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Spotlight October 2009 • Vol.9 Issue 10 Page(s) 60-70 in print issue |
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Appapalooza They Have A Program For That? 2009 Edition |
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What is it about cool little apps that power users find so appealing? Does it make us feel smarter for getting more work done in the same amount of time as mere “normal users”? Do they confer upon us “computer superhero” status whenever we trot them out to perform a task? Perhaps it’s just the thrill of discovering something new before it makes it to the mainstream? Whatever the reason, every year we bring to you a list of our favorite little (and some not-so-little) applications that do something way-cool or way-useful (and usually both) and hope that you’ll find them as invaluable as we do. We’ve been presenting this list for four years now, but for you new people, here are the ground rules: First, if an app made our list last year, then it sits out this year (observant readers will know that we broke this rule for a couple of apps); apps that have been on our lists before 2009 must have received a significant upgrade since then to be included now. Second, the app needs to be malware-free, which we check by scanning it with one of our top-two security suites (Norton Internet Security 2009 or ESET Smart Security 2009) on two different computers, and then monitor with a firewall to check for illicit Internet communications behind our backs. Just to be safe, however, you should scan any of these programs we suggest yourself, because the version we used may be different from the one you download, or perhaps come from a different source. Because these aren’t full-blown reviews, there’s no official CPU score. On the other hand, we invite you to check out our 2009 lineup of power user apps and see if you wouldn’t give it four or five stars.
A modern PC needs lots of background processes and services to support all your hardware and accessories, but those background tasks can slow down your PC when playing those hardcore games. With just one preset icon, AlacrityPC temporarily shuts down the background processes you designate as “not currently needed” and then launches the game. When the game shuts down, AlacrityPC reloads your background processes as if nothing happened. If you don’t know what processes are worth shutting down, AlacrityPC can take a pretty good guess that, in our experience, is normally correct. Unlike earlier CPUs, Intel’s Core 2 and i7 line of processors (and Xeons based on the same core) have thermal sensors that A) are slightly tricky to read and B) don’t have a published upper temperature limit or thermal offset value. The result is that many CPU temperature-reading programs seem to be running a little “off” when gauging these processors. RealTemp was written by someone who calibrated program readings with an infrared digital thermometer, so its measurements jibe better with real-life observations. It also includes a basic benchmark and Taskbar Tray displays of core temperature. You’d be surprised how often Windows problems all come down to drivers, and not just buggy ones. Sometimes when you upgrade to the latest drivers, portions of the old ones are left behind, and often the results are strange crashes, hangups, and/or slowdowns. Drivercleaner knows how to remove drivers from Nvidia, ATI, Intel, Logitech, Realtek, Creative Labs, Microsoft, and more. Just run it and select the drivers you want to remove, reboot, and install your new driver as if the old one was never there. Your hard drive is arguably the most important component in your PC, since both your OS and your personal data reside there, and HDTune is the best program for keeping track of your drive’s health and speed. There’s a free version that covers the basics of read performance testing, SMART drive health attribute monitoring, and error scanning, but you’ll want the Pro version’s handy tools such as folder size scanner, write speed testing, and secure drive and file erasing. Both are attractive and easy to use. Many foreground malware (aka spyware) scanners have risen and fallen through the years (Ad-Aware and Spybot-Search & Destroy, anyone?), and this year’s cream of the crop comes from Malwarebytes. It’s so good there are unconfirmed reports on blogs that a major antivirus program’s tech support staff directed users to run it first before installing their own AV product in times of trouble. The paid version ($24.95) offers real-time background scanning, scheduled foreground scanning, and automatic update downloads, but we find the free version an invaluable first step to clearing off owned machines. Mark Russinovich’s Process Explorer is so good at what it does that Microsoft started distributing it (along with Russinovich’s other tools) itself; it’s essentially what Windows’ Task Manager should have been, exhaustively listing running processes and providing you with more details for any executable by simply clicking on it. As programs start and stop, they remain visible with green or red highlighting in order to call attention to themselves, while right-clicking something in the list reveals many useful options, such as a Google search or a breakdown of what DLLs or network connections a particular program is using. For years, TrueCrypt was the best way to encrypt USB flash drives and hard drives, for not only does it use government-approved algorithms, but it also does so in a way that you can plausibly deny the very existence of encrypted volumes (meaning the encrypted area looks like random data whether it is full or empty, letting you claim that there’s nothing hidden). The latest version of TrueCrypt goes a step further, allowing you to encrypt entire operating systems and boot drives (including Windows), and the program now takes advantage of multicore CPUs to employ parallelization and pipelining, which “allow data to be read and written as fast as if the drive was not encrypted.” We didn’t test this claim, but the new version is significantly faster than the old. Running a virtual OS inside your main OS is probably the safest way to try out an unknown program or potentially malicious Web site, but for years, to get good performance and useful features you had to shell out serious coin for VMWare Workstation. Sun’s VirtualBox brings virtual machines to the masses, providing good speed and powerful networking features as well as a good system for taking “snapshots” of virtual machines. VirtualBox is only a year or two behind VMWare in features, but for most power users, this is plenty. If you don’t want to go through the hassle of creating your own virtual machine(s), then the free VMWare Player is worth checking out. With hundreds of free and commercially available environment images (called “Virtual Appliances”) already made, VMWare Player makes it easy to check out different OSes, run different server programs, and diagnose complex networking issues—all directly within Windows. Given a strong enough host machine, running a “live” server with VMWare Player isn’t out of the question, yet it retains the advantages of easy backup and portability inherent to all virtualization offerings. VirusTotal.com is a Web site where you can upload a file and have it automatically scanned by 41 antivirus engines, all of which are always kept up-to-date. Odds are, however, that VirusTotal has already seen the file you want it to scan, so it can show you the last test result instantly, saving you the frequently minutes-long scanning queue. A new Windows-only uploader makes submitting files a snap: Just right-click the file and choose Send To VirusTotal from the pop-up menu, and off it goes. The results appear automatically in your default Web browser. Do you know what your DOC files say about you (other than that you’re brilliant, of course)? Stored within each DOC file are details like who your word processor is registered to, how long you’ve had a file open, and how many times it’s been printed. There may even be early revisions and edits, which could be embarrassing if brought to light, stored there that you thought were long gone. Doc Scrubber can display and optionally remove all metadata from DOC (though not DOCX) files or whole folders full of DOC files in a single pass. If you think Process Explorer is too simple, then AnVir Task Manager is for you. ATM has several modules living within its tabbed interface, such as a detailed task monitor (complete with drill-down screens for active DLLS and network ports), a startup program enabler/disabler, a hardware/SMART hard drive monitor, a VirusTotal file submitter, and a lot more. AnVir offers four versions (free, $39.95, $59.95, $79.95) with different capabilities, but even the free version is stuffed with handy tools. You’ll want to keep a copy on your emergency thumb drive.
Determining what hardware is inside a desktop isn’t that tough: A screwdriver, flashlight, notepad, and pencil are pretty much all it takes, along with some patience. Notebooks are trickier, because you can’t normally open them up and take a peek. HWiNFO32 is the best sleuth we know for getting to the nitty-gritty details of a computer’s hardware. Everything, including RAM timings, LCD build dates, battery wear levels, and more are instantly visible with HWiNFO, making tweaking your hardware drivers or replacing components a snap. The DOS version is similarly powerful and runs from a floppy, excellent if you want to run it from a bootable thumb drive or floppy or if you don’t have Windows. Short for System Information for Windows, SIW takes a detailed inventory of your Windows computer, both on a hardware (rather like HWiNFO, but slightly less detailed) level and software level. If you need to know your registration keys for various software; email passwords; and lists of file associations, installed applications, registered DLLs, and scheduled tasks, SIW has you covered. It also adds handy tools such as a network port scanner, MAC address changer, real-time monitors for your CPU and other hardware, and even a monitor tester. There’s even a portable version that works from a thumb drive. Windows keeps a permanent list of all USB devices that you have ever connected to your PC, which is why you only receive a “New Device Found” message the first time you plug in a particular USB device. Occasionally, Windows gets confused about these devices, and they can suddenly stop working. USBDeview lists this database and lets you edit its contents, effectively uninstalling any previously installed USB device, meaning you can insert it again, get the “New Device Found” message again, and reinstall its driver. It also lets you forcefully disconnect any active USB device. CCleaner (short for “Crap Cleaner,” really) is the easiest and safest way to delete all those superfluous files that tend to clog up a system over time, such as temporary Internet cached files, cookies, log files, recently accessed file lists, abandoned uninstallers and entries in the Add/Remove Software Control Panel, and more. It works for all major and most minor Web browsers and can clean out “Registry rot” from all the major Window variants. Reading ebooks on your notebook or netbook would be a lot easier in some circumstances if you could rotate your device 90 degrees counterclockwise, with your screen on the left and the keyboard on the right, sort of like an open book. The developer of EeeRotate had that very idea but realized there wasn’t always an easy way to tell Windows to rotate the display 270 degrees and then rotate the orientation of the trackpad to match. Hence EeeRotate, which works on all WinXP notebooks (not just netbooks) and uses two simple keyboard shortcuts to work the ebook-reading magic. There are a lot of backup methods out there, but simply synchronizing folders (one on your internal hard drive and the other on a separate drive) is a good strategy that’s easy to conceptualize. As a bonus, after the first synchronization, successive syncs are generally very fast. Microsoft’s own SyncToy has made our list in the past, but PureSync goes a step further, offering binary file comparisons, its own automatic scheduler, a thumb drive mode that starts the syncing when a certain USB drive is attached, a camera mode (which is as effective with your camera’s photos as it is with other files), and a lot more.
NirSoft offers 16 free password recovery tools, which generally work by decrypting the password file of various applications such as Outlook Express, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and AIM/Google/Yahoo! Messenger. It can also display the wireless encryption keys and passwords Windows saves for network shares, Remote Desktop access, VNC accounts, and dial-up passwords. Each is invaluable when fixing problems related to forgotten passwords. Some security software flags these applications as “hacking tools,” but, really, they’re virus- and malware-free. These tools are packaged as a ZIP file, letting you choose the recovery apps you want to install. In an effort to limit the ability of infected Windows systems to make jillions of Internet connections at the same time, Windows XP SP2 and Vista limit the number of “half-open” network connections it can make to 10. While we can only guess how effective it is at keeping bots from taking over the ’Net, a side effect is that BitTorrent and other P2P programs work at a snail’s pace. Although there are several workaround patch programs that eliminate this limit, HOLF is the easiest to use by far (and just as effective as other methods). It also offers a convenient way to revert back to the default system settings. The most surefire way to see if your computer has been changed without your knowing is to check the Windows Registry for changes, but what’s the easiest way to do this? SpyMe Tools is the easiest way we’ve found: Just run it, click Scan, and then save the results. Then install some software you think will change the Registry and run another scan, saving the results. Finally, click Compare and choose the two saved results; in a moment a collapsible tree appears with the Registry changes. An additional real-time mode displays Registry changes as they are made. Although Launchy is the most popular “keyword launcher” for Windows, Executor has the goods to take away the former’s crown. A keyboard combination makes Executor appear, and typing program names, URLs, or keywords executes programs, jumps to Web pages, or performs tasks that you’ve preprogrammed. Executor has niftier skins, “fuzzy logic” that interprets things better even when you make typos, and easier keyword creation for custom tasks. Executor was written by someone who found Launchy wanting but still good, so if you use Launchy now, you’ll find Executor has a familiar feel. Your iPhone and PSP are starved for media that’s been transcoded to fit their small screens and low-power processors, but the process normally takes more than an hour or two for a full-length movie. Badaboom harnesses the power of your Nvidia video card’s GPU to slash the processes to close to 10 minutes, yet the picture quality is actually better than most other transcoding programs that rely on your supercharged CPU. Although not cheap, it pays for itself after five movies if your time is worth more than $3 an hour. If you capture more than three screen shots per month, you’d really benefit from a dedicated screen-grab program. SnagIt is the leader in this field, but it isn’t cheap, and you have to buy into its workflow system for maximum effectiveness. CaptureWizPro, on the other hand, does almost everything SnagIt does (including video capture with sound and autoscrolling windows; plus, it can capture tricky items such as screen savers and mouse tooltips), but its interface is more like a conventional Windows program. At $39.95, it’s also slightly cheaper. If you’ve ever worked with video files and wanted to do some basic editing, cleanup, and file conversion, you know that the software that comes bundled with most video capture hardware, in a word, stinks. Commercial apps such as Adobe Premier are somewhat expensive and are overkill for simple processing. VirtualDub, however, is free, simple, and fast. Written by a talented programmer frustrated with commercial offerings, everything about VirtualDub is slick and quick, and it generates impressively smooth and attractive results. Zinc is a combination of Web browser, browser plug-in, and video streaming service that works well with a PC remote and a computer connected to your TV in the living room. It streams television programs, Netflix movies, and even Hulu programming directly from the content creator’s Web sites. In other words, “Lost” episodes typically come from ABC’s servers instead of Hulu’s, so you can watch programming that might not be on Hulu. Though Zinc keeps track of what you’ve watched, it doesn’t store programming; that comes though a streaming Internet connection. Although you could duplicate this functionality with a Web browser, Zinc simplifies sorting through programs and episodes to child’s play, and almost fun.
You say you’re hungry for a WinZip alternative that’s free, opens up more archive formats, works as a portable app on your thumb drive, and has versions that work identically under Windows and Linux? If so, look no further than PeaZip. Windows users can enjoy full shell integration, while everyone gets drag and drop, a basic scripting feature for repeating similar compression jobs, impressive file-splitting functionality, strong encryption, checksum/hash file integration, and even a benchmarking program (in case you’re curious about how swiftly your system can handle compression/extraction). As a bonus, PeaZip is attractive and easy to use. iTunes may be the world’s most popular media player, but you need to play by Apple’s rules. MediaMonkey is perhaps the world’s best “alternative” media player, and it lets you play by your own rules. Keep your music stored in different folders or network drives. Sync with a broad range of portable devices (including the iPod). Rip music to MP3, M4A, OGG, WMA, or FLAC. Fix incorrect tags in bulk with powerful editing tools. Burn audio CDs or data CDs filled with MP3s and playlists. You can even create a public jukebox where listeners can select music without altering your library. It’s all good with MediaMonkey. Miro is a combination media player, media downloader, and BitTorrent client. You may think this an odd combination, but consider this scenario: You find an RSS feed that lists torrents for new episodes of television programs available for download. You point Miro at the RSS feed, and as new episodes become available, Miro starts downloading them via BitTorrent and offers them to other peers for a period you designate. As episodes are saved, they appear in TiVo-like listings, ready to be watched on your schedule. Miro also downloads YouTube videos and video podcasts (and queues them up, too). Despite having just badmouthed iTunes, there’s no denying that it has many sterling qualities. And now that you can purchase DRM-free songs from the iTunes Store, you can play your purchased music on many non-iPod devices. iTunes doesn’t know how to sync with other portable players, but iTunes Agent does. Simply keep it running in the background, and it detects your devices and “tricks” iTunes into syncing with the device. Configure iTunes Agent once, and iTunes works with your player automatically without fuss. Hulu has done more to legitimize TV-over-Internet than anything else, with buy-in from most of the major television networks greatly improving its long-term survival prospects. Still, it’s a Web site, which makes interacting with the programming from your couch and a computer remote somewhat annoying. Hulu Desktop is a standalone, fullscreen application that makes Hulu much more friendly when you aren’t using a keyboard and mouse, and it’s fully integrated with your Hulu account—all your programming is ready to go. It’s still slightly buggy in Windows (the Mac version is solid) but worth using as-is. Boxee takes Hulu Desktop a step further, letting you easily enjoy your own videos, music, and photos from your couch, assuming you have a PC (or Mac) connected to your television and you have an appropriate remote control. It also lets you view Hulu’s television content (for now) and stream Netflix movies, making it an all-in-one media player. Optional plug-ins let you view photos from Facebook, download videos from MTV.com, or listen to music from Pandora.com. Its interface is arguably more clunky than Hulu.com, but the content should keep you occupied for hours on end. Say you want to enjoy watching Internet videos on your TV in your living room but don’t want to make a dedicated HTPC. If you have a DVD player (and who doesn’t?), then DVD Flick will save the day. DVD Flick converts nearly every video format used to encode Internet videos to standard DVDs. If you spend more than five minutes with it, you can easily add a menu system, subtitles, and custom audio tracks. Norton Ghost, while a favorite of techies everywhere to clone disks and make partition images, is getting a little long in the tooth, and without updates, it isn’t always able to recognize the latest hardware. Clonezilla consists of a Linux LiveCD (running either Ubuntu or Debian), a collection of Linux tools, and a usable (if not terribly attractive) text-based GUI to create and restore disk images to other HDDs, USB storage devices, or network stores. It’s as fast as Ghost and has full support for Linux and Mac partitions. Up to 40 copies can access a disk image server at the same time. Copying hundreds or thousands of files with Windows’ own Explorer is just torture. It’s completely incapable of properly estimating how long the job will take, and it stops cold if it has trouble with even one file or directory, leaving no log for you to determine what file was the problem. TeraCopy takes care of all these problems, making several attempts at reading damaged files before moving on to the next file. A log window alerts you to the problem file(s). As a bonus, it’s normally faster at copying files than Windows, and there’s a flash drive-compatible portable version. If you want to open and use an ISO file without having to burn a disc, then VirtualCloneDrive will save you some time and sanity. It emulates a CD/DVD-ROM drive in Windows, letting you double-click an ISO file to mount it as if it were an actual disc. It also lets you to extract specific files within an ISO as needed. You can store disc images on a network share for using ISO files among multiple computers with virtually no loss in speed vs. regular optical media. Windows includes almost no tools for burning CDs and DVDs, and the OEM software that comes with CD/DVD/BD burners is sometimes quite lacking. ImgBurn is a good compromise between “powerful” and “easy.” A straightforward interface makes copying discs a snap, along with ripping (ImgBurn doesn’t circumvent copy protection, however), creating discs from ISOs and other images, and creating audio CDs from a wide range of digital formats. Given the proper VIDEO_TS, HVDVD_TS, or BDAV/BDMV folder, it can create DVD, HD-DVD, or Blu-ray Discs with ease. Although GParted has made it easy for anyone to perform basic disk and partition manipulations, due to its nifty GUI, there are some tasks it can’t perform. In these cases, Paragon’s HDM 2009 Professional is the best tool for the job. Partition resizing, copying, moving, backup, restoration, MBR editing—it’s all there. It also comes with two boot discs (one Windows PE-based and one Linux-based) to ensure compatibility when restoring from bare metal. It isn’t terribly cheap, but it is fast, easy, and reliable.
Frankly, almost all of NirSoft’s catalog is pretty great (we’ll wait while you check it out), but VoluMouse is, as far as we know, unique. Once installed, just hold down the Alt key and roll your mouse’s scroll wheel to raise or lower the volume of your computer. You can also program other mouse buttons or hotkeys to activate the volume-controlling scroll wheel. Or just set it to use the scroll wheel to adjust the volume whenever a certain program such as Winamp or Windows Media Player is active. Never bother with the tiny Taskbar Tray volume icon again!
Winning this year’s “Funniest Utility Name” prize is StrokeIt, which adds mouse gestures to pretty much any Windows program and even Windows itself. By default, StrokeIt recognizes 80 mouse gestures (performed by holding down the right mouse button and dragging the mouse in a certain pattern) that correspond to performing actions in 20 programs, including Firefox and Internet Explorer. Most gestures look like capital letters, but the classic “forward” and “back” gestures of a simple horizontal line drawn either to the right or left can do program-specific tasks, such as skip to the next track in Winamp or read the next message in Outlook Express. You can also create your own and associate them with specific apps. The battery life icon in the Taskbar Tray is among the more annoying aspects of using a notebook. It’s hard to tell how much battery power is remaining at a glance. Power Meter Plus puts a “power thermometer” right on the desktop that’s basically transparent when your battery is full but becomes more opaque as it drains, calling attention to itself. It manages to not interfere with your programs or Desktop icons by jumping out from under your cursor whenever it gets close, and it has other options to tailor its appearance to match your desktop. Having a thumb drive full of portable applications is amazingly handy, but manually jumping through subfolder after subfolder to find that executable can get annoying. PStart is an “instant start menu” for portable programs, letting you manually create a Taskbar Tray icon and menu for all the apps on a thumb drive, or you can just let it scan for all executables and make a menu automatically. The menu stores relative pathnames, so assigned drive letters can change, but the shortcuts still work. You can also define hotkeys and perform searches for programs. There is no shortage of sidebars available for Windows, but the best one comes from a company that you’ve probably never heard of. Klipfolio’s sidebar consumes less memory and feels more spry than the competition (Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!) and has thousands of widgets (called Klips) available. Klips are collapsible, so they don’t take up much space when idle, but they display lots of information with a mouseover. The built-in RSS reading Klip is especially attractive and useful. Want Linux on your PC but don’t want to mess around with repartitioning or replacing the Microsoft boot loader with Grub or LILO? Wubi comes to the rescue, automatically creating a “partition file” on your NTFS hard drive and installing Linux onto it. It alters the Vista or WinXP boot menu to add a Linux entry and lets Linux run with 98% of the speed of a native installation with almost no drawbacks. Wubi comes with Ubuntu and Mint Linux, but the base version of Wubi lets you install more distros. So you have all your Desktop icons arranged exactly the way to want them, but suddenly some utility or game changes your Desktop resolution, spreading your icons all over the place as a result. IconRestorer takes a snapshot of all your icons’ positions (and, optionally, your wallpaper) and lets you restore their position with just two clicks. IconRestorer can optionally run the background and save your icon positions every few minutes. It also stores different icon arrangements for multiple resolutions if you regularly switch between desktop sizes or monitors. There’s nothing inherently wrong with DOS batch files for some simple Windows automation, other than you have to Google how to write them (who honestly remembers?) and a DOS window appears when they run. Batchrun uses simple point-and-click and wizards to write scripts that can start programs, kill processes, copy and paste text, and copy/move/delete files. And even if doing all this wasn’t blindly obvious from its simple interface, the built-in Help file will get you going in no time. Batchrun is only 800KB, and there’s even a portable version for thumb drive use. If your Taskbar is crowded with all the minimized apps you have running in the background, then TrayEverything should take care of all your problems. TrayEverything can make all your apps minimize to a Taskbar Tray icon or make the app essentially turn invisible upon minimization. TrayEverything can collect up to five child windows of a single app and reduce them to just one on the Taskbar and even password-protect minimized apps.
If you have multiple email and instant messenger accounts as well as at least one social networking site, then Digsby will save you lots of time and effort. Digsby monitors your email (letting you mark spam in many cases), lets you instant-message with AIM, Facebook Chat, Google Talk, ICQ, Jabber, MSN, and Yahoo! accounts while maintaining a unified buddy list, and monitors your Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter accounts. It takes up much less RAM than having all those Web browser tabs and IM clients open and consumes a lot less on-screen real estate. Postbox gives you the power of instant searching and filtering (via an integrated search index such as Google Desktop) of your email messages with an interface that’s much more conventional and inviting than the essentially similar Opera M4 Mail module. Add tabbed browsing and Gmail-like threaded message views, and you get what may be the best email client in the world. It’s based on Mozilla Thunderbird, which means it gets regular updates/patches and has all the “conventional” email features you need. Google’s Web applications seem poised to make substantial inroads in the desktop software market, but there’s a little problem: You need to be online in order to use them. Google Gears is a framework that allows Google Reader and Google Docs to work on your PC even if you aren’t connected to the Internet. And it automatically resyncs your data to the Google cloud when a connection is reestablished. Several third-party sites now also use Gears (such as Zoho and Remember The Milk), with more on the way. In short, Gears makes Web apps better. If your broadband has a monthly limit, you’re wondering about instantaneous bandwidth at a given time, or you want your computer to perform an action in response to a surge of downloading, then NetWorx is the program you’ve been yearning for. NetWorx is essentially a “smart meter” for your network (or dial-up) connection, constantly monitoring your connection. The Taskbar Tray bandwidth bar displays all network activity in real time, while the Quota feature lets you know how much you’ve downloaded overall and can warn you when you approach a limit. Lots of other handy features make it an essential tool for network troubleshooting, too. With Web browsers becoming the “new OS,” our browser settings and bookmarks are now valuable enough to be worth saving, but backing up this information can be tricky. FavBackup backs up and restores things such as bookmarks, certificates, cookies, skins, toolbars, mouse gestures, and stored passwords, though that isn’t exactly new. However, FavBackups works with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Chrome. FavBackup works fine from a thumb drive and makes transferring your browser settings from one computer to another a snap. If your circle of family and friends all live in your city, then Skype probably holds no appeal to you. But if you want to call or have video conferences with people who are spread out around the world, then Skype is a godsend. For computer users with broadband connections and Skype (with versions available for Mac, Windows, and Linux), Skype is essentially a free long-distance telephone and videophone network.
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