Liane Cassavoy, PC World, Yardena Arar

Campers who need an all-in-one survival tool have the famed Swiss Army Knife. And business folks who are looking for an all-in-one productivity survival kit have B-Folders 3. This handy tool is more of a suite than just a utility, and what it lacks in user-friendliness, B-Folders 3 more than makes up for with its performance.

B-Folders 3 uses a three-paned interface that makes it easy to navigate through all of the info you have stored.B-Folders 3 includes a laundry list of features: It's a bookmark manager, a contact manager, a journal, a notepad, a password manager, a task manager, and more. How to access all of these features isn't immediately apparent when you launch the desktop application. But once you click through B-Folders 3's three-paned interface, how to access its feature set becomes more apparent. It uses a tree-like folder structure, so you can move up through its levels easily. The left panel provides an overview of your B-Folders database, where you'll see a list of all the folders you've created. The center panel is where you add new items. Clicking on the big plus icon at the top of this panel brings up a list of available features: you can choose to add a new folder, note, task, journal entry, etc. You create the actual entry itself in the third panel, where you enter the information you want to store, as well as any notes on it.

RadarSync's PC Updater 2012 offers an easy-to-use and comprehensive solution for updating your PC's drivers. The application quickly scans for and identifies the out-of-date drivers lurking on your computer, and makes installing the newer versions a cinch, but getting PC Updater running takes a little longer than it should.

RadarSync PC Updater's interface is attractive, but a bit bland.The delay is due to all of the extras that RadarSync offers you while installing the software. I declined its invitations to install a Babylon toolbar, to change my default search engine to Babylon.com, and to change my home page. Then, I opted out of its suggested installation of an app called "I Want This." Ditto for an app called "We-care," from Save the Children. And ditto for an app called "ComplainApp." By the time I was able to run PC Updater, I'd almost forgotten which app I'd initially wanted to install.

The power of an Android phone or tablet already makes a desktop PC, or even a laptop, seem a little old-fashioned--but you can enhance your smartphone or tablet even more. Here are six applications that allow you to use your desktop computer to get more functionality, and more fun, from your Android device.

DoubleTwist

You can complain all you want about the closed nature of Apple's software, but you can't deny that the marriage of iTunes and iOS is as cohesive as it gets. This desktop-mobile connection is missing from the Android experience--until you install DoubleTwist. Once you install this free desktop application, it automatically finds the music, photos, and videos you have stored on your computer (yes, even those in your existing iTunes library) and organizes them for you, letting you browse your collection by artist, album, playlist, and more in its tidy interface. You can sync these multimedia files to and from your Android device via USB.

Today's smartphones have bigger and better screens than ever before. But, while a 4- or 5-inch screen may feel roomy on your mobile device, it's probably less than a quarter the size of to the screen that your laptop or desktop boasts. If you'd like to use all of those inches for viewing and controlling your Android phone, meet AirDroid, a handy mobile application that allows you to take complete control of your Android device via your computer's Web browser.

Sick of composing SMS messages on a tiny screen? AirDroid lets you do it from your Web browser.To use AirDroid, your two devices must be connected to the same Wi-Fi network. You download the app to your mobile phone from Google Play. Launch the app, and it does most of the work for you, creating a link between your phone and your Web browser. AirDroid lets you choose how to complete the connection between the two devices, and provides all the guidance you need along the way. It offers up two Web addresses that you can use to complete the link; one is an IP address that makes a direct connection, while the other is web.airdroid.com, which will link the two once you've entered the supplied passcode. Alternately, you can use the AirDroid app on the phone to scan an on-screen QR code that appears on web.airdroid.com, which will also complete the connection.

If you ever feel like you're drowning in all of the information that social networks like Facebook and Twitter provide, you're not alone. That's where Bottllenose can help: This free online service helps you make sense of all the information that social media delivers. But its own feature set is so dense that it may overwhelm you at first, too.

Bottlenose's Sonar view makes it easy to see which topics are popular, and how they are related.Bottlenose takes all of the information that you get from social media--it supports Facebook, Google Reader, LinkedIn, and Twitter--and groups it into a series of streams. The streams, which are listed in a panel on the left side of Bottlenose's neatly-organized Web-based dashboard, are organized by the type of information they contain. "All" contains info from all your social networks, while "Inbox" lists messages and updates directed at you. Other streams include Private, @Mentions, Notifications, Suggested for You, and Popular. Bottlenose also includes several Filters, which are pre-defined streams that find information based on the content type, such as News, Tech News, Entertainment News, Videos, and more,

Change is never easy, especially when it's one of your favorite services making the changes--and forcing them on you. But, if you're one of the many Twitter users still lamenting the loss of the old-style retweets in the new Twitter, you don't need to be sad any longer. Classic Retweet, a simple Firefox add-on and Google Chrome extension, can return you to the glory days of Twitter's retweet feature, allowing you to append your pithy comments to everything you retweet

Classic Retweets tags the original author in your retweet, and lets you edit the text.Once you add Classic Retweet to your browser, you'll see it appear as a new option in Twitter's action menu, which appears below tweets when you mouse over them. In addition to Twitter's standard options--expand, reply, retweet, and favorite--you'll see an additional option: "Classic RT."

Netgear R6300 802.11ac routerNetgear's first 802.11ac router, the R6300, will go on sale next week for $200, the company announced at a news conference yesterday. Touting the benefits of the next-gen Wi-Fi standard, the company also announced two more 802.11ac products: a lower-end router and a USB adapter for notebooks, both due this summer.

Netgear officials continue to maintain that the company is the first to bring 802.11ac products to market, even though Buffalo Technology's first 802.11ac router and an 802.11ac media bridge are already on sale on Frys.com and Newegg.com. A Netgear official at yesterday's press event said he had ordered a Buffalo unit from Newgg in order to verify actual availability, but that he had not yet received it.

Facebook is a lot of fun...until you realize that much of the information posted there could be found by someone you might not want to see it. Like your boss, or potential boss. Your mother, or your potential mother-in-law. Ever wonder how your Facebook page might make you look to someone else? NetworkClean can show you: This free service scans and monitors your Facebook account, alerting you to any problems lurking there.

NetworkClean's dashboard gives you an overall look at the state of your Facebook account.Currently in beta, NetworkClean is a tool that's designed to be run on your own Facebook account to manage your own Facebook reputation, similar to Reputation.com, which offers both free and paid versions of a comprehensive Internet monitoring service. NetworkClean offers many of the same features offered by tools that are designed to monitor the Facebook use of younger children, such as MinorMonitor and SocialShield, and could conceivably be used in the same way, but isn't expressly designed for this purpose.

Staying on top of one social network is tough enough. Keeping tabs on two, three, or more is nearly impossible if you try doing it the old-fashioned way--by opening a window for each and toggling between them. Who's got time for that?

Enter Engagio (www.engag.io), a browser-based service which creates a universal inbox for your messages from popular social networking sites (at this writing, these include 4Square, Disqus, Facebook, Google contacts, Google+, Hacker News, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and Twitter).

Buffalo AirStation WZR-D1800H 802.11ac Wi-Fi routerBuffalo Technology says its first 802.11ac AirStation products--a router and a wireless media bridge--are on sale now at Fry's, Frys.com and Newegg.com, making Buffalo the first to market with next-generation gigabit Wi-Fi gear.

At this writing, I was not able to verify the claim (this blog entry was written based on an embargoed news release). But if true, Buffalo will have snuck past Netgear, which last month said its R6300 router would be the first based on the new standard. Netgear said the R6300 would go on sale in May, but as of Sunday night it did not turn up in a Google Shopping search, or in searches of a couple of Netgear's major retail partners. (I'll update these results as needed.) Update: I've since found the Buffalo router and media bridge on Newegg.com.

See that cell phone next to you? Unfortunately, you're paying too much money for it--every month. If overpaying for what you need sounds like a bad idea to you, stop doing it. We've assembled 12 simple actions that you can take to reduce your cell phone bill, so that some of the cash you now spend for service--maybe even half of it--remains in your possession. So check out our tips, and use one or more of them to save big bucks on your bill.

Covering the Basics

1. Find the right plan for you: Carefully review how often and in what ways you use your phone. Ideally, you should do this before signing a cell phone contract, but of course it can be difficult to know exactly how you'll use your phone until you spend time with it every day.