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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.

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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.

Well, we have had the new Windows Vista with us for over a year now so I thought it was about time to write a review from a “how it is to use” point of view, rather than “look at what Microsoft say this new Operating System (OS) can do!”.

I think I have mentioned in past blogs either here on on Brandstar.co.uk that I was using the pre-release of Vista codenamed longhorn and thought it was good although wasn’t completely convinced. When Vista was fully released to the public at the beginning of 2007 I moved over to Vista on my existing system.

Installing Vista Business on my XP System

I didn’t want to have to buy a new machine just to use Vista, mainly because I didn’t know if it would be worthwhile. Instead I decided to install it on my existing machine that was running XP fairly well. There begun a number of problems. Firstly the graphics card drivers didn’t work properly so I had to replace the graphics card (took two attempts!) and then stability did seem to be an issue although I think that was due to the XPC motherboard as I was aware of some problems with them at the time.

Despite those problems, what I had seen of Vista, I liked but I needed in the office something more stable than this XPC machine that would randomly freeze. So I bought a Dell Vostro Desktop. Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33GHz, 4GB Ram, 200GB Hard Disk etc. In short..a nice machine!

Vista on a nice new PC

With this machine built for Vista it had hardware in it that I knew would be compatible and stable and so I thought a good ground to really begin using Vista properly.

I have to confess that I was surprised when I found all my existing hardware to be compatible with Vista. I know Microsoft raved about the compatibility but that was just marketing surely! My Canon IP5300 printer had drivers I could download, the Samsung ML-1210 works nicely, both Epson scanners worked too!

Some people say – “It is important that my digital camera works”. You rarely need drivers for your digital camera to work on XP or Vista, let alone the bloated software that comes with them. Might I suggest that the next time you get a digi camera you take a photo and plug the camera in…see what happens! I think you will be surprised!

It was a new OS so there were obviously things to learn, the first one for me being how to overcome networking issues. Turns out you have to use Network and Sharing Center and turn on things like Network Discovery, File/Printer Sharing etc. Once you have sussed that and set the Vista machine up on the right workgroup then my experience so far has been good. Set it up and do a reboot…away you go!

Secure…Really? - Microsoft’s sales team spent goodness knows how long telling us how much more secure Vista will be compared to XP. I have to be honest despite knowing how much time and effort had gone into testing the OS before release I was still a tiny bit sceptical. Having said that..It turns out that Microsoft might actually have been telling the truth! From what I have read the reported security problems with Vista is not only way below XP’s security vulnerabilities upon release but is also beating other brands of OS as well! What’s more, my experiences on my own Vista machines as well as clients match their findings. Well done Microsoft!

Crash, Hang, Reboot - How is the stability. Well I am yet to see a blue screen on Vista, anyone got a screenshot to prove they exist? Seriously, I am sure they do exist. I am just yet to see one. Because I access my desktop remotely all the time it tends to get left on and it does so quite happily. The only thing that does cause it to shutdown against my will are the powercuts we randomly get around here and that isn’t really Vista’s fault! When I last checked how long my Vista machine had been up and running for, it was 21days, and still going strong. I only rebooted because I installed an application that wanted a reboot.

It has only been in the last week that I have actually seen Vista crash, which isn’t bad after working on it for a year or more. That was on a clients machine and it actually turned out to be a problem with the storage controller and not Vista. The other crash I have seen on Vista happened last week and that was caused by a fault with a CD rather than Vista.

So is this a perfect Operating System then..? Well..No, I don’t believe in such a thing. Vista isn’t perfect, if it was they wouldn’t be releasing Service Pack 1 for it in March. However the things that I have come across more than once with Vista that make it not quite perfect are these:

• Windows Mail – There is a bug in this that will randomly lock out and corrupt the outbox mail folder. There is a way round it but you loose any unreadable messages from the outbox. If you are struggling with this we wrote about it on Brandstar along with the fix, check out the Brandstar Site for details.
• Windows Mail – An issue, not really a bug with Windows Mail this time, but a little disappointment is that there is no UK dictionary.
• Office 2003 doesn’t fully work with Vista. There are the odd little bugs here and there which annoy more than anything in Office 2003 running on Vista. The one I found on a users machine was that they couldn’t use Word to edit their signature in Outlook. Small but annoying. Office 2007 I have to say is better and works perfectly on Vista, but that’s not really the point!
• Bit-Locker only on Vista Ultimate – In my opinion the Business version of Vista should have the Bit-Locker facility as well. I appreciate Microsoft’s argument that Ultimate has to have something ‘extra’ to warrant having that version but surely just having all the components of Premium and Business is enough?

They are the things that come to mind, and although there might be one or two more I don’t really think there is anything terribly worrying that should put users off this Operating System.

Am I recommending people get Vista?

The answer is yes and no. Much like when it was first released I don’t recommend upgrading your machine unless you bought it as “Vista Ready”. If you are buying a new machine then I wouldn’t even think of advising you against Vista! My most important advice. Make sure your computer peripherals are compatible with Vista!

I hope this has helped, particularly if you are on the edge of buying Vista. So far Vista has been very well taken up but at the same time there are still many users uncertain about making the change, and understandably as the OS is still pretty young. But with the first milestone of a year in use and no real scares I think Vista will only become more and more popular. I think this year will be an important one for Vista!