We get a remarkable variety of press releases here as a result of the wide breadth of topics that we either currently cover or had covered in the past. A press release we got yesterday promoted GetDiz, a freebie text editor from Outertech, a German software developer. I said sure, I installed it and gave it a shot. It’s a nice little editor, but I didn’t see where it would fulfill my needs for a text editor any better than, say, TextPad, which I had used in the past for web work (though TextPad is shareware). But it’s worth a try if you need something better than plain ol’ Notepad. (And you all know that I’m a Mac user too–and I loooooove TextWrangler… it’s free too, from the people who brought you the goodness that is BBEdit.)

But back to Outertech–they have a wider complement of software than just this simple text editor. A couple of titles that caught my eye include Cacheman (Freeware and Shareware versions available) and StartEd (Freeware and Shareware versions available).

I tried CachemanXP, the shareware version, and I like it–it shows you the memory usage of all processes and allows you to look up processes that you don’t recognize on the Web, it allows you to recover RAM swallowed by apps, and it gives you the option of having running graphs in the tray to show things like CPU usage and memory availability. Registering the software unlocks additional system optimization features. (Every system can use some tweaking every now and then… your editing workstation might have some performance potential that has yet to be tapped.)

StartEd (free version), on the other hand… I can’t say I’m impressed by–the experience was largely ruined by the installer (W3i’s InstallIQ) which tries to ram additional software down your throat and will try to take over your browser’s home page and search settings unless you’re on the ball. (If you need the ability to see the programs that start up automatically, we recommend CCleaner or Windows Defender. Both are free.) We hope this isn’t the wave of the future.

On the other hand, we have also noticed some shareware using TrialPay, a system where you agree to sign up for an offer from a third party (e.g. FTD, Netflix, Citibank, eBay, Discover Card, etc.) and the shareware registration fee is taken care of. This is an interesting approach that we think we’ll be seeing more of in the current economy.

Update 12/8: it appears that Cacheman XP also tries to install Virtumonde, a program that appears to be very undesirable to have running on an editing computer. I’ll investigate further, but at this point I feel the responsibility to notify all of you. I hope this software hasn’t caused problems for anyone’s editing computers.