Here is just some of the Software we use each and every day.
This is a really good software package of twelve 'SEO tools' that promote, maintain and analyze your website. And it’s free, so there’s no reason not to give it a try if you have a website that you need to promote. Of course, there are a few restrictions in the free version but it’s not time-limited and even the free version of Web CEO is much better than most commercial tools.
Some of the key features of this free SEO software include:
This great free software can help you to tweak your web pages to get free traffic from search engines, it can also monitor your rankings, submit your site and analyze your links (very important for high rankings in search engines – see our SEO article – Getting Inbound Links ). Also, you can find and fix errors on your site like broken links and missing images and can learn almost anything about visitors to your site using a great real-time traffic analyzer. The traffic analyzer is very good for ad campaign and Return on Investment (ROI) tracking.
All in all, this software was a lucky find! Be sure to check it out for yourself by downloading this free software from Web CEO.
See the QBS Review of this great Free software.
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 WindowsXP, 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 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.
See our hands on review of Nero 10.
This piece of software provides a suite of professional web promotion tools including modules dealing with all aspects of website promotion and search engine optimisation.
IBP offers everything you need to successfully promote your own website. Download the free demo version to test many of the IBP features for free. If you want to learn more about IBP's great features, take the quick feature tour.
See the full QBS PC Help review of this SEO software.
MailWasher is a spam detection and mail preview tool that allows you to check the mail on the server and delete any spam before you download it to your local computer. It can notify you when new mail arrives and automatically mark suspicious messages, so you can preview and delete them.
There are 3 levels of spam detection, and you can specify your own filters. MailWasher also offers the option to exclude your friends from spam checking and check mail against public blacklists.
This free version is limited to one POP3 email account. If you have more than one account you will need to purchase the Pro version of MailWasher. Check this FAQ.
OpenOffice.org is a multi platform and multilingual office suite and an open-source project. It is compatible with all other major office suites and is free to download, use, and distribute.
The parts of OpenOffice.org (and the Microsoft Office equivalents) are Writer (Word), Calc (Excel), Impress (PowerPoint), Base (Access) and Math (Equation Editor). It also includes Draw, which doesn't really have an equivalent in Office.
The OpenOffice.org programs are very much like their Microsoft Office counterparts. If you're familiar with Microsoft Office, you'll have no trouble using this free software.
Get your free copy of version 3.0 here
Notepad2 is a light-weight, free and open source Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting for a few commonly used programming languages (HTML, XML, PHP, ASP, JS, VBS, CSS, JavaScript, VBScript, C/C++, C#).
This free and improved version of Notepad is based on the Scintilla source code editing component downloadable from - http://www.scintilla.org. Notepad2 works on NT-based versions of Windows.
Installation and Uninstallation
Just put a copy of Notepad2.exe and Notepad2.ini to any directory on your computer. To uninstall Notepad2, simply delete these two files. Notepad2 does not create any registry entries on your computer.
Download this improved Notepad now.
The GSiteCrawler will help you generate the best Google Sitemap file for your website. The GSiteCrawler uses different ways to find all the pages in your website and can generate all sorts of files, statistics and more.
The GSiteCrawler is available for free and runs under Windows - all you need is an internet connection and the desire to make the most out of your website!
QBS PC help use the MySQL open source database for all its web applications. Large sections of our website are controlled by this back end database.
MySQL is the database of choice for a new generation of applications built on the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP / Perl / Python.)
MySQL also runs on more than 20 platforms including Linux, Windows, OS/X, HP-UX, AIX, Netware, giving us the kind of flexibility that we need in developing website solutions.
Find out more About the MySQL Database
PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.
The entire content of several pages within the QBS PC Help website is held in MyQSL databases and is generated via PHP scripts.
If you are new to PHP and want to get some idea of how it works, try the PHP home page.
Our website is hosted on 1&1’s Linux shared hosting, as this offers QBS PC Help a reliable, efficient and secure hosting environment.
1&1 offer very competitive pricing for both Linux and Windows hosting packages and these are both comprehensive and feature-packed. These packages even come with free .co.uk domains!
QBS PC Help are very pleased with all aspects of the 1&1 hosting service and since moving to 1&1's speedy servers our site visitors continue to grow!
Find out more about 1&1 Hosting Packages or read the PC Pro review.
A good all round tool for checking out parts of your PC is SiSoftware Sandra. Download the free Lite Version from Download Sites for Sandra Lite.
We currently recommend Kaspersky Internet Security 2010 or Kaspersky Anti-Virus 2010 for its stunning 98% mailware detection, heuristic scanning and low resource usage. (This is what QBS PC Help use on all our office computers.)
Other anti virus offerings include:
For a quick fix, if your virus infection is not to severe, you may be able to make use of one or more of the following online software tools.
If your computer has System Restore (Windows ME, XP, Vista, Windows 7) you should disable this before running these cleaners to prevent copies of the infection being stored.
Prevx CSI is a powerful new security tool that will quickly and easily tell you if your PC has been infected by one of the ever growing number of new internet threats - spyware, adware and rootkits.
If you like Prevx CSI, as we do, you can keep a copy on your PC or on a separate USB memory stick. It can then be used as often as you like to check if your PC is been infected.
Tip: click here to see how to install SpyBot and get the best results when using it.
This free program scans your PC's registry for unwanted, corrupt paths and gives you the option to make a backup before cleaning begins. Although there is not an option to restore the removed items if you change your mind, the backup is a simple .reg file - you just have to double click it to bring back your deleted registry keys. You can download this excellent program from this website right now! Or just read on.
CCleaner does a whole lot more than just clean out your registry it finds and clears all your Windows Temporary Files and removes your browser or start menu run histories, cookies and a whole lot more. It runs in all flavours of Windows, including Microsoft's latest operating system Windows 7. You can get your own copy of this excellent program from www.ccleaner.com.
Computers are under constant attack from viruses, spyware and identity theft. Every day a new threat seems to pop up.. These attacks are coming faster than ever before, they're getting harder to stop and traditional antivirus products are finding it hard to keep up.
ThreatFire's patent-pending ActiveDefense technology offers protection against all types of internet threats - both known and unknown - spyware, adware, keyloggers, viruses, worms, Trojans, rootkits, buffer overflows, and other malware. ThreatFire uses its unparalleled protection to hunt down and paralyze those threats that are either too new or too clever to be recognized by traditional "signature-based" antivirus software.
ThreatFire is proven to provide up to 243% more protection when combined with traditional AntiVirus products.
This great program works together with most other antivirus programs and runs under Windows® 7, Vista™, XP, and 2003. Check it out for yourself.
Another free registry cleaner is RegScrubXP. This is a very popular utility designed to delete unnecessary information from the System Registry of Windows 2000 & Windows XP operating systems. This "junk" is often left behind when programs are uninstalled, and the information is not needed anymore. Programmers mistakenly load the Registry with junk as well. The result of cleaning out the junk is a smaller, faster Registry. Because your operating system accesses the Registry a lot, keeping it clean is an essential 'housekeeping' step. To download your free copy of this program visit - www.majorgeeks.com a very useful site for updates and free software tools.
AVG Anti-Rootkit is a powerful tool with state-of-the-art technology for detection and removal of rootkits. Rootkits are used to hide the presence of a malicious object like trojans or keyloggers on your computer. If a threat uses rootkit technology to hide itself it is very hard to find the malware on your PC. AVG Anti-Rootkit gives you the power to find and delete the rootkit and to uncover the threat the rootkit is hiding. This free tool can be downloaded from www.grisoft.com.
Mozilla Firefox is the dream Internet browser you've been looking for. It displays an elegant simplicity and makes your web experience better, much faster and even more enjoyable.
Take its toolbar which, compared with the clutter of Microsoft Internet Explorer's toolbar, presents only a few basic browsing commands: back, forward, reload, stop and home. Its Options screen consists of six simple categories of settings - most of which don't need adjusting, since the defaults actually work and make sense.
And if Firefox isn't already good enough you can improve its performance even further by using FireTune. This is another piece of open source software that optimises several internal settings of Firefox for better performance. Read More...
Perform a Google search and the McAfee Site Advisor tool displays traffic lights (green, amber or red) to indicate whether a site is safe to visit. Naturally enough red means danger!
If you hover over the traffic light a balloon appears with even more detail. If you then click the balloon it takes you to the McAfee Site Advisor website where a comprehensive analysis is supplied. This covers the risk of any spam email, infected downloads and suspicious affiliate links. The same traffic light signal is applied within the browser whenever you visit a site.
Grab a copy of this excellent software. Its free and works with both Firefox and Internet Explorer - www.siteadvisor.com
This PowerToy gives you access to system settings that are not exposed in the Windows XP default user interface, including mouse settings, Explorer settings, taskbar settings, and more.
Version 2.10 requires Windows XP Service Pack 1 or Windows Server 2003.
This is a great web based program that probes your firewall for security shortcomings (vulnerable ports. shares and browser headers) and tells you about them in a detailed, but easy to follow analysis.
To get started the first thing you need to do is go to http://www.grc.com. Click on the splash screen and on the main page scroll down to the 'Hot Spots' section and double click the 'Shields Up' link.