Garden Planner Review

Faced with the daunting task of transforming a vacant fenced block of land, I was about to boot up Microsoft Visio (which I'd used before for house plans) before I thought to myself - "there must be a better way".

Well I found that way, and it is an affordable piece of shareware called Garden Planner.  However it takes a bit of patience.  On first use I was amazed by the sheer number of pre-loaded symbols for common landcaping including trees, fences, paths, vegetable gardens and the like. 

On the whole this software seems quite powerful and intuitive, although I found that initially I could not create a border or fence.  I worked out that you could double click to complete a border, but sometimes it just wouldn't allow you to delete and create a new one.  After several frustrating attempts of closing the software and reloading, I finally worked the quirks of the system and managed to - with several saves - get the hang of it.. Other than that, my only other griefs were that the software tended to crash and the scale and grid options are initially a little tricky to find.

But overall, Garden Planner is a neat and complete little piece of software that allows you to save, export and print a garden design.

Check it out at:
www.smallblueprinter.com/garden/

10 Essential Freeware Programs to download for a Fresh Install

Having recently reinstalled my PC yet again, I thought I'd share a brief list of must have free programs which I always download and install on any fresh copy of Windows.

1. Microsoft Security Essentials (freeware - requires valid Windows licence) - virus and spyware protection is a must and it won't bog down your PC either
2. Sun Open Office (freeware) - essential for documents, desktop publishing, spreadheets and presentations
   
3. Adobe Reader (freeware) - opening PDF files can be difficult without it 
4. Mozilla Thunderbird (freeware) - for email
5. Irfanview (freeware) - for viewing images
6. Paint.NET (freeware) - for editing images
7. Mozilla Firefox (freeware)- web browsing mainly for its plugins and standards base (using it less than Chrome these days though
8. Picasa (freeware) - an essential photo management tool
9. Windows Movie Maker (freeware) - a nice little suite for creating movie files and uploading them to services such as YouTube
10. Filezilla (freeware) - for uploading files to the web

I can survive without anything else installed.

Media Monkey digital Media Player kicks some butt

I don't know why, but I'd been using Apple iTunes as a digital media player for so long, I never questioned it.

In the old days, I was a big fan of Winamp. Especially getting into its visualisation plug-ins, skins and format compatibility.

At one point I started using iTunes. I think it just became a pseudo standard. It was easier to import music and plug in to my Sony Walkman MP3 player for a start.
But I always found that iTunes to be limiting in visualisations, and it generally got bloated, slow, incompatible and unusable. I got sick of the ads in the interface.

Recently I've discovered Media Monkey. Not sure why it took so long, because it is not only faster, but it offers a lot of the features that I used to like about Winamp, but takes it to a whole new level. I'd definitely recommend looking at it at least.

If I haven't made your mind up for you, then check out this blog which provides a pretty decent and detailed comparison between the products (there is also a wikipedia article, "Comparison of Media Players", but there are so many on their list unless you have the time I would much prefer to cut straight to the chase).