Mail. Today I am going to review Yahoo! Mail.

You can upgrade Yahoo Mail from the basic free version to ‘Yahoo! Mail Plus‘, ‘Yahoo! Business Mail‘ and you can also purchase a package called ‘Yahoo! Mail Personal Address‘.

The Basic Free Yahoo! Mail has many features for example:

• Yahoo! Mail will automatically check for new messages.
• You can drag and drop items into folders which makes organisation easier than ever!
• Access your email on your mobile phone
• Also, recently Yahoo! have developed and integrated a way to send/receive Instant Messages, to friends that are online, straight from your Yahoo! Mail account.
• 10MB Message Size
• 15 Spam Filters
• SpamGuard (Spam Protection)
• There is also a features page which you can visit to see more!

Yahoo! Mail Plus has the features above, plus the following:

• 20MB Message Size instead of 10MB.
• 50 Filters instead of 15.
• SpamGuard Plus(Spam Protection) instead of just Spam Guard
• No account expiration
• However…this all does come at a price! On the website it is down as $19.99 a year which is just under $2.00 per month. This works out at the current exchange rate to be around £10.00 a year which is under £1.00 per month!
• For more info click here

Yahoo! Mail Personal Address basically lets you majorly personalize your email account,

• It includes 5 email addresses
• You can personalize your email address in the format ‘name@your-name.com’.
• The service also has an advanced anti-virus protection.
• To find out more click here.
• All this is for $35 a year which is less than $3 a month! At today’s current exchange rate that works out at around £17.50 a year and less than £1.50 a month!

Finally Yahoo! Business Email has pretty much all of the previously names features and more:

• Award-winning spam and security protection
• Easy-to-use and powerful main interface
• 24/7 Free Customer Support
• For info click here.
• At today’s current exchange rate this will cost you for the basic package just under £5 a month. However you will need to pay a set up fee of around £12.50.

From looking at all the Yahoo! Mail products I have discovered that they provide a package that can suit most people’s needs, however the downside of it all is that some of it comes at a price. It’s just down to the user to decide if they really need all the extras or not, as the basic package is adequate for most people.

We are now on the penultimate of the Web Based Email Review series. I’ve previously reviewed Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Live Mail, now its time for Gmail. Gmail is one of the many applications that you can have for free with a Google Account. Google Accounts are completely free and worth while!

There are many useful features you can get with your basic Gmail account. On their site they have made a list called ’10 Reasons To use Gmail’.

1. You don’t like spam. Neither do we
2. Search your mail instantly
3. Organize replies into conversations
4. Chat is built right in
5. Labels, Filters and Stars…oh my!
6. Get your mail on the go
7. Lots of space (and counting)
8. We have ads, but only the good kind
9. Save time
10. All this is free?

To find out more on these features and to see the details of the list click here.

Gmail have made some cool new features for all their users. Some new features include:

• Group chat
• Instant messaging
• 20MB attachment limit
• Emotions
• Contact Groups
• 6.732016 GB email storage per account and the amount it always increasing!

Click to see a list/information on all 35 updates/new features.

You can also upgrade to either Premier or Education Edition. An Education Edition is free to accredited not-for-profit K-12 Schools, Colleges and Universities which are described in the terms and conditions. It provides the same features as the standard edition but also includes:

• Conference room and resource scheduling
• APIs to integrate with your existing infrastructure
• Email routing controls for dual delivery (Coming November 08!)
• Email migration tools
• 24/7 assistance, including phone support for critical issues
• Third-party applications and services
• 6.732016 GB email storage per account and the amount it always increasing!

Click to find out more about Google for Educators or to Compare Packages.

The Premier Edition is by far the packages which supplies the most but it does come at a price! It costs £25 a year. With in the Premier package there are two versions, one geared more towards Enterprises and the other Small Businesses. The package provides all previously mentioned features from the Standard and Education Editions, plus:

• 99.9% up-time guarantee for email
• Policy management and message recovery by Postini (Coming in November)
• 25 GB email storage per account

Click to compare the package with the standard package.

Gmail has everything that most people need from their web based email account and you can also use so many great applications with an account. Although in my opinion it isn’t as user friendly as other providers.

Do you use Gmail? What do you think of it?

Over the next week I am going to do a series of reviews. I will be reviewing the three of the most popular web based email providers; Hotmail/Live Mail, Google Mail and Yahoo Mail. On Sunday I will write a conclusion to the series of reviews, comparing all three email providers. The first review of the series is Hotmail/Live Mail.

• Each account has 5GB Storage Space. By having more storage space you can store more emails and pictures etc. Also on Live Mail, you can send up to 10MB worth of attachments.
• Microsoft Live Mail has exactly the same features as Hotmail. Although as Live Mail is newer there are many email address names left, where as in Hotmail the amount of address names is getting less and less by the minute.

There are hundreds of great features that the service offers, here are a few:

• Microsoft have put together a great interactive tour of Live Mail which gives you a glimpse of the layout and features it provides.
• One great feature is that you can link Live Mail and Outlook together, this means that you can import contacts to and from each other and view your mail in both Outlook and Live Mail.
• Hotmail/Live Mail are also both very good for speed, you can either select a version which is suited to a fast Internet connection (broadband) or for a slower connection (Dial-up). Both versions make the most of the Internet connection, ensuring that they run at the best speed possible.
• Modern styling. You can also personalise the account by changing the colour etc.
• You can search your message using the search bar from the top.
• Finally, the most important thing is that all of this is FREE!

Live Mail/Hotmail is a very good free web based email service provider which has pretty much anything that an average user would need. However, the downside to it is that there aren’t any upgrades/different packages to suit other peoples needs.

What do you think of Microsoft Live Mail/Hotmail?

Sorry for the late Quick Tip this week! No real excuses.

A Couple of weeks back I mentioned in a quick tip that people with AVG 7.5 could get version 8 for free. This has been popping up as a message on peoples computers, but people are having problems installing. So, this weeks quick tip is my suggested upgrade path Hope it helps…

1. Make sure you have your license number to hand – if not you open AVG and then click on LICENSE at the bottom, then Copy License. Paste that into a text document for safe keeping.
2. Download your version of AVG 8.0 from here: http://www.avg.co.uk/uk.download make sure you get the version that is the same as your 7.5 version.
3. You should be able to run the file once it downloads and it will un-install version 7.5 for you. (If you have problems doing it this way then go into Control Panel > Add / Remove Programs and remove AVG 7.5 before installing version 8.0)
4. Done! Just follow the setup process through and that should get you sorted. If you have any further problems we suggest you contact your local IT Support so they can advise or do it for you.

Enjoy your bank holiday weekend.

Last week AVG released the Free version of their new award winning Virus Protection software. It is still an entry level protection package and their full Internet Security software still offers much more protection but for those home users who really can’t afford it then this is the next best thing!

Along with the Anti-Virus module, this version of AVG Free includes AVG Spyware protection and AVG’s new ‘Safe Search’ feature to help protect you online.

Compatible with Windows XP and Windows Vista. Download it now for Free!

Bank in Nov 07 we posted on the Brandstar Site about Microsoft Office 2007 being really cheap for students, well we noticed today that it ends really soon so if you haven’t taken advantage of this offer do so quick! 30th April 2008 is your last chance to get Office 2007 Ultimate nice and cheap!

Take a look at the Brandstar Blog post all about Office 2007 Ultimate for Students

A very quick tip this week, if you are running a paid for version of AVG 7.5 then all you need to do is download the equivalent version 8 and you can use your existing license code for the latest version! How nice

Read Brandstar’s review of the New AVG 8.0 Anti Virus