If you’ve got the need for a desktop publishing program, but can’t rustle up the cash for one of the big guns, do yourself a favour and try out PagePlus SE from Serif Software — it’s an excellent program and, best of all, it won’t cost you a cent.

If you find you really like the program, but want the added features in the commercial version (PDF export, built-in spreadsheet, mail merge, photo optimiser, Web publishing and Pantone colours), you can upgrade on the site for just $US9.99.

While you’re on Serif’s free software site, check out its other offerings. They’re first-rate.

PagePlus SE

A quite cool little freeware program that will transform your little ‘hunters and peckers’ into speedy touch typists is Rapid Typing Tutor. It’s just as suitable for adults wanting to sharpen their keyboard skills, but its bright interface and engaging lessons make it particularly appealing to kids.

The Rapid Typing Tutor site also has entertaining typing games for the kids, lets users take a typing speed test online with the chance of making it onto the champions board, and generously provides links to its pick of the eight best other free typing tutor programs.

The Rapid Typing tutor software lets you choose from a range of keyboard layouts, displays onscreen animations of correct technique to illustrate each lesson, features colourful graphics, tracks your progress, and supports individual settings for multiple users.

Rapid Typing Tutor

Perhaps you have PDF ebooks that you need in various formats for your different portable devices — with PDFZilla, you can convert then to whatever formats you need.

There are a number of free software programs around that will let you do this job, with varying degrees of success, but until 7pm (AEST) tomorrow, you can download PDFZilla, a full-featured commercial PDF conversion program, from the Giveaway of the Day site for free (normally sold for $US29.95).

It’s a 6.57M download and supports Windows 2000, XP, 2003 or Vista.

PDFZilla is a desktop application that quickly and accurately converts PDF files into editable Microsoft Word documents, rich text documents, plain text files, images, HTML files, and Shockwave Flash SWF files.

PDFZilla supports most of popular formats: DOC, RTF, TXT, BMP, JPG, GIF, PNG, TIF, HTML and SWF formats. PDFZilla also supports batch conversion and individual and partial page selection.

You’ll find a tutorial on how to use PDFZilla here.

Giveaway of the Day

Office 2010 Australian  Recommended Retail PricesOffice Home and Student 2010: Boxed Product – RRP $209;  Product Key Card – RRP $169
Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote

Office Home and Business 2010: Boxed Product –  RRP $379;  Product Key Card – RRP $269
Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook

Office Professional 2010: Boxed Product – RRP $849;  Product Key Card – RRP $499
Includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, Outlook, Publisher and Access

If you are wondering what the ‘product key card’ referred to above is, it’s a single-license card that lets you unlock Office 2010 software preloaded on new PCs from major PC manufacturers.

As you can see from the above, we’ve introduced a new way for people to buy Office – the Product Key Card. The Product Key Card is a single license card that lets you unlock Office 2010 software preloaded on new PCs from major PC manufacturers.

The various versions of the 2010 Office suite can be pre-ordered here,

However, if you are on a budget, and it doesn’t run to even the Home and Student offering, just remember that there are plenty of freeware programs that will make admirable substitutes. Check out the Open Source section of this page for some free alternatives to the various components of the Office suite.

However, I find myself using Google Chrome more and more these days rather than Firefox, so I’ve been on the lookout for a similar screen capture tool for that browser.

That’s when I found Webpage Screenshot in the Google Chrome Extensions Library. Once installed, it puts a little camera icon to the right of the Chrome address bar. When you want to capture a screen shot, just left-click on the camera icon.

You’ll then be presented with a pop-up box, giving you the option to resize the window before capture, change the header and footer, capture the visible screen, or take a screenshot of the whole Web page.

When you’ve made your selection, you’ll get another screen that give you the image size in pixels and asks you to click on the provided link to open your screenshot.

You then need to right-click anywhere on the screenshot for your options for saving etc.

Webpage Screenshot

However, I can say that many of the new additions and improvements are awesome, even if I can’t tell you what they are — remember, they have my first born, and I’m very fond of him.

If you want a taste of what will be on offer in CS5 when it finally hits the shelves on April 12, check out the sneak peek videos here on YouTube.

Apparently, Adobe isn’t as fond of its first born as I!

For instance, if you upgrade your operating system, you may need to know what components make up your system to source new drivers. Or if you plan to upgrade your hardware, you’ll need to know what hardware you currently have so you can decide on what to replace it with.

If you want to see at a glance what hardware comprises your PC, head to tech journalist Darren Yates’ Web site and download his System Spec Analyser. Just click on the download button and follow the prompts and you’ll get all the informations you’ll need in a matter of seconds.

Here’s a list of the information it extracts from your system:

* Processor make and model
* Processor actual clock speed (as opposed to what’s written on the box)
* Motherboard make and model
* BIOS version
* System memory and speed
* Graphics card
* Hard drives (SATA, IDE, RAID and USB storage included)
* Optical drives
* Operating system (include 32-bit or 64-bit indication and any service packs added)
* Monitor make and model
* Graphics card memory, resolution and refresh rate, driver version and maximum refresh rate supported.

The software is compatible with Windows 2000, XP, Vista and Windows 7, 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems and is a 1.31M download.

A very handy little tool.

System Spec Analyser

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum lets you copy your DVDs to a wide range of audio and video formats and allows you to transfer them to popular devices such as the iPhone, iPod, Apple-TV, PSP, Zune, mobile phone and smore. For a full rundown on the programs features, head here.

The program is only available for around another 20 hours.

WinX DVD Ripper Platinum on Giveaway of the Day.

If you need to recover data that has become corrupted or accidentally deleted, it can be a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. Of course, there are professional data retrieval services, but they’ll cost you an arm and a leg.

There’s also a raft of software available that can do a pretty good job of retrieving your lost files, but they don’t come cheap either, although they’re much more affordable than professional intervention.

Fortunately, today (until 7pm AEST) you can download a copy of Easeus Data Recovery Wizard for free from the Giveaway of the Day site. It’s a 4.37M download.

Data Recovery Wizard will recover lost data from formatted drives including your hard drive (even if you have deleted it and emptied the Recycle Bin), USB drives, SD and other memory cards, and normally sells for $US69.95. To read more about its features, head here.

Even if you think you’ll never need the services of this software, download it anyway. It’s far better to be sure than sorry.

Easeus Data Recovery Wizard from Giveaway of the Day.