Features of Thunderbird:

• One of the most basic advantages of using Mozilla Thunderbird is the relative ease with which one can set up his/her preferences and settings in the e-mail client. The most recent version of Thunderbird comes with a Migration Assistant that helps the user set up Thunderbird according to the requirements.

For example, the user can switch to the toolbar of an earlier version of Thunderbird if he or she finds it easier to use. Similarly, using the Migration Assistant, it becomes easier to make the transition from another e-mail client like Outlook Express to Thunderbird without being baffled by the difference in the user interface.

• Every user who has relied on their e-mail clients for managing multiple e-mail accounts at the same time understands the importance of a mail account setup wizard, which is one of the features of Thunderbird. As usual, the ability to handle multiple e-mail accounts is what determines the popularity and efficiency of e-mail client packages like the Thunderbird. And with the Mail Account Setup Wizard, users can now setup their accounts for different e-mails without having to check through all those heavy details, like the IMAP or SMTP settings. Just providing the email address and the password enables the client to obtain the settings from its database and set up the account automatically.

• Anybody who has ever used Mozilla Firefox will be acquainted with tabbed browsing. Thunderbird brings a similar feature – tabbed email. This feature of Thunderbird allows the user to load different emails in different tabs, so that the user can easily access any one of them at any time. This facility is useful when one might need to refer to earlier emails in order to compose another mail. When any mail message in the inbox is double clicked, it will open in a new tab. If one right clicks on the message, it will be loaded in a tab in the background. While quitting, all tabs that are visible in the package are saved, and can be restored when Thunderbird is re-launched.

• The filter feature is another of Thunderbird’s aces. Using this feature, the user can automatically set some criteria to delete certain mails that are undesirable. This feature comes in handy in instances when the volume of junk mails with a particular word is very high. The account where the filters are to be applied has to be specified in the message filter box. This implies that different filters can be used for different accounts, which is a handy feature indeed.

• Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client uses a type of filtering called the ‘Bayesian Filtering’, which is effectively a form of adaptive filtering. What sets this feature apart from other email clients is that it needs to be trained as to which mail is spam and which is not. The Junk Mail controls can be accessed from the Tools option. Once the Junk Mail Controls window opens, the user needs to specify the account for which the current settings are applicable. The user will have to teach the client to recognize spam, either by highlighting a mail message and pressing the junk button, or by marking a message as junk.

Mozilla Thunderbird is an excellent alternative to conventional email clients like Microsoft Outlook Express. Apart from superior upload and download, it boasts of more flexibility and affords more power in the hands of users through addons. It can be easily used to set up an auto-reply system, or do similar functions.

Overall, the Thunderbird steals the show because it provides more or less similar functionality as the proprietary ones do, but being an open source software, is free of charge.

The popular Facebook download “Chit Chat” is in essence a traditional chat client that makes it possible for you to login to Facebook Chat.

There are many advantages to using Chit Chat – just for example, if you’ve ever have had the problem whereby you’ve lost messages when you’ve surfed away from your Facebook Chat page – you won’t have this problem with Chit Chat. Moreover, Chit Chat allows you to insert emoticons and use text formatting without ever having used codes.

Chit Chat supports:

• Chat Logging – Save your conversations manually or automatically for a later date
• Emoticons – Insert smileys without having to remember their codes
• Text Formatting – Use bold and italic at a click of a button in your Facebook Messages!
• Visual Notifications – Shows you when you’ve received a message
• Online Notifications ­– Let’s you know when you’ve received a message.

Download the Facebook Chat Messenger Chit Chat

Portable applications are basically, software that doesn’t write anything to the registry, doesn’t require any installation, and leaves behind just a small footprint on the computer it is running on. This makes them ideal for anyone who needs to work on the run.

A portable application just needs to be unzipped or decompressed and it is ready to go. So no more uninstallation worries. The only drawback is that some of the programs are a “slimed down” version of the original. So you may not get the full functionality in some cases.

That is just a small list of the total number of free Open Source software in Portable Apps. There’s no need to go hunting all over the Web when you can now download them all in one bundle (which keeps growing). It’s now time to put that USB flash drive to better use!

Widget = A hypothetical, or real-life mechanical gadget or device.

Perhaps one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0, although they have been around before that, widgets (on the Web) are small pieces of code that utilize JavaScript, Flash, or HTML to display fancy badges, buttons, banners, ads, RSS feeds, media streaming, etc by fetching content from an external third party site without the actual website owner having to do anything other than placing the code on their site.

Other terms given for widgets are gadgets, badges, snippets, and modules. They all refer to the eye catching, and often novel looking, little pieces of code that will brighten up any website or page out there.

And they are mostly free to use.

This can be an addictive pastime – of browsing the multitudes of widgets online and checking out the latest and slickest widgets. There are so many widgets online for so many things, from checking the countdown to a pregnancy, to checking the latest stock market news, to displaying the weather reading, to live video streaming, etc, it is impossible to describe them all.

Why do programmers spend a lot of time coding a widget and then releasing it for free? Releasing a widget for free, utilizes a viral way to market a website at no effort if the widget gets really popular; as the feed for the widget comes from the third party site which will have its source URL displayed at some points. But it’s a fair trade. Give and you shall receive.

The possibilities for widgets are just endless, and there are thousands of free widgets at present. Web widgets mostly require Java Script or Flash enabled browsers to function, so may not display on older browsers.

Here are a couple sample applications for widgets:

Sudoku

Some places to find free downloadable widgets:

http://www.widgetbox.com
http://www.smartwebgadgets.com
http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/ (For Mac users)
http://www.sixapart.com/typepad/widgets/ (For blogs that use TypePad, a good source of widgets)
http://www.springwidgets.com (Good place to find cool widgets where you can customize the size to fit)

SIW by Gabriel Topala, is just astounding in its features. You can view A LOT of your PC’s system info from its comprehensive dashboard which displays your system info in a hierarchal tree format. Practically all your system info is gathered and displayed in milliseconds, just by clicking on the icons in the sidebar.

-Why do I think it’s cool?

• Does NOT install itself on your Windows system. A standalone software.
• Which is why you can run it on your USB pen drive (or any external drive).
• Very useful for technicians to get a quick look on hardware specs and drivers, useful for almost all system diagnostics.
• Very light on resource usage and leaves only a small footprint on your system.
• Able to retrieve the passwords for the current logged-on user of a PC with the Secrets feature. Note: This feature could be abused – see below. Use it for your own password retrieval purposes.
• Certified as having no spyware or virus of any kind by all the major antivirus programs. I was skeptical at first, but… it’s true none of the AVs flag it.
• Able to export the info retrieved to HTML format.
• Has a MAC address changer (use with caution)
• Able to ping and trace routes
• Able to display the CPU temperature
• And a whole lot more stuff that you can view with this little tool….

Note on data security

For best data security practice, NEVER choose to remember your passwords in Firefox or Internet Explorer because both Firefox and IE do not encrypt your passwords, ever. I’ve never ever chosen the Remember Password option and I highly suggest to anyone not to. Always use a hard copy to write down all your passwords, and if you must, store them in an Excel spreadsheet and burn it on a CD and store it in a safe deposit box (just kidding about the safe deposit box).

But never store your passwords in Firefox or IE because of the lack of encryption. And by all means, get Windows XP, as thanks to this tool, it has showed me just how insecure Win98 really is.
Aside from the questions raised about SIW’s password retrieval capabilities, this is a REALLY useful tool that is highly beneficial to just about any PC user to check on their system info at anytime.

At any rate, other system info tools also do the same, since they all are able to retrieve passwords from Firefox or IE; however SIW goes beyond the usual stuff to deliver almost complete information about your system info than most other comparable software.

And the cost is……FREE! Yeah, you got that right. Sometimes, the best stuff out there, are really free.

You can get SIW from here.