The disk crash is many PC users’ worst nightmare: All data lost, the last backup is from months ago, and all that downloaded software has to be downloaded again. And, saddest of all, all that personal data, the digital pictures, etc. Will that backup still be restorable? There couldn’t be a worse scenario, or could there? There could: What if your house burned down and your PC, including all backup media was destroyed? Now, those family pictures are surely lost. Of course, you could store those pictures on a DVD and take it to a friends’ place. In a different house, maybe a different part of town. Or you could take it to a bank locker. But who’d leave the house for that?

Now online backups, in particular Jungledisk, ElephantDrive, provide an alternative. Simple to install, they provide relatively low cost datastorage in large vaults run either by Amazon or other providers. With the possibility to mount network storage as a Windows drive, they integrate into the Windows Explorer, so even non-sophisticated users can access them, making them a much more feasible solution for these user groups than old school hosting providers.

Two major drawbacks should be mentioned: Both Jungledrive and ElephantDrive do not offer client side encryption. This basically means you cannot be ultimately sure that nobody can ever access your secret data. This can be overcome by encrypting your data locally, e.g. with GnuPG and then submitting them for backup. However, this requires some expertise on the user side, reducing the ease of use of the online backup solutions somewhat. If your data isn’t secret or you trust those providers, this drawback may be irrelevant for you.

The other drawback is of course speed. With the limited upload speed of retail DSL connections, a backup of your digital photo album can easily take several days. You can run those backups in the background and limit bandwidth usage, so you can continue to work with your PC and even run the online game of your choice, but this increases backup duration even more. However, since your photo album probably increases in size only slowly, and backup is incremental, these long durations are generally acceptable — for me. Your mileage may vary.

Windows Vista is where it’s at for anyone with a digital camera and at least one friend.

For anyone that emails digital photos, Vista has incorporated a great new feature to make the standard processes easier to complete. For those of us that have spent countless hours trying to reduce the resolution of our digital pictures to minimize file size to make it easier to send to friends and family on dial up, our savior has arrived in the form of Microsoft Vista.

Vista now allows you to highlight a group of photo’s to be emailed, click the “email” button on the toolbar, and choose the appropriate resolution size & approximate file size you wish to email. After clicking the attach button Vista brings up Windows Mail and automatically included the pictures into the attachment at the smaller resolution size. All you need to do is type in the email address you wish to send them to & click send. A task that used to take an hour now takes 15 seconds. It is simply amazing.

Are you an serious, active stock trader? If so, you need Wall Street Analyzer. This free charting and analysis software has 30+ build in technical analysis indicators. You can also build your own custom indicators. Also includes backtesting capabilities for your own trading system. This software is for serious traders only as it’s a bit beyond the average investor. For the money (free) this is the best stock trading software.

Myzips.com has selected Back4Win as the #1 backup software application. This freeware uses industry standard zip compression to backup your data and make it recoverable on any OS. Perfect for backing up software to CDR and CDRW media. Backups can be saved as .exe as well in case compression software is not available. No size limitations and backups are timestamped for easy reference.

Want to find out what’s taking up all the space on your hard drive?

WinDirStat is an excellent application that will display the contents of any drive or folder you select in a way that makes it very easy to see how big every file it is. You may find old unneeded files that you had completely forgotten about are taking up space, or that a program you rarely use has spread itself over a large section of your drive.

Ever had one of those days when you were on the web one day and the next day your browser refuses to go to the sites you want and jumps from site to site.

Well I’ve had several of those days and I’ve got a program that you need if you want to be on the web each night without worrying what gets on your system. Developed by Sunbelt Software, CounterSpy 2.0 has succeeded where other applications such as McAfee VirusScan Enterprise 8 and Windows Defender has failed. Not only did it get rid of my browser problem, it alerted me to other security issues on my system (including tracking cookies) filtering out the bad and leaving behind the good.

You can get a free 15-day trial at the Sunbelt Software website and can upgrade to the full version for $19.95. I think it’s totally worth the price since it saved me from viewing webpages I had no interest in seeing. A word of caution though: Active Protection tends to go a bit extreme so try and create a system restore point before your first install and see how it works for you. If it doesn’t work out well the first time, use the restore point and install CounterSpy without enabling Active Protection. Good luck!