Although Seattle-based Intermind have been around since 1995, their Intermind Communicator product has only recently been launched. A cross between a browser and email, Intermind allows you to "subscribe" to sites (there are 40 already signed up) and have updated news sent directly to your browser. You can control what the publishers on each site send you and you can subscribe or unsubscribe at will. The product currently works under Windows 3.x/95/NT (Mac and Unix versions are coming soon) with both Navigator and Explorer, versions 2.0 and above. Sites which publish information that you can subscribe to are classified into Arts & Entertainment, Business, Family & Kids, Health & Science, Sports, Travel & Leisure and Technology groupings. Both Intermind and the site subscriptions are free - simply download the software, log on and choose what you'd like to be sent to you. Is this the future of the Net? Maybe. But for providing an interesting service anyway we're making this our Top Pick Of The Week

Have you ever wondered how fast your connection to your Internet service provider really is? Between your computer, your modem, your telephone line and your ISP's modem there are a lot of things that can go wrong. Maximised Software (who make some excellent software for webmasters we hope to review in the future) have created this freeware utility to exhaustively test your TCP/IP connection so you can find out if the Net really is slow, or whether the problem lies somewhere else (eg: a crusty phone line or a modem that's not really what it's cracked up to be). This utility is so punishing that tests are limited to 12 seconds but it's very easy to use and very useful. TCPSpeed requires VBRUN300.EXE to execute - but most Windows users already have this. If not, there's a download link on the site as well. Maximised Software also have a few other freeware utilities on their site too, so have a poke around!

Microsoft have taken quite a pasting from us several times this year but - in fairness - they produce as much good as bad and they do try to do the right thing. We suppose that if they weren't the world's biggest software company we'd probably be kinder to them (yes, other people have bugs in their software too) and if they didn't tell such awful fibs (eg: "our products don't have bugs") we could overlook many of the goofs they've made. But one thing they are doing that gets our unqualified thumbs-up is trying to introduce a standard set of fonts for the Web so that we can all get to see pages on the Net that have something better to offer than Times or Courier. This is going to be a long process - but to hasten it along Microsoft are making all of these fonts available as free downloads. And since they're TrueType fonts you can use them in your normal word-processing and DTP applications too. If you use Microsoft products you may already have several of these fonts (eg: Ariel, Times New Roman) but you may not have all of them - especially some of the newer ones that Microsoft have just released (or are about to). Most downloads are between 80K and 160K and you can pick the ones you want or download the lot in one much bigger ZIP file. Thankyou, Bill! We forgive you for Explorer 2.0 and 3.0 (the jury's still out on 3.01).