This isn’t the most feature-packed Windows optimization utility but we found it one of the easiest to control. Advanced WindowsCare Personal’s simple interface offers two main options: Repair and Repair And Optimize. The former fixes Registry entries and cleans out your operating system. The latter does the same thing and tweaks Windows for maximum performance.

If you run into trouble, the Restoration option can return your system to its original configuration. The Advanced menu provides fine control over repairs and optimizations. Afterward, I noticed only one improvement, a reduced amount of used RAM, but that’s not insignificant. However, the sparse descriptions of system problems may not satisfy seasoned users. And although the latest version of the app includes a help file, it’s hardly extensive.

Nevertheless, if your system is doing its best turtle impersonation and you’re considering reinstalling Windows, it wouldn’t hurt to try this freeware package first. There’s also a paid upgrade that offers more features, such as a run-in-background option, faster definition file updates, and tech support.

If you’ve ever hunted for a job, housing, or furniture on Craigslist.org, you’ll appreciate the help of a devoted desktop reader to sift and sort through multiple listings. I’ve taken a look at two free Craigslist-helpers on CNET Download.com–Craigslist Reader Pro and CraigsList Reader. While neither one is perfect, we found Craigslist Reader Pro to be the stronger choice, though it would do well to learn from what CraigsList Reader has done right.

Craigslist Reader Pro by CraigsPal is good at precision searches, but bad at presentation.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Craigslist Reader Pro, published by CraigsPal, isn’t pretty to look at, but it does quickly hone your search to Craigslist’s key cities and categories, and displays results in one of the reader’s four program panels.

There are certainly some nice touches here–a search bar to help in choosing the location of the query, a chance to define positive and negative keywords, and choices to only read posts with images or search titles only. A list of extra variables appropriate to each category you’re searching is especially useful for whittling down results. For instance, you can tick a box to find pet-friendly apartments or nonprofit jobs.

While I liked the filter menu to further attack ungainly results after you’ve launched a search, what’s sorely missing are management tools to slash entries you no longer want and to flag favorites one by one–it’s currently all or nothing. Without these, Craigslist Reader Pro remains a strong search engine that’s limited by the most basic of readers.

CraigsList Reader lets you manager listings and is easy on the eye, but has been known to return less accurate results.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

CraigsList Reader, on the other hand, achieves much more with design, but contains some worrisome performance omissions. The interface, a Microsoft Office 2007 clone (and not the first we’ve seen), is much more legible and attractive than its rival. CraigsList Reader also tops the CraigsPal “Pro” reader in organization and customization, and for some that’s the lure. You can delete single listings or clear them all, and save individual data files on your PC. You’ll also be able to set notifications for incoming listings that match your criteria, and customize the reader’s display.

However, the tool is neither as advanced when it comes to picking out locations nor as adept at defining or narrowing searches. Most importantly, CraigsList Reader routinely failed to return as many listings, even when the criteria were equal for both readers.

The ideal Craigslist reader would splice CraigsList Reader’s organizational tools and more advanced design with Craigslist Reader Pro’s superior engine. Until that happens, or until CraigsList Reader improves its precision and accuracy, we recommend CraigPals’ Craigslist Reader Pro, warts and all.

Power Downloader often uses his friends’ Wi-Fi hot spots all over the world, but he doesn’t visit each friend as regularly as he’d like. Months or even years go by before he sees them again. Whether they use a WEP key or a WPA, he never has to worry about keeping a password database with WirelessKeyView.

WirelessKeyView consolidates your Wi-Fi settings into one window.

(Credit: Nirsoft)

WirelessKeyView is a simple utility. The main feature lets Power D view the passwords his Wi-Fi manager has stored, but it offers more than just that. The spreadsheet-style main window shows the properties on any stored network name. Users can view not only the ASCII password, but also the Hex key, the adapter type, and the adapter GUID. If you want to copy any of the information, hit ALT-Enter to open a properties window that displays it all in editable text fields.

Besides offering copy and search functions, WirelessKeyView also crams in an HTML report feature for either selected networks or the entire database. All in all, it’s a great little application for revealing some of the hidden mysteries of the Wi-Fi signal you’re using.

Though this multifaceted burning tool won’t win any beauty awards, it has almost everything Windows users need to create CDs and DVDs. One of the most glaring holes in Windows XP is a good DVD burner program, and CDBurnerXP Pro fits the bill well. Despite a slightly confusing interface, this freeware tool should not disappoint users who take the time to familiarize themselves with its functionality.

The core of the program’s feature set consists of three main tasks, which are prompted via a wizard upon start-up: writing data CDs and DVDs, creating CDs for audio playback, and ripping music from CDs, or editing ID3 tags. Canceling the wizard results in a rather blank blue screen with only a few selections in the toolbar. To work on a new project, you’ll need to select one of the options, which can be brought back via the “New document” icon in the upper left. Unfortunately, you can’t even open an existing project without selecting one of the wizard options first.

The program supports both burnproof and on-the-fly disc writing, as well as bootable ISO files, but it cannot burn double-layer DVDs, a feature promised for version 3.5 and still in alpha development. While it may take users some time to learn how to use it effectively, CDBurnerXP Pro is a competent tool and a great value.

Similar to Launchy, Executor is a program launcher powered by hot keys that nonetheless offers a different program-starting experience.

Several of the many skins available for Executor.

(Credit: Executor)

The interface should be familiar to Launchy fans. A skinnable bar appears at the top of your screen, and as soon as you type in the first few characters of the program that you’re looking for, a list of potential choices appears. The more you type, the shorter the list becomes. Users can also scroll down the list to click on the item they want.

From there, Executor begins to differentiate itself. The customization options that you can choose from give the little app a lot of heft. Users can choose to drag an object onto the bar to create a keyword for said file, folder, or favorite. This is an interesting workaround for the less-than-compelling search feature, which works great with programs but had trouble indexing all my files.

Another built-in alternative takes advantage of the native Windows searching system, for both XP and Vista users. Users should be able to type “find [text]” and Executor will search your hard drive. In principle, even with the keyword this depends on you going into the Settings menu and configuring the indexing system to index your entire hard drive.

However, the keyword feature works great. Change that ”find” to ”addremove” and type in the name of the program, and Executor automatically opens up the Windows native Add/Remove Programs options from the Control Panel.

It feels like everything else in Executor can be customized, from such superficial aspects such as the skins to how the auto-completion function behaves. You can set it to override the Windows Run hot key, you can swap hot keys around, and you can set URLs, files, or programs to launch alongside Executor.

Executor should appeal to power users who are looking to accomplish specific program-launching tasks within a framework that offers a lot of leeway for customization.

The amount of layout possibilities for your diagrams is staggering.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Need to make a flow chart, a family tree, a diagram, or just plan the layout of your new apartment? Check out OmniGraffle, from the folks who make the classy OmniWeb browser. OmniGraffle offers all the tools you need to make professional-looking diagrams for any presentation you might have. Whether you’re just sketching out ideas for a business plan or even planning an elaborate presentation, OmniGraffle helps you create a nice-looking diagram everyone will appreciate.

Still not sure if OmniGraffle is right for you? Download OmniGraffle and read our review.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Do you want a simple way to bring life to your photos? Photo to Movie is a fairly basic concept which adds drama to average photographs. Once you have your chosen photo, use the intuitive tool set to choose your starting and ending frames to create a camera path across the image. The end result is a slow motion pan across a photograph or several photographs, making for excellent slide shows with extremely smooth animations. You can even add music to make it more dramatic. If you’re looking for a way to make a photo DVD, a personalized screensaver, or a new way to present a favorite photo, Photo to Movie offers an easy and unexpectedly dramatic solution.

Choose from several options to bring your still images to life.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Still not convinced? Download Photo to Movie and Read our review.

I just got the preview for Backblaze, yet another online backup service. Or to use the current vernacular, cloud storage. It’s a nifty service in that it does but one thing: back up your PC (Macs coming). Setup is so easy my cat could do it: you grab the software, run it, enter in an ID and password, and you’re done.

By default, Backblaze begins to backup your PC in idle times, grabbing everything on your disk except the contents of your system and program directories, and your temp files. There’s no storage or bandwidth limit, and it will store files up to 4GB in size. Backblaze costs $5 a month–quite reasonable.

You can't beat Backblaze's simplicity.

If you want to change the default backup directories or filter out files by type, you can do that in the control panel. You can also change the backup schedule so the app isn’t constantly waiting for idle time to send data. The service, as simple as it is, also gets geek cred for giving users the option to set a private encryption key for their data; if you use this option, even Backblaze won’t be able to recover files if you lose your password. On the other hand, Backblaze can’t access open files, which means it won’t back up your Outlook e-mail unless you remember to close the app. Mozy handles Outlook better.

If you want a highly configurable backup solution, there are plenty of competitive options (Mozy, for instance, or Carbonite, which I use). Backblaze is the backup app you recommend to your mom, or anyone else who should be backing up their computer but is either too scared of the technicalities or too lazy to do the work necessary to make sure the app grabs all the files it needs to.

Backblaze will let users access files they’ve backed up from its Web site, but it is not designed for that. It’s not a sharing or a syncing platform. And I’m not impressed by the restore services. Since the app doesn’t back up your entire PC, you can’t use it to do a bare-metal rebuild of a machine from backup. You can’t even do a restore of all your data over the Web: You can get up to 1GB of data downloaded at a time (in Zip files–not exactly user-friendly), or 4.7GB on a DVD (for a fee), or, in a real catastrophe, up to 160GB on a USB hard drive sent by overnight mail to you (for more of a fee, but not a usurious one).

The service is still in private beta, but you can get access to the trial (15 days free) at https://www.backblaze.com/webware.

Just a week and a half ago WordPress for the iPhone was announced with a pretty killer screencast detailing what you could do with it. Tuesday morning it finally showed up on the app store (download it here), and I’ve had ample time to play with it. The good news is that it’s very enjoyable to use and quite capable for creating posts on the go. The bad news? You’ve got to have an iPhone or iPod Touch to take advantage of it.

The key benefit to using this app is writing and publishing quick posts on the go. What I found after using it, though, is that it offers up far more to the discerning user who wants to use it as a very powerful publishing tool. You can upload photos either from your existing library or snap a quick shot with your phone’s camera. I can see this leading to many food-related photo blogs. Also nice is that whatever you write can be saved on your phone, so you can work on dozens of posts at once and only publish when you want. There’s also a great preview function that will show you what your post will look like without kicking you off to Safari.

I successfully connected two Wordpress.com hosted blogs to the app in just a minute or two, although I ran into problems connecting my personal hosted blog that uses the software install from WordPress.org. It’s worth noting you’ll need version 2.5.1 or higher to hook it up to a hosted blog, although updating to the recently released 2.6 is definitely worth it for all those extra publishing goodies.

Unfortunately there are some serious shortcomings to the iPhone that bring the app down a notch. If you’re used to adding links to your posts there’s not a lot you can do without copy and paste. HTML code is fully supported, so as long as you’re good with your href tagging (which is brutal on the iPhone’s built-in keyboard) you’ll be able to add links from memory just fine.

Another quibble of mine is that drafts created on your computer won’t show up in your post queue on the iPhone app, meaning you won’t be able to start a post on your computer and finish it on the road. Ideally, future revisions will include better shortcuts for adding links and some support for fetching drafts from the cloud.

Hardcore users with a lot of readers will also be pining for some sort of comment management feature in future revisions. As it stands, you’ll have to log in to your WordPress dashboard from Safari and administrate them from there, which isn’t terrible, but it would be far more enjoyable to write and manage in one place.

All in all, it’s off to a great start, and compared to competitor TypePad, which had its app available at the launch of the app store, WordPress is just as full featured and opens up mobile blogging to the millions of WordPress.com and WordPress.org users.

I’ve embedded screenshots and the screencast below.

If you’re looking for an Expose emulator to port that cool app-switching feature from the Mac to Windows, DExposE2 is probably about as close as you can get to a direct copy for either Windows XP or Vista. It gives them three choices for jumping between open programs, and it doesn’t slurp up more RAM than it should.

(Credit: Devrexter/DExposE2)

Using the F9 key, you’ll be able to minimize your applications to fit on the screen, then choose one to bring to the front by hitting Tab or left-clicking your mouse. F10 highlights only the active windows belonging to the application currently running in the foreground. F11 reveals the desktop by shunting all active windows off to the right side of your screen, visible only as a thin and unidentifiable bar.

DExposE2 lets you set up other hot keys or move your mouse to the corner of the screen to activate, and there’s also a Windows Taskbar icon you can use to access it’s features–but the hot keys are more than adequate. Other customizations include setting a background image, determining the behavior of previously minimized windows, and customizing program labels. Three levels of graphical quality should allow those with less RAM to scale the program to their needs. Although some crashes have been reported, DExposE2 worked flawlessly for me.