Lets talk about scanning for a moment. Most people use the software that came with the scanner to scan. That software is usually bloated and not the most appropriate, but if everything is configured it should do the job.

Users who like to speed up things use third party software instead, and WinScan2PDF is such a software.

The free portable program offers one feature: It turns one or multiple sheets of paper into a pdf document. Usage is dead simple and should not pose troubles for anyone.

The program displays three buttons and two options in the main interface. Non-German speaking users should click on LNG in the lower right corner to change the language to English or one of the other supported interface languages.

You select the source first with the button on the left. Just select the scanner that is connected to your computer. Most users will find only one scanner in the list.

You can then opt to scan in multiple pages that will be all turned into the same pdf document or just one page. If you do not check the Multiple Pages checkbox only one page will be turned into a pdf document. A click on Scan to PDF initiates the scan.

The first document that you put into the scanner will be scanned and converted into a pdf document after the scan.

And that’s it. No fancy interface, options or anything. Ideal for quick scanning and the creation of pdf documents.

WinScan2PDF is compatible with all 32-bit and 64-bit editions and versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. You can download the program from the developer’s website over at Software OK.

I had to fax some information to Paypal the other day and I had to copy the documents and walk into a store that offered to send papers with their fax. Besides the privacy concerns I lost almost an hour that day just to fax some papers to Paypal. It would be much easier to simply use the camera of a mobile phone to take a picture of the document and send it as a fax or email attachment to the recipient.

I tried two services, one of them free while the other one is a paid service that starts at $4,99 monthly for 10 sheets. Scanr is a free mobile application that supports a wide variety of mobile phones offering a Java and Symbian version of their software. A 1 Megapixel camera is required though.

The only costs are the costs of your wireless carrier. There is no image postprocessing which means that your images could be rather big which would lead to high costs unless you have an unlimited plan.

Comombo is a paid service which offers their application for Java and Symbian as well. The big advantage is the postprocessing of the images which leads to some remarkable results. First the size of the image is reduzed which is always good because you have to send it over the Internet using your mobile phone.

The second advantage is that it increases image quality. It lightens up dark images for instance making the document more readable.

The freeware version is good for 10 pages that can be faxed. All other versions ask for a monthly fee that grant a certain amount of free faxes for that month. I would like to see a one time payment opportunity which gives me a certain amount of faxes that I can send whenever I want to.

This is a good service if you fax regularly and a not so good one if you only do it occasionally.

Update: The Scanr website returns an error for quite some time now. The project seems to be dead and it is unlikely that it will be restored in the future. Please check the comments in the article for suitable alternatives.

Certain file types can be excluded from scan, the default configuration exlcudes dll, sys, vxd and inf files from the scan. You could add more files that are important in your case or remove any of the default ones. You could on the other hand limit the scan to files matching a certain filter. It would be easy to setup a scan that would only scan for images for instance using this filter. (good way to check for duplicates in image collections of 100000+ images)

Last but not least you can leave out files that have a certain file attribute such as read only, system or hidden. System files are excluded from scans by default. A last parameter makes it easy to define a rule that files will not be scanned if the file size exceeds or undercuts a give size.

The lenghts of a scan depends on various factors such as hard drive space, filters that have been set and speed of hard drive. Doublekiller is a clever program that makes it easy to scan through a large list of files and free up disk space in the progress.

GRISOFT is announcing a new version of the AVG Anti-Virus Free Edition. This new 7.5 version with improved performance and full compatibility with the latest Windows Vista version is available. Users that are using AVG Free 7.1 will be provided with a specific dialog, within the next few weeks, with the opportunity to choose the right option fulfilling their needs. AVG Free 7.1 version will be discontinued on 15th of Jan 2007. 

In case that you are still looking for an antivirus solution other than AVG Free I recommend Antivir which is completely free for personal use. I have been using Antivir for some time now and have not encountered serious issues as of now. I would say that a successful solution depends more on the user behind the keys than on the antivirus program that he is using.

They used one virus file which is about 50 megs unzipped and contains more than 10000 virii. The software that found the most got their recommendation which is not the best criteria if you ask me. There should be other factors like system resource use (never use Norton if you want a fast system), updates, type of virii found aso. But its a good test to see how your favorite AV handles this infested files.

Page loads a little bit slow but its worth the wait. I will check some of the tools out that I did not try out until now and if I find a gem review it here at ghacks.net.