If you’re suffering from withdrawal symptoms and missing the classic menu for Office, you’re not alone. For a company that normally puts backward compatibility at a premium, Microsoft sure got it wrong with Office 2007 and it’s successor Office 2010.

All the familiar menus you’ve grown to love or hate have disappeared and in their place is a new – supposedly better – system that would be fine if you were just learning to use Office but turns the air blue if you’re used to things being where they always have been.

Unusually there’s no option to switch back to the classic menu for Office. But fortunately there’s an add-on available which puts all your old, familiar menus back into your sparkling new copy of Office. Phew!

It saves headaches and relearning/retraining costs…

Continue reading →

In an ideal world, you’d never need a program like Panic Button Pro.

Of course, the world isn’t ideal and there are times when you need to stop things happening on your computer instantly.

Sure, Windows has an option to “show desktop” and minimize all your programs and browsers to the system tray.

So what makes Panic Button Pro better?

When you first start the program, you’re offered a configuration screen:

But that’s all it does. Panic Button Pro goes a lot further than this and could be worth its weight in gold…

Continue reading →

If you’ve ever accidentally pressed the “delete” key on your digital camera, you’ll know the heart-sinking feeling that your photo has been lost forever – but can Photo Saver come to the rescue?

It’s almost as if modern cameras were designed to help you lose your favorite photos.

Fortunately, there is an answer to this problem: Photo Saver. Continue reading →

When you press “delete” on your digital camera, the photo isn’t actually erased as you’ll find out if you get hold of a program like Photo Eraser.

Deleting photos on your camera works much the same way as deleting files on your hard drive – for speed, the space is marked as available for re-use. But apart from a small indicator that shows the photo up on the available list, it’s really still there.

Which isn’t normally a problem…

Continue reading →

Ultimate Registry Cleaner gets to the Windows Registry, the dark heart of Windows. The registry is a bit like the boiler room in horror movies. And at least as scary.

It holds all sorts of information – program settings (Microsoft’s programs and other  ones as well), hardware settings (think hard drives, CD/DVD writers, graphics cards), most all of your user settings (it remembers where that window should open and what size it should be for instance).

And it’s not unheard of for  the registry to get confused…

Continue reading →

Computers are great time savers (at least sometimes) but there are times when they take short cuts to keep themselves running quickly and efficiently – Secure Delete can overcome one of the scariest shortcuts.

One of these shortcuts comes when you delete a file.

You likely already know that deleted files get sent to your recycle bin and can be undeleted from there with just a mouse click.

But what happens after they leave your recycle bin is a bit scarier if you’ve got confidential information that you’d rather keep secret.

Continue reading →