For those who think computers are dull, functional and slightly boring, the name ‘workstation’ isn’t going to change their minds, and adding in a few technical “gigs, cores and rams” in the way, will probably just make all this worse. After all, it does what its name suggests – it’s something that you sit at to get a job done as quickly and efficiently as possible.

The Z800 sits at the top of the tree from all the HP workstations, and is aimed at serious computing tasks where multiple processors and huge amounts of memory bandwidth is required. We’re talking here on intense data crunching like animation, games developers, graphic design, broadcasting video etc…

When this workstation was delivered to me, I was actually quite shocked at the weight of this system (thank god for elevators). The case of this computer is absolutely fantastic and can be also perhaps described as “cool” compared to other systems. Its design gives it a very smart, efficient look, but also enables air to flow into the case from front to back, cooling all the lovely internal stuff, the stuff that counts most. It also has handles on top (front and back sides) to facilitate moving this workstation around if need be.

An interesting part was definitely the opening for the slot loading optical drive where you can say it’s totally invisible. I’d be interested to see if it would be problematic to add on further drives in the future. Strangely enough this slot loading drive bay is also able to take the mini-dvds, but you might have to give it a good push so it reaches the loading mechanism.

There are also three front mounted USB ports, headphone and microphone sockets and a full 6-pin FireWire port, which makes a lot of sense for its target audience, which could well be editing digital video. Round the rear of the machine you’ll find six more USB ports and another FireWire socket along with two Ethernet ports.

Embossed on the large brushed metal side of the workstation is the HP logo, plus a handle at the top that allows you to easily remove the cover to reveal the impressive insides of this workstation. The design of this workstation from the inside is absolutely impressive and its tool-less approach is definitely a massive advantage.  To help out with this marginally different setup, HP took great care to include a full schematic on the side panel, which seems to be printed on the side panel, so you wont even have to worry about the sticker peeling off years down the line.

A tool-less approach is evident in this system where for example, the hard disk removal is absolutely fantastic and you can plug in or remove a hard disk in seconds. Tool-less entry extends to a cover hiding the PCI cards, and retaining flaps at the back of the PCI slots, so if you need to fit a large dual slot professional graphics card, you can do without needing a screwdriver.

Internally on the motherboard you’ll find four x16 PCI Express ports, two x8 and one 32-bit PCI port. Things are motored along by dual Intel Xeon 5560s and these run at 2.8GHz, feature 8MB.

These two monster processors are covered by two large fans and unlike your average desktop the memory is too. Then again, the Intel 5520 chipset based motherboard is a heavyweight in every sense, featuring 12 DIMMs slots, which enables it to support an eye popping 192GB of RAM, using 16GB DIMMs.

With all these fans, it would be a bit much to expect the machine to be absolutely silent, but that said I did manage to easily ignore the sound of the machine after a while.

Performance is very much what this machine is about. Even though this test workstation was delivered to me running Windows Vista (which is well known to be a resource hog, and not the best performing OS) this HP workstation easily handled (actually blasted through) every intensive graphic demo I threw at it, and even while running multiple instances in the background! Since I don’t personally own any video editing software or extreme 3D rendering, my tests were only limited to the graphic and general day to day operations.

I installed the latest version of Assassin’s Creed, which is to my knowledge, one of the most graphically intensive games and the performance was absolutely jaw dropping with MAX settings. No hiccups at all and the performance was as smooth as it could be. Normal day to day operation like software installations, zipping and unzipping files was the best I ever saw.

As far as negative points for this system, I was very surprised with the keyboard and mouse supplied. Very basic cheap versions that simply don’t match at all with such system, I’m positively hopeful that these are not the standard keyboard and mouse shipped with such a system. Second negative point with the system is simply the reason that its front fins design in Malta might actually be a bit of a nightmare to keep clean since of all the dust in the air. Very minimal –ve points compared to the vast list of +ve’s!

The raw power of the HP Z800 Workstation mean that for those in industries where performance is everything – be it analysing data, or rendering 3D visuals – investing in this system could potentially pay for itself in a matter of months, which would make the upgrading to one of these a totally no brainer. You’ll be saying to yourself…. Why didn’t I get one sooner! As a self admitted geek, this is a dream come true machine. All good things come to an end, and I’m absolutely dreading the moment the machine has to go back to the supplier. I might beg them on my knees to leave it here in my office!!

When upgrading the account is out of the question (even though it’s really cheap). Sorting through the emails would be a never ending task, and unfortunately, Gmail doesn’t offer any built in feature to find the largest emails in your mailbox. So in this scenario, one has to turn to a third party offering to handle this tedious task.

One solution would be to use Gmail’s IMAP service to download the emails to Outlook, and sort through the emails using Outlook’s email sorting capabilities. Outlook will connect to your Gmail account via IMAP and therefore when you delete an emails with big attachments locally, the same happens in your online inbox as well.

If you however find the above workarounds a little complicated, and that it would take ages to download all email, there’s an even simpler method that won’t even require you download or install anything – it’s called findbigmail.com.

This incredibly useful and simple to use web service will quickly find all the big email messages in your Gmail account that are taking up the maximum space. These messages are categorized with special labels to help you decide which of them should be removed to recover more space.

To get started, you simply connect your Gmail account with Find Big Mail using Google’s OAuth. It then scans all your messages for their sizes and send you an email notification once the scan is over.

You can then log into your Gmail account and act on messages marked with the labels to instantly reclaim space. I have freed up about 1GB of space from files I didn’t even know I had in my account.

For business users, this could also be an incredibly precious tool, since it can be used to delete any unnecessary files from your account, therefore you might be able to reduce storage costs from your Gmail service.

This service is run on donation basis, so if you like the tool, a donation to the team would be appreciated to help them cover the costs and keep the service running.

Windows Live Messenger 2011 contains a brand new ribbon interface that aims to bring Messenger in-line with the other ribbon-based applications such as Windows 7 Paint and Microsoft Office 2010. This new interface has advantages and disadvantages.

The obvious major change to the interface is that the main window area is no longer just your friends list. The friends list has been moved to the right hand side and the majority of the window is taken up by your social networking. Currently, you can integrate Facebook, MySpace and (new to the the full version) LinkedIn accounts into this main window. Surprisingly there is no Twitter integration. You can go back to the old style list view in windowed mode, but the maximised view might take some time to get used to.

Facebook Chat is integrated well with Windows Live Messenger. Previously this feature was only available to those in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, and Brazil, but we can confirm now that more countries have been added to the support list.

WLM 2011 introduces tabbed conversation windows with a familiar ribbon-style interface. Instead of each open conversation being allocated to a separate window as with previous Messenger versions, all conversations are put together into a single, tabbed window. This window is complete with middle-click to close tabs and tab rearrangement. While the tabs appear in one window, like Internet Explorer each tab appears separate in the Windows 7 taskbar.

While the basic mechanics of WLM conversations haven’t changed, Windows Live Messenger automatically embeds YouTube videos in the conversation window when you post a YouTube link, as long as both people are running 2011. I actually found this feature to be quite annoying, and as yet we haven’t discovered the setting where to actually disable this.

Unfortunately, Windows Live Messenger 2011 is also completely loaded with advertising. Under the contacts list there is advertising, under conversations there is advertising and there are buttons that take you to affiliated websites. To have so much advertising it really takes up a huge amount of space that could be used for other, more useful purposes. We do understand that advertising is what keeps WLM free, but Microsoft could have tried to keep it to some small banners or text-only ads. (If you are extremely frustrated with the advertising around Windows Live Messenger you can remove it via third party software such as A-Patch).

Other new interface features include a new Office 2010 style notification pop-up, a brand new set of emoticons, a simplified options menu that unfortunately (or thankfully!) removes the ability to have custom names.

VIPRE Antivirus Lifetime is a fully featured PC security solution with antivirus, antispyware and firewall, with the added advantage of lifetime protection and antivirus definition updates. Consumers pay only the one-off retail price for the product and will receive virus definition updates for the life of the PC on which it is first installed.

It includes notable features such as extensive support for removable drives; support for 64-bit environments, including a 64-bit boot cleaner and 64-bit rootkit scanner; support for Mozilla Firefox Scan Extensions; and other capabilities to bolster the efficiency and performance of VIPRE.

GFI VIPRE Antivirus Lifetime is available for pre-order now from Amazon.co.uk. Virus definition updates and protection continues for the life of the machine with no annual renewal fees or additional charges.

VIPRE is compatible with both 32 and 64-bit versions of Windows 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista, Server 2008, Server 2008 R2 and Windows 7.

Amazon.co.uk link: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0042ESPK2

I use this software extensively and it’s my primary solution to take care of my backups. I highly recommend this software for anyone that is looking for hassle and maintenance free backup.

Full Review:

Since the alpha and beta builds, this software has been incredibly stable and bug free. I was one of the many testers that were trying out the software and checking for bugs and improvements. From day one the software was very close to a final solid product. Needless to say I was very glad to be testing such a good product and that it didn’t mess up my system.

The stability of the software is reflected in the full final version of the software. So far I haven’t experienced any crashes or unresponsiveness and the memory footprint is relatively low, so it doesn’t interfere with your computer’s operation.

This innovative backup solution offers several innovative features that include:

BackInTime – This is one of the major software selling points. BackInTime allows you to go back and browse the data in your backups in different periods of time.

Silent File Versioning – This feature works in conjunction with the 1st feature. Oops!Backup runs in the background and monitors all file changes. Once a change/modification is detected it will back up the file for you in your pre-set location.

ReverseDelta – is an incredible time saver as you only have to create a full back up the first time you run the software. All the following backups after that will just be the new changes applied to your files. This will dramatically reduce the time taken to do your backups.

Plug & Protect – This feature will automatically back up any changed or new files to an external drive when it is plugged into the computer.

Software installation is simple, just like any other windows program, and the download is only around 13MB so download on a broadband connection will take just a few seconds. Once the program has finished installing, you will be presented with the Setup Wizard that guides you to configure your backup (as in what to back up, when and where).

Once the setup wizard is complete, the software will run its first (and last) full backup. Make sure you have plenty of free time when running your first backup, especially if you are backing up a lot of data. This is due to the fact that while backing up the computer performance is affected due to the hard disk reading and writing in the background. It’s probably recommended that you leave your computer alone for a while until the backup is complete.

The good thing about this software is that you only need to set it up once, and you don’t have to think about your backups any more. The software will scan your monitored files for changes and save any changes to your preferred backup location (External HDD, Internal HDD, network location, USB flash storage etc…). You can also set the frequency of when the backups are saved (say every 30 mins, or 1 hr, once a day, once a week etc…)

I found the Go BackInTime and Restore browser to be extremely handy. You can view the actual state and contents of your files and folders over time so that you can see what has changed and when it was changed so you can decide exactly what you want to restore. This is very handy particularly in a file corruption scenario or when a user saves changes to a file (example accidentally deleteting some data from a spreadsheet or document) and a previous version has to be restored.

Improvements:

I found out that the software does not seem to have the ability to back up to multiple locations. This means that if one wants to be ultra safe and backup your files onto 2 different locations, this doesnt seem to be yet possible. A second point for improvement would also be that once a backup has started, there was no way for me to easily postpone the backup process to a later time. This could be quite annoying if the backup process started right when you are working on some CPU intensive application.

Conclusion

Being designed as a totally automated backup software, Oops!Backup manages to perform what it promises really well. There is no user input required for performing backups, so you can easily set this up on your relatives’ computers so they won’t have to think about their backups (and you won’t get panic calls asking to retrieve files from a dead hard disk!)

It’s easy to use even by a beginner, light weight and very cheap to purchase – let’s face it; at €29 per computer (volume discounts possible) it’s a very small price to pay for keeping all your files safe. Imagine losing a lifetime of photos, documents, assignments and work that you wont be able to get back!

A FREE 30 day trial download is also available if you want to test out the software before committing to a purchase. If you want to get the free trial, click here to access the download page.

Later this week IT News will be launching a mini competition, and 5 lucky users will get a free Oops!Backup copy for use at home or at the office. Stay tuned for mer info soon!

After a full week using my new Nokia N97, I can officially say that it’s quite a great phone. Mind you, it’s still far from perfect, but the experience in itself was more rewarding than when I got the iPhone. It has all the features that you can think of and none of the awful limitations of the iPhone. This is a list of pros and cons that I found when using the device.

• Battery life, compared to the iPhone is great. I can run the phone for about 2 days of heavy use without charging, so that is definately a big plus. Although in comparison, that battery diddnt last as much as it used to do on my Nokia N95.
• The phone suffers a bit due to the underpowered CPU and/or poor graphics rendering. The user interface animations are sluggish and the graphics in the games are poorly antialiased. This is a feature that should be addressed in a future version of this phone. This however doesn’t make the phone slow or unresponsive, it’s just the animations that are not so good to look at. It probably needs a RAM increase as well.
• The device operating system feels a bit unfinished. It appears like no (or just little) customisation has been done to port the Symbian Operating System to a touch interface. It also still has a scroll bar where-as, most phones have kinetic scrolling, which is missing in this phone. (Kinetic scrolling has been recently added thanks to a software upgrade.
  
• There is a MAJOR lack of widgets. One of the main features that is being advertised on the phone is the ability to customise your home screen with widgets like weather, email, Facebook etc… however these are basically the only ones available. Nokia really should have done much better and release more widgets to increase the customisability of the home screen. – I was quite disappointed with this one.
• The keyboard is awesome, I managed to get used to it in a few days. It’s very quick and responsive, and perfect for people with larger fingers since the keys are well spaced apart. However it does have a very weird space bar position (you can get used to this easily though) and I seriously miss a right side shift button. Also, inserting symbols is not as easy since you have to either keep the character switch button pressed all the time, or else double tap it for a “caps lock” effect. There is also a SYM button that brings up an on screen character map, however this one allows you to only select one character at a time, meaning if you want to write several symbols at once (say… :-) ) you would have to use a combination like this (SYM button + Tap : on screen, SYM button + Tap – on screen, SYM button + Tap ) on screen) – which is way too long. If a feature to allow you to tap multiple symbols at once exists. I haven’t found it yet.
• Another issue I have with the keyboard is with the Fullstop button. The button displays a fullstop symbol and a comma on top of it. This usually means that a press of this button will print a fullstop, and a Shift + button press will display the charachter on top (which is a comma) – on this phone, this is not the case, and the buttons are reversed, and the symbol at the bottom is actually printed on screen with a shift + button press. I don’t know if its a “feature” or a bug – (i hate it like this!) – This issue has been fixed with the release of the Firmware Update 12.2.024
• Menu Double click – some items in the menu require a double click… why? isn’t this quite useless?
• Email reading is not stellar. The software works well, its quick and very responsive, however I  believe that it’s not capable to read HTML email. most probably there might be an HTML capable email client for Symbian available, however I didn’t find one yet.
• App store is seriously lacking in applications. This is bound to improve on a daily or weekly basis. However for now, the applications available on the OVI store are very little, and years away from a great app store such as Apple’s. However on the plus side, you can find loads of applications on other sites simply by looking on Google.
  
• PC Synch is incredibly awesome using the OVI manager. It automatically synchronises the phone contacts, messages, music and photos automaticallly when you connect the device. very handy indeed and very nice interface.
• Maps 3.0 is a great application, expecially if you live in large countries. It has a great interface, and it also has information for travellers and also map overlays to pontpoint several touristic places, accomodation, services, transportation etc… but the maps for some smaller countries like Malta, it’s extremely bad. It’s not even close to the iPhone version. The zoom level for Malta is very low, and just gives you a slight idea where you might be located. This application however (unlike the iPhone) allows you to download the maps into the device, and therefore be able to use the map application offline, saving you loads of money while roaming.
• Camera, its absolutely awesome, its one of the best I’ve seen on a mobile phone. The level of detail is great and colours are nice and vivid. Not as vivid on night shots though where the colours looked a bit dull. (Examples below) I did notice however that with the Flash OFF feature, the LED lights still turn on for a few seconds. Some very helpful users at the N97 Geeks forum told me that most probably, the flash goes on for autofocus. However this defies the purpose of a flash off feature since this makes it unusable in situations where a flash photo is not permitted! There doesn’t seem to be an auto-focus off feature.

Click the image for the FULL photo

• On the phone I have 2 applications that I never plan to use JoikuSpot and Boingo that I never plan to use, however they seem to be “protected” and I can’t uninstall them from the phone. Why?
• Web browser on the phone is good, and it supports flash, however I found a browser called Digia @ Web which actually works a lot better than the default application (And it’s FREE). Same goes with the Photo viewer. There is a beta application which is downloadable from the Nokia beta labs which works a lot better than the default viewer.
• Most Nokia phones running the s60 Symbian OS can make use of the N-Gage gaming application, that usually works great. However yesterday I tried to install Age Of Empires on the N97. The installation went smooth and it successfully installed. However the game failed to load, and after a couple of tries and reboots, I gave up and uninstalled the game.
• Customisability is a feature that is completely absent from the iPhone. By downloading themes from loads of sites on the web, you can customise the appearance of the phone. The themes are able to change the appearance of the wallpapers, operating system icons, animations and more. there are tons of themes available. You can even customise the Nokia n97 to look like an iPhone.
• Screen is absolutely gorgeous, the quality is great and the colours are also very bright and vivid. This doesnt disappoint.
• Firmware updating is handled much better than the iPhone’s updating since it keeps all your settings, applications and files so you dont actually have to re-install all the software you have made on the device everytime you update it. This is absolutely great! – you are still advised to back up your data in case something goes wrong.
  

This is the end of the review for now. I plan to add and modify additional points to this post as we go along since new firmware updates might bring improvements to the phone’s usabiliy and more functions could be added or improved. Keep reading!

Sumatra PDF is a free PDF reader which is really slim, light and open-source. This freeware has a very minimalistic design, and mainly concentrates on it’s simplicity rather than adding tons of features that are not commonly used, yet serves the basic purpose of allowing users read PDF documents. You can take a look at this software over at this site. I hope it helps!

ClearApps Network Inventory Advisor is an incredibly useful tool for system, administrators that require having an accurate and up to date inventory of all the software, hardware, operating systems etc… This could be for a variety of reasons, including hardware theft, unauthorised replacement of hardware, old or unauthorised software installation and so on…

I downloaded the software in a couple of seconds, since the software is only 6.88 MB. Installation was very quick and clear wizard style (Next, Next, Next) type. I did notice that during file copying, a couple of error prompts popped up saying “Invalid File Handle” Once theses were ok’ed, the installation continued on as usual.

Once the installation was done, I was presented with a first time load screen that asks you to either insert the registration code, or a button to evaluate the software. After that, you will be presented with a wizard, that will guide you though some customisability options.  These custom settings are basically there to make the software run better, depending on the size of your network. It will then run a scan to detect all the computers on your network and run the first inventory check though the entire network. Of course one must point out at this stage, that this could take a bit long on large network since the software has to connect to each computer and download the data. On my small home network, this was done in less than a minute. One should also point out that this scanner doesn’t need an agent software to run on each machine, that’s a really great!

The software “Ribbon” interface should be familiar to all those who already used Microsoft Office 2007 or tested out some beta versions or Windows 7. All the toolbar options are in plan sight and everything is very self explanatory.

When the software finished running the network auditing, it presented me with an incredible amount of information. The information was split into 4 different main categories, including a Summary tab, Software + Hardware tabs and “Other”.

Starting with the summary section, this gives a good overview of the main hardware and software items and also an alerts section.

Software
The software section starts with an incredibly detailed operating system section, and then moves on to other important items like operating system hot fixes, a list of all installed software and security and protection software. You can also have an overview of the licences in use on the network, so you can track the keys that are being used, and re- use the unused keys.

Hardware
This section was one of the most important ones for me as it gives an incredible amount of detail on all the computer specifications like; models, manufacturers, CPU types & speeds, hard drives, network adapters, motherboards, video, audio, memory, peripherals and loads more! This is incredibly useful for companies who want to take a snapshot of the original network, and periodically check again if there have been any changes. For me this section was particularly useful to have a central store of all the specifications of the computers on my network. Therefore if a particular machine fails for one reason or another, from my main database I can obtain the specifications of any part, and replace with an appropriate compatible part.

Other items
The “other” tab, also gives you access to the shared resources, processes, services, plus local and domain user accounts.

All the details in the sections above, can be either viewed as an entire network summary format, or you can simply click on one individual computer and view it’s summary.

Other features worth mentioning are:

• Scheduled reports allow you to setup an automatic schedule to run various tests according to your preferred schedule. This means that you can practically set this once and forget it. – Obviously there is still the need to monitor the actual final reports to see if there is anything to take care of.
• Exporting features – you can print or export the reports in various formats, including xml, html, sql and more.
• There are also a bunch of pre-set reports where you can scan your network for computers with low disk space, hardisk usage through the entire network, discovering users with no antivirus. And much more…
• The software is also available in multiple languages including; Spanish, Chinese, German, French, Japanese and Russian.

I really suggest you to give this software a try. If you are in the market for such software, or if your managers request ad-hoc reports out of the blue and they need them really quickly… this could be a perfect tool where it can save you an incredible amount of time. It costs only $89 for a 25 node network, and the prices get lower for larger networks.

Click here to visit ClearApps and download a free trial.

Intro: Most people nowadays practically have all their life saved on their computers. That’s why backup of all this data is a task that should never be overlooked. The potential problems that any person or business could face in case of a major data loss could be fatal, and in most scenarios the data is forever lost. Imagine losing all you photo albums, photos that have never been printed nor backed up, and photos of all your travels, activities, and life precious moments all LOST. Imagine other possible scenarios like all your documents, emails, financial data or your kid’s school or university assignments that get lost or corrupted from a virus that infected your computer.

That’s where backup software comes into play. There are countless software titles that can help you to perform and schedule your backups. I’ve selected GFI Backup – Home Edition because first of all it’s one of the latest backups software to be released and has an impressive feature, secondly because it comes from GFI, a leading company that has been releasing software primarily targeted to system administrators for decades, and they sure know what they are doing. Last by not least; the software is completely FREE!! I will be writing only about the main details of the software since writing about all the features would take me ages. For more information you can visit the official website at http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm

Review:
Initial download of the software is a breeze, you can download the software from http://www.gfi.com/backup-hm and the download is only about 8MB so on a high speed connection the download only takes seconds. Installation is equally fast with an easy step by step wizard interface. Once the installation is done, you can open the software from the start menu, or from the shortcut on the desktop. When the application is run, the user will be taken to a nicely designed intro screen with 4 main options, Backup, Restore (which are very obvious) My Tasks and Synch.

Clicking on the backup option, takes you to another 6 step wizard style process where once can create the fist backup task. The first tab allows you to specify a name and description of your task together with a very handy email notification (you need to setup your SMTP settings in the software before you use this feature), the second tab “source” allows you to choose the locations you want to backup, and also an incredibly useful feature that allows you to save user setting for particular software that is installed on your system, email backup feature and also some registry keys (a feature more targeted for the technical users).

When you select all the files that need to be backed up, it will immediately run a scan to decide how much space you will need on your backup device. While the scan is running, you can still switch to the 3rd tab which is the destination. This will be the place where you will be backing up your files. It can either be another internal or external hard disk, a local area network location, removable device like a USB stick or memory card, backup to CD or DVD or finally backup to FTP. With the FTP support though, there is no secure FTP functionality, meaning you need to set up a SSH session to ensure the security of your backup.

The 4th tab gives you some final options, if you have a lot of data you might want to consider using compression to shave off the file size of the backup a bit, however one must note that with every zip backup, the process will take much longer, so if disk space is not an issue, I would recommend keeping this off. Other settings worth mentioning are the encryption features. If you have sensitive data that needs to be backed up, one is suggested to use either a zip password protected encryption (which is a very basic security feature) or and AES encryption which is almost impossible to crack. It’s important at this point now to mention that if you lose the password for this backup archive, data retrieval will be impossible! So make sure to remember your password.

The last tabs in this wizard allow you to schedule your backups automatically and also event notification in case there are any errors in the backup process or backup summaries. Finally you can press the save button to save your backup task. When this is done, the software will automatically ask you if you want to run the backup task you have just created, you can either cancel it and run it another time, or press yes to start the backup.

The restore function on the main menu is pretty intuitive and it allows you to make a complete restore of your backup or chose the files and folders manually. In the section My Tasks, you can see the backup tasks you have previously created, from this menu, you can create new backup tasks, run a previously set task, delete tasks, and edit existing ones. There is also an advanced view for the more technical people. Another little gem in this package is the ability to synchronize as opposed to backing up. I did not have the time to test this functionality (since I don’t have anything to synchronise at the moment), but just going through it, seems like a sound option for those who may have a laptop, website or otherwise and need an option to keep things in sync.

One concern I do have on this software is the 4GB limit on any compressed or protected file. While I do understand that this is an issue with using the standard zip file format to maintain easy restoration from the backups, it is still an issue. This side of the application does need to be built upon further and a full system backup solution added. Final Verdict Overall this application does incredibly well. It performs backups in a respectable amount of time and getting set up is easy as well. Considering that a lot of people have actually paid cold hard cash for an application like this I think it’s one of the software that everyone should install on his computer to keep their data safe.

At first I was looking for a PHP software that I can install on my server. I actually tried quite a few, and managed to come to a conclusion on a final decision to go use the Clientexec application. Installation wasn’t so straightforward, in-fact at the end I just gave up, and asked my web host guys to do it for me. It required messing up with some php.ini files to install ioncube loaders (way too complicated for me). Once the software was up and running, I couldn’t really figure out everything, and after a few days I just scrapped the thing off.

Started looking around again for a remote hosted solution; basically an online invoicing service. And a after a few minutes of looking around, I bumped into zoho.com. They offer a whole suite of services, and the online invoicing was one of their services. I went ahead to register for a free account and I fell in love with it in the first couple of minutes!

Setup was extremely easy, and it guides you step by step, some very basic users would probably not understand the e-mail section since it requires the basic understanding of variables in the email templates (just like the Microsoft Office Mail Merge options) but for me it was incredibly easy. You can upload company logos to customize the invoice and also there are several templates you can use for the invoice styles – a very basic but very useful feature.

I started inputting client details (that actually reminded me to try to update them all with the latest details) and I started setting up scheduled invoices for all my client’s domains and hosting accounts. The process was extremely easy. One major feature that would save you tons of time was the recurring profiles. It allows you to schedule daily, monthly, or yearly invoices so the software would send an invoice automatically so you don’t have to take care of renewals. It also integrates with paypal and some other merchant services, so you can even automatically process online payments. For clients that prefer other payment methods, you can also just input the payment details when a payment arrives, and the client is automatically informed that a payment has been processed.

A very important feature for me is data backup. At first I didn’t find any information on that, however using the built in feedback facility in the website, I got in touch with support, and I got the info needed within less than a day, they assured me that all data is backed up very frequently, and that there is an exporting feature that allows you to backup the data locally if needed. That gives you an extra piece of mind!

Other great features include the ability to store customer details, extensive reporting features, and also automatic reminders for due invoices – very handy indeed!

I applied for a paid account after only about 1 hr of using it, since I’m absolutely sure that it will work very well for me! So if you are looking around for such a software, just go ahead and give it a try at http://invoice.zoho.com – very highly recommended!