Ramon McLeod

When you use your PC, your operating system saves data as bits spread throughout your hard drive. And though file access time is less of a problem than it used to be, thanks to faster rotational speeds and improved caching on the latest hard-disk drives, utilities such as Diskeeper Professional 2007 can help optimize system performance.

In my anecdotal hands-on experience, Diskkeeper 2007 markedly improved my system's performance; I now get from my Windows XP log-in to a usable desktop in half the time it took before, and access times for some frequently used files (such as images displayed in ACDSee 7.0) improved noticeably. I also like the new interface.

Our lab tests were less clear. Executive Software reps told us that systems equipped with the latest version of the product should show performance gains on our WorldBench 5 benchmark tests, but we saw no significant improvements. (We did observe some small changes in the results for individual applications in our test suite; these changes were likely due to the file's new placement on the hard disk drive, after Diskeeper performed its defrag). WorldBench 5 doesn't measure boot-up time.

This is, without a doubt, the best product out there for grabbing files from Usenet. Nothing else compares.

I've used this product for years, and it has never failed to amaze, and satisfy.

Few of us have the time or patience to wade through the multitude of information found in newsgroups. Agent helps you subscribe to, filter, and organize UseNet messages.

You may think you know Internet Explorer, but Version 7 is a different beast entirely from the IE you probably are using today. This new iteration of the world's dominant browser brings in a number of features long since taken for granted by alternative browser users, such as tabbed browsing, a toolbar-integrated search box, and limited RSS support.

Version 7 also has a much more compact and streamlined interface than its predecessor, with a strong emphasis on dedicating as much of the window as possible to the displayed Web site. And there are a number of security upgrades, like a new anti-phishing filter.