Top Ten Computer Software Programs

The 1 GB Sansa M240 will hold approximately 16 hours of CD-quality MP3 tracks (encoded at 128kps) or 32 hours of WMA tracks (at 64kbps). It's compatible with MP3, WMA, secure WMA (Microsoft WMDRM 9 and 10), and Audible audio file formats. The digital FM radio allows you to access local radio stations, as well as preset up to 20 of your favorite radio stations. With 5 equalizer types for the FM radio and music player, you can optimize your sound for your favorite style of music, for example, Rock, Jazz, Classical, Pop, and Custom (user-defined). You can also use the built-in microphone and voic e recording function to capture interviews, classes, and short voice notes to yourself.

The SanDisk Sansa is easy to use with its simple controls.

The compact yet robust industrial design offers an easy-to-use interface with an indigo-backlit LCD screen showing ID3 tag information from currently playing tracks (song title, artist, and album, as well as battery level and playlist). Sophisticated music library sorting lets you browse the music in your player by artist, album, song title, genre, year, playlist, and other useful criteria. The ÒABÓ playback feature allows you to select a start point and an end point within an audio file so you can play that segment over and over--helpful for learning languages.

It's easy to transfer songs to the Sansa--just connect it to your PC via the included USB 2.0 connection cable, where it will appear as a Windows Portable Device on your computer. Then, just drag and drop music files from anywhere on your hard drive or use a variety of music software to move licensed music to the device. The Sansa is compatible with PCs running the Windows XP operating system.

This player is designed to be PlaysForSure-verified out of the box and works seamlessly with Windows Media Player 10, in cluding support for Auto Sync to sync your music, photos and playlists. You can choose from a growing number of PlaysFor Sure download and subscription stores, such as Real Rhapsody, MSN Music, Musicmatch, MusicNow, Napster (and Napster To G o), and Wal-Mart Music Downloads.

Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it's going to work.

Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you're shopping for a portable music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time. Match the PlaysForSure logo on a large selection o f leading devices and online music stores. If you see the logo you'll know your digital music will play for sure.

The PlaysForSure logo makes it easy to find digital media stores and devices that work together. Choose from a large number of digital music and video stores including: CinemaNow, MSN Music, MusicMatch, MusicNow, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Downloads, and many more.

The 512 MB Sansa M230 will hold approximately 8 hours of CD-quality MP3 tracks (encoded at 128kps) or 16 hours of WMA tr acks (at 64kbps). It's compatible with MP3, WMA, secure WMA (Microsoft WMDRM 9 and 10), and Audible audio file formats. The digital FM radio allows you to access local radio stations, as well as preset up to 20 of your favorite radio statio ns. With 5 equalizer types for the FM radio and music player, you can optimize your sound for your favorite style of mus ic, for example, Rock, Jazz, Classical, Pop, and Custom (user-defined). You can also use the built-in microphone and voi ce recording function to capture interviews, classes, and short voice notes to yourself.

The SanDisk Sansa is easy to use with its simple controls.

The compact yet robust industrial design offers an easy-to-use interface with an indigo-backlit LCD screen showing ID3 t ag information from currently playing tracks (song title, artist, and album, as well as battery level and playlist). Sop histicated music library sorting lets you browse the music in your player by artist, album, song title, genre, year, pla ylist, and other useful criteria. The ÒABÓ playback feature allows you to select a start point and an end point within a n audio file so you can play that segment over and over--helpful for learning languages.

It's easy to transfer songs to the Sansa--just connect it to your PC via the included USB 2.0 connection cable, where it will appear as a Windows Portable Device on your computer. Then, just drag and drop music files from anywhere on your h ard drive or use a variety of music software to move licensed music to the device. The Sansa is compatible with PCs runn ing the Windows XP operating system.

This player is designed to be PlaysForSure-verified out of the box and works seamlessly with Windows Media Player 10, in cluding support for Auto Sync to sync your music, photos and playlists. You can choose from a growing number of PlaysFor Sure download and subscription stores, such as Real Rhapsody, MSN Music, Musicmatch, MusicNow, Napster (and Napster To G o), and Wal-Mart Music Downloads.

Choose your music. Choose your device. Know it's going to work.

Look for the PlaysForSure logo if you're shopping for a portable music or video device and you want to make sure the digital music and video you purchase will play back on it every time. Match the PlaysForSure logo on a large selection o f leading devices and online music stores. If you see the logo you'll know your digital music will play for sure.

The PlaysForSure logo makes it easy to find digital media stores and devices that work together. Choose from a large number of digital music and video stores including: CinemaNow, MSN Music, MusicMatch, MusicNow, Napster, Wal-Mart Music Downloads, and many more.

Design DVD menu templates in Photoshop Elements and save them to use in Premiere Elements.

Burn photo slide shows to DVD to show on your TV and share with friends.

Instantly fix common flaws with tools that automatically correct skin tone, lighting, color, and more.

Easily find and view photos using keyword tags.

Grab from virtually any media device with the new Media Downloader.

Choose from hundreds of special effects to dazzle your audience.

Create photo slide shows in Photoshop Elements and then use Premiere Elements to burn them to DVD to show on your television to friends on family. When creating special photo emails, calendars, and photo albums in Photoshop Elements, you can add a video frame captured from Premiere Elements. And include still photos from Photoshop Elements in your home videos created with Premiere Elements to add interest and variety. Adobe Premiere Elements also automatically converts text and graphics created in Photoshop Elements to be optimized to look perfect in video.

About Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0
Based on powerful and professional photo editing software, Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 helps you edit and share your photos easily and conveniently. Ideal for home users and hobbyists, Photoshop Elements 4.0 provides all the tools you need to edit and enhance photos while expressing your creativity.

Editing tools let you correct common photo flaws, such as lighting, skin tone, color and contrast. Even red eye can be corrected automatically as new photos are downloaded. When making changes to color, you can compare a range of color variations side by side with the original to select the option that looks the best. You can also instantly see the changes you make with before and after views in Quick Fix mode. Photoshop Elements 4.0 can divide scanned photos, so you can scan several photos at the same time and they will be automatically divided, straightened and saved. Rotating and cropping photos is simple with the touch of a button.

If you want more control over the look and feel of your photos, you can select specific areas of the photo to retouch manually. Use the Spot Healing Brush or Healing Brush to brush away flaws, unwanted objects, or wrinkles. Additionally, you can control color temperature, tint, shadows, highlights, and exposure. Enhance photos with tools to add depth, shadows, and glow, or convert photos to black-and-white or sepia tones. Apply colored filters that mimic real-world photography effects, simulate the look of a painting, or add surreal effects like warping, twisting, and pulling. You can even make composite photos and add special effects, text, graphics and shapes for fun and exciting collages or panoramas. And if you demand precise control over the final product, how-to guides are included to teach you more in-depth techniques and advanced editing options.

Sharing photos is easy with a variety of options. It's simple to make customizable slideshows that feature special effects like zoom, pan, transitions, captions, narration, and music from your own digital audio library. Adobe Photoshop Services include a personal online photo album that lets you share photos with friends and family around the globe, and even allows others to order prints or hard-bound photo books. Make animated GIFs for the Web and preview them in Photoshop Elements. If you want to email photos, you can now embed photos directly in the email and include colorful backgrounds and frames. Photos can be sent to mobile phones or viewed on a Palm OS handheld. Slideshows can also be viewed on your home television via your home network on video CD and you can control the show with a TV remote.

Organize photos the way you want by using keyword tags. After you've tagged a photo with your own keywords, you can then click on any of these tags to view photos by place, people, or topic without having to spend time browsing through all your photos. Photoshop Elements 4.0 will also instantly find all photos that contain faces, so that you tag photos of friends and family quickly and easily. Or you can browse photos by date including viewing photos taken from any specified time period, which makes seeing all the photos from, say, your family vacation quick and easy.

About Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0
It's easy to create your own cinematic masterpiece with the new Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0. Import files easily, choose from hundreds of special effects, convert audio to Dolby Digital stereo, and add music, titles, credits and more. With a bounty of new features along with flexibility and ease of use, Premiere Elements 2.0 is a top choice for home users who want to make professional looking videos without a lot of fuss.

It all starts with easy data transfer of DVD footage via fast USB or FireWire connections directly into the timeline. You can now grab video, audio, or still images from virtually any device, including cell phones, DVDs, camcorders, digital cameras, and more, using the Media Downloader. Once all your files are ready, you can work in a custom editing studio that gives you a flexible workspace that resizes and adjusts the area to your needs. Once you delete unwanted footage, the timeline will automatically resize everything for you. If you want to save your project, you can easily transfer the work to another PC or archive it for future editing.

Hundreds of special effects are at your fingertips to let you customize and add sparkle and personality to your movie. And if you're unsure what an effect will look like, the sneak preview function will let you view the effect before you apply it. Special transitions like fades, dissolves and wipes--or even your own customized transitions--can make moving from scene to scene seamless. Add text and moving graphics, or even use TV-style effects to add more unique elements to your movie. Choose from professional Adobe fonts designed just for video and add shadows, glows, and other effects. It also features over 100 professionally-designed templates for credits. Make your own soundtrack in Dolby Digital stereo with up to 99 audio tracks that you can edit with precise waveform controls. If you're unsure where to start, the program features how-to guides, and the Adobe website offers free tutorials and hints to help you get your project going.

Achieve amazing results in a fraction of the time with the groundbreaking Vanishing Point tool, which lets you clone, paint, and paste elements that automatically match the perspective of the surrounding image area.

Adobe Bridge (formerly File Browser)
Adobe Bridge software is the new-generation File Browser--Photoshop's navigational control center that allows you to browse, organize, label, and preview graphics and Photoshop files quickly and efficiently. Adobe Bridge takes File Browser, introduced in Photoshop 7.0, a step further by providing centralized access to your suite project files, applications, and settings. With Adobe Bridge, you can process multiple camera raw images at once; resize, rate and label thumbnails; review images in slide show mode; and more. With file organization and sharing, plus Adobe Stock Photos at your fingertips all the time, you simply search for the files you want to place using metadata--such as key words, colors or image resolution--and seamlessly drag and drop your files into Photoshop. You can even page through an entire Adobe PDF file right in the preview panel of Adobe Bridge. And with Adobe Bridge, you can also browse, search and purchase royalty-free images from leading stock photo agencies without ever leaving InDesign CS2. It's as simple as that.

Revolutionary Vanishing Point and Image Warp
Photographers especially will be amazed at the effects that Vanishing Point can bring to a project. Clone, paint, and paste elements that automatically match the perspective of the surrounding image area in a fraction of the time that it currently takes. With Image Warp, you can easily create packaging mock-ups or other dimensional effects by wrapping an image around any shape. Place your client's logo around a coffee cup, or stretch, curl or bend an image across the hood of a car or around the Space Shuttle, for that matter. The effects you can create with Image Warp will be limited only by your imagination.

Accelerate your raw file workflow with simultaneous processing of multiple images while you continue working.

Digital Camera Raw File Support
Accelerate your raw file workflow with simultaneous processing of multiple images while you continue working. With Photoshop CS2, you can import images into your choice of formats, including Digital Negative (DNG); enjoy automatic adjustments to exposure, shadows, and brightness and contrast; and much more. This exciting new enhancement provides fast and easy access within Photoshop software to the "raw" image formats produced by many leading professional and mid-range digital cameras. The Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in--now available as part of Photoshop CS2--has been updated to support more cameras and include more features.

Spot Healing Brush and One-Click Red-eye Correction
Never have touch ups been so easy. With the Spot Healing Brush, you can effortlessly retouch photos--including 16-bit images--in a single click. Red-eye Correction lets you instantly neutralize red eyes and also lets you set pupil size and darkening level.

Effective red-eye reduction is only a few clicks away.

Use the new multilayer select feature to more intuitively edit and control your work.

Other New Features
Photoshop CS2 offers a huge array of exciting new features designed to help artists and creative professionals in all fields stretch their imagination and increase their work and creative efficiencies:

• Smart Objects: Perform nondestructive scaling, rotating, and warping of raster and vector graphics with Smart Objects. Even preserve the editability of high-resolution vector data from Adobe Illustrator software.
• Multiple Layer Control: Select and move, group, transform, and warp objects more intuitively by clicking and dragging directly on the canvas. Easily align objects with Smart Guides.
• Nondestructive Image Correction: Improve the color, contrast, and dynamic range of any image using a comprehensive set of professional correction tools and nondestructive adjustment layers, which display corrections while preserving the original.
• Full 16-bit and New 32-bit Image Support: Work with absolute precision thanks to support for 16-bit images in all channels and layers. Create and edit 32-bit images, and take advantage of High Dynamic Range, 32-bit support.
• Advanced Noise Reduction: Reduce noise and remove JPEG artifacts for cleaner images.
• Customizable Workspaces and Menus: Get easier access to the tools you need with task-based presets, highlight new or commonly used menu items, and even set up and save custom menus and workspaces.
• Web Animations: Quickly create dynamic GIF animations directly within Photoshop CS2 by taking advantage of the new Animations palette and layer palette animation options.

Tracking money coming into and going out of your business is a breeze with QuickBooks Pro 2006. View larger.

Import downloaded bank and credit card transactions from more than 1,000 financial institutions. View larger.

Automatically interface and share business contacts with your OS X Address Book. View larger.

Run your payroll from QuickBooks Pro 2006, or any web browser with QuickBooks Payroll for Mac (powered by PayCycle). View larger.

Managing cash flow is important for any small business. QuickBooks will help you track money going in and out of your business without all the headaches of managing piles of paperwork. You can easily perform routine tasks like payroll, invoicing, tracking bills, and check-writing in minutes instead of hours. In fact, with this new version of QuickBooks you can actually run your payroll right from the software, or any web browser with QuickBooks Payroll for Mac (this service is powered by PayCycle, Inc.). So what else is new in 2006? Plenty. Give your tired fingers a rest, stop all that typing, and simply import downloaded bank and credit card transactions. Pro 2006 supports Web Connect so you can easily import downloaded transactions into QuickBooks from more than 1000 participating financial institutions.

Aside from the nuts and bolts of your cash-flow operations, Pro 2006 is also designed to automatically interface and share business contacts with your OS X Address Book. Imagine having contact information for all your QuickBooks customers and vendors right when and where you need it, without any retyping. Plus, you can print lists of customers, vendors, and more to help your sales team. Although this software is specially built for Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger), you can cross-share files with QuickBooks 2006 Windows users for a smooth transition from Mac to PC. This a surprisingly important feature, because your accountant or bookkeeper may not run their version of QuickBooks on a Mac. Don't fret. Intuit knows that just because Mac is right for your business, it might not be the best choice for everyone. Your company's QuickBooks file will open with no trouble on any computer equipped with a version of QuickBooks Pro 2006 (Mac or PC).

The features might sound great, but there is always the worry that new software will be difficult to setup and a pain to navigate. Not with QuickBooks Pro 2006. Intuit is well-known for creating easy-to-use, efficient, and powerful software, and this new version is no exception. Pro 2006 for Mac is easy to setup, learn, and use. Checks look like checks, and purchase orders look like actual purchase orders. Built by and for Mac users, Pro 2006 has a familiar Mac interface and even takes advantage of some of the best features of OS X.

QuickBooks understands how common business tasks flow together and is organized to help you save time. The customer, vendor, and employee information you enter is pulled into the estimates you create. Estimates are then used to generate invoices, and invoices to receive payments.

Pro 2006 organizes all your important business information in one place, making it easy for you to see the big picture. Track money going in and out of your business more accurately. Instantly create over 100 customizable business reports. Isolate expenses. Identify your largest customers. Track your areas of biggest growth and more. Once you get the feel for the flow of QuickBooks, it will become one of the most important tools for running, streamlining, and increasing the profit of your small business.

Special Offer: With the purchase of QuickBooks Pro 2006 for Mac you will receive the Learning QuickBooks for Mac interactive training CD free of charge. This interactive training tool will help you understand bookkeeping basics and master QuickBooks Pro 2006.

For Web browsing, XP Home comes with Internet Explorer 6.0 and MSN Explorer. The most significant new feature for Internet users is the built-in firewall. A firewall protects against one of the most disturbing security risks, in which other users unknown to you might connect to your computer while it is online, reading private files or causing other damage. XP's built-in firewall is a simple affair, but it does prevent most types of unauthorized connections.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 Features