True Image Home has our back(up)

Backups fall into the “floss your teeth" category of computing tasks: it's about as sexy as watching paint dry but it's an essential practice that most people don't follow often enough. One roadblock is remembering to backup your system regularly. Most people don't have the will or the desire to manually back up their drives every month, let alone every week or day. Automated solutions can be difficult to set up properly, requiring some tinkering in the Windows Task Scheduler or even the use of old-school batch files.



True Image Home is not free, which putting it at an immediate disadvantage to other backup solutions. But the comprehensive array of options available in True Image Home make it a formidable opponent nonetheless. For the inexperienced, the utility's interface is simple and straightforward – setting up a simple backup is as easy as walking through the backup wizard. Backup schedules are handled entirely within True Image Home, allowing you to set up backups at regular intervals or triggered by system events such as turning on the computer.

True Image Home can also perform incremental backups–backups that only store the changes made since your last backup job–to keep your backup drives from getting full too quickly. It'll even consolidate old backups to save space. There's a whole range of additional features too, like the ability to mount backups as a drive in Explorer or the Try & Decide feature, which creates a snapshot of your hard drive and lets you roll back your system state to that snapshot. There are other great backup solutions available, but True Image Home is a comprehensive package that will cover the needs of nearly every home computer user.



Web browser compatibility testing has been a thorn in the side of many a developer ever since the days when Internet Explorer was just a two-bit upstart with something to prove. Most people don't even know what a web browser is, if a Google video filmed in Times Square is to be believed; web developers should be so lucky. Developers keep an array of browsers handy for site testing, and even different versions of the same browser–a menagerie that can be difficult to manage, especially since multiple browser versions often conflict with one another when installed on the same system.

BrowserLab alleviates the stress of maintaining multiple browsers on the same system by essentially doing the same thing for you. The web application's concept is simple–you type in a URL in BrowserLab and pick the browsers you want to compare. BrowserLab will show you screenshots of the site you requested in a side-by-side comparison of the browsers you chose, or for extra pizazz it'll lay one browser's output on top of the other as a translucent layer in the onion-skin view.

You won't be able to throw away all your extra browsers just yet; because BrowserLab returns only screenshots of each browser, you won't be able to test Javascript functionality. And the onion-skin view could use some work–each browser has a slightly different window size, meaning layers often don't line up as well as they should. On the other hand, if you use Dreamweaver, BrowserLab's ability to integrate into your workflow is a welcome addition. No matter what your development environment, however, BrowserLab deserves a place in your diagnostic toolkit.

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