27 Tools-in-1 Wichio 1.2

CNET editors' review

Reviewed by: CNET Staff

This Internet Explorer-based browser adds a number of tools to the shell, as its name suggests. Perhaps it's inevitable that the interface of 27 Tools-in-1 Wichio Browser bewilders, with its 30-plus buttons, but it does let you choose to display fewer buttons. Wichio comes packed with a huge number of features, some of which we found useful, such as its network tools; others, such as the ability to add random sounds to mouse clicks, are just silly. We appreciated the tabbed-browsing feature, which let us quickly switch among sites and save groups of tabs as a bookmark. The most useful tool is the download manager, which resumes stopped transfers. The application's features include notification of e-mail and Web page updates, an alarm clock, a pop-up blocker, and automatic connecting and disconnecting. Another group of utilities offers searching, a dictionary, song lyrics, and weather lookups, but you can't customize the links for online resources. We like the new Private Surfing feature that lets you create private URL lists specific to your username that remain hidden when other users log in. The Lyrics Finder, which finds the lyrics to your currently playing song on Winamp, seems frivolous, but some people might find it useful. More advanced surfers will like the Whois, Traceroute, and DNS query tools. All these enhancements make Wichio eat much more memory than Internet Explorer, but high-end Internet users might deem it worth the extra load.

Publisher's description

From Revopoint :

27 Tools-in-1 Wichio is an Internet Utility Suite with 27 popular and powerful utilities which serve all kinds of Internet users, from ordinary to power users. The program is very easy to use with one button for one utility. To set options of any utility, just right click that button. And if you install MS speech engine, Wichio will notify you (for the features that give notifications) by speaking anything you want. Open only this program to work like IE plus extra 27 utilities such as:

'Block Pop-up Windows' closes annoying pop-up windows automatically. 'Download Manager' lets you download groups of images, audio, video, etc. files at once and resume broken download. 'E-mail Alerts' informs you of new e-mails on your POP3 and Yahoo! accounts, then directly log on to read these mails. 'Web Update Alerts' tells you when your favorite pages have been updated, useful for monitoring updates of your threads in message boards. 'Pre-Fetch' speeds up your Web surfing by pre-loading your favorite or selected Web pages in the background. The 'Fast Search' gives easy access to results from the top 20 search engines. Checking the 'Weather' for any country and city is a mouse-click away.

If you don't want anyone to know which Web sites you have visited before, just easily click the 'Delete History, Cache, and Cookies' button. 'Show System Resources' can prevent your computer crash by notifying you if free system resources are less than 10%. As an online game player, you can see your IP address and copy it with a click. Need to control how much time you spend online? Wichio can be set to automatically connect or disconnect at your specified times or based on your specified events. You can even select which connection you want to use if you have multiple connection options. 'Keep Connection Alive' function can also simulate Internet activities when you are away, especially useful when you are connecting via ISPs which automatically disconnect you after a period of inactivity. And lots more.

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