In the past, the all singing and dancing Nero Burning Rom was renowned for slowing your system down or even crashing your PC so that a restart was needed before you could start using Nero again!

Times have changed, and the latest version of the Nero suite, version 10, runs really well on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. It is perfectly stable and speeds through its tasks at a fair rate of knots.

We have been using this suite of tools on a Windows 7 PC for about two months without any problems at all. Just point Nero 10 to what you want to do and then it does it!

So full marks to Nero for this latest iteration of their suite.

From its early days Nero has grown from one of the best CD burning tools into a mammoth collection of products that can handle all sorts of burning, copying, recoding and recording tasks. It includes advanced video editing features, a media organizer and player, burning software, reliable backup technology and special multimedia tools to enhance your music, photos and videos.

To see our full review of this amazing suite of tools click here – http://www.qbs-pchelp.co.uk/nero10-review.html

Mozilla has pumped out the first beta of Thunderbird 3.1, aimed at ironing out problems caused by the switch to the Gecko 1.9.2 rendering engine.

Gecko 1.9.2 is the same rendering engine powering Firefox 3.6, and while the change should bring a raft of improvements including interface tweaks, bug fixes and memory management improvement, the Thunderbird team acknowledges there could be “possible problems caused by the changes in the underlying platform”.

Among these problems are broken add-ons, “crashes and bugs and potentially data loss in profiles,” according to the release notes.

The beta, codenamed Lanikai, is available for PC, Mac and Linux, with a second beta expected to be available in early April, followed by a release candidate at the beginning of May.

The final release of Thunderbird 3.1 is targeted for 1 June 2010

Source: PC Pro

Mozilla Messaging has finally released the latest version of Thunderbird 3. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Thunderbird 3 introduces several hefty new features and some long-needed improvements, including an overhauled search and message indexing, tab support, and a revamped setup wizard that’s designed to make new account setup quick and easy.

One feature that isn’t included is the calendaring add-on, Lightning. Originally, Mozilla had planned to include the extension into Thunderbird 3, but decided back in February 2009 to change course and leave it up to users to download. Although Thunderbird natively comes with Microsoft Exchange support, there’s no calendar and therefore no meeting support in the default installation. Along with Lightning, there’s an essential Google Calendar add-on for Lightning that gives Google users calendar support in Lightning.

Even without Lightning, Thunderbird makes for an excellent desktop-based e-mail client. Beyond Outlook replacement, it also makes a savvy offline or local-storage tool for the various Web mail providers. Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements in version 3 include better recognition and integration of Gmail’s special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and the non-English versions of Gmail. The All Mail option in Gmail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder.

Undeniably, the killer feature in Thunderbird 3 is the search tool. The most obvious competitor, Microsoft Outlook, doesn’t offer anything that comes close to the level of granular control that Mozilla has given to Thunderbird users. The new search bar is dominant at the top of the interface, and you can change the default Search All Messages to focus on a particular part of the e-mail, filtering down to the Subject, From, Recipient, To, CC, or message body fields, or to a combination of all of them.

Thunderbird 3 rates as a top-notch e-mail client, and it’s definitely the best freeware one around. It will require some fidgeting to get it to be usable in a corporate environment, but it’s far more scalable to user needs than anything else currently available.

To find out a lot more about this major release see the Mozilla Messaging site – en-gb.www.mozillamessaging.com/en-GB/

I’ve now been using Ora Time and Expense for more than 7 months and it has really helped in tracking the time I spend on web design, repairing PC’s and calculating PAYE for several local companies.

This great little time saver is ideal and can be used for tracking all the hours you spend on business and personal projects. It can also generate time-sheets, expense reports and invoices if you need them!

It has customisable templates in xml format and new templates can be added to the Ora templates folder to further customise things to your liking.

The application is now at version 1.1.8. There have been many improvements since Ora Time and Expense became a winner of the ‘Adobe AIR Developer Derby Best Business HTML Application’ in June 2007.

In particular the task timer can now be paused and resumed. And the duration of each task is clearly displayed in hours and minutes.

It just a great little program and it works so well. It also works in the background and does not impact on your computers performance at all.

To get your own copy of Ora Time and Expense visit the developers web site at – www.johnwu.com/ora

When firing up Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop and Bridge today (CS3 versions), to work on a new website, everything crashed after a few minutes with the message “AMT Subsystem Error -The licensing subsystem has failed catastrophically. You must reinstall or call customer support.”

None of the programs would open so I trawled the Adobe website for an answer and found a useful Tech Note which offers a number of work-a-rounds. This can be found at:

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402004.html

As it turned out I just rebooted our PC’s and all the CS3 suite programs opened up.

They have remained stable for the last few hours so the problem seems to be solved.

I’ve been using a great little application called Ora Time and Expense.

This fairly simple program can be used for tracking the time you spend on business or personal projects. It can also generate time-sheets, expense reports and invoices if you need them.

It has customisable templates in xml format and new templates can be added to the Ora templates folder to further customise things.

The application is still in BETA and uses $ settings rather than £’s but its still worth downloading.

Its simple to set up and I have been using it for nearly a week without any problems. It just works well.

Get a copy of Ora Time and Expense here.

Have ever wanted to carry the firefox browser, a full office suite, a diary and task manager and a full featured notepad all on a flash drive that can be plugged into to any USB port on any Windows computer?

Then take a look at the Portable open sourced applications supplied by portableapps.com. Well worth a look especially as they are free and very useful if you use internet cafe’s or repair other peoples PC’s and need these tools to record time spent, browse the internet, write a report etc.

Download this wonderful tool from their website – http://portableapps.com/