Midway through last year we reviewed a promising program called BrowseFast which claimed that it could greatly increase your apparent surfing speed by making use of unused modem time to download sites in the background while you cruised the Net. Regrettably, BrowseFast didn't last very long but now an Australian software company has produced something very similar. Go Ahead, the former Brisbane-based company who created the Go Ahead Doctor for Santa Cruz Unix (now known as SCO Doctor) have just released Got It!, a combination of an intelligent agent and remote fetcher that plugs into Navigator or Explorer, watches you as you surf, and then downloads the sites you're either interested in (or are likely to be interested in) whenever you're plugged into the Internet but are doing something else. By scanning your bookmarks and creating an intelligent cache, Got It! greatly improves your surfing speed by pre-loading sites onto your hard disk, surfing and caching up to 10 sites at once while you go about your daily business. Got It! is probably most useful if you have a permanent Internet connection (as many workers in government, academic and corporate sites now do) and is perhaps less useful if you're an after-hours dial-up user - but try it for yourself in either case! This $US39.95 product is available as a free 14-day trialware download and providing you have at least a 486 with 8 Mb of RAM and 10 Mbytes of free disk space for a cache, Win95 or NT and either Navigator or Explorer, you can evaluate it yourself and see if it improves your surfing speeds. In some cases it won't - but in many it definitely will. For this reason, we're giving this our equal Top Pick award along with....

Manageable Software Services Inc have recently pioneered a new Internet service which is a godsend if you have a lot of software and want to be certain you're running the most recent version - or if you're a shareware and/or freeware author and want to be sure that potential customers are downloading the most current release you have available. Catch-UP! inventories the software on your hard drive, then checks a central Catch-UP! database and sends you an email notification of the latest releases of the software you have - and even tells you where you can download them. This eliminates a lot of tedious searches and can be an immense time-saver if you have even a modest software collection. And you can run this service out of your browser whenever you like, as often as you like. Manageable have only been operating Catch-UP! a few months but they already represent hundreds of popular shareware and freeware programs (including the big names like Paint Shop Pro and RealAudio) and the list is likely to expand even further as the months go by. Best of all, the service is completely free. The Catch-UP! helper application is available for Windows 3.x/95/NT and runs under both Navigator and Explorer (though it works best with Navigator).

It was inevitable that someone would eventually realise that email and faxes both pass through the same telephone lines and that it should really be quite simple to send documents that pop out of fax machines through the Internet (or vice versa). In Australia, OzEmail recently launched just such a service, offering fax rates through the Internet that are half the prices charged by Telstra providing you stump up $200 for a special black-box to plug into your phone line. But if you suspect that this is probably still too much, you're probably right. The Davis Company in Alaska have a Windows 3.x/95/NT freeware program called FaxLauncher that you can download and use to send faxes through the Internet to any fax machine on the planet - no black box required! When installed, FaxLauncher simply adds a new virtual printer to the Print menu of every Windows application you use. When you print your document to this virtual printer, it asks you for the fax number you wish to send the document to, then sends it to that fax through the Internet by way of a FaxSav global server. The Davis Company charge fees for this service - often less than 20c per page - but they only charge for pages that transmit successfully and to let you try out the service you can download FaxLauncher and send off your first 10 faxes anywhere in the world absolutely free. Naturally, the telecommunications companies hate services like these - but you can expect to see more and more of them in the future as it becomes generally known how heavily the telcos have overpriced telecommunications services for most of their existence. And if your fax bills are high there's no reason not to start saving money today. Well worth a look!

Our final selection this fortnight are two delightful Windows 3.x shareware programs from Bruce Schwab of Dakota in the USA: Credit Card Safe (772,000 bytes), a very handy database program you can use to store all your essential credit card details (including emergency contact numbers if the card is lost or stolen!) and EZBitmap Screen Saver (759,000 bytes), a marvellously easy-to-use program that will allow you to create your own personal screen-savers by accepting up to 20 bitmap images (eg: photos of your friends and family, company logo etc) which you can display on your own screen, or zip up to share with friends and co-workers. Fully-registered versions of both programs only cost $9.