Most ISP’s offer a small amount of storage space on their servers that you use to set up a webpage. This space is often included for free as part of their plans. While many people don’t want to create a website, you can still use the space for whatever you would like. You could place your most important files in their as a way of offsite backups, or share files that are too big for email with family and friends.

FTP clients are a great tool for people who spend a lot of time uploading and downloading files from websites or online storage space, but they can be complicated to use if you are not familiar with them. There is an easier way to access this storage space.

Netdrive is a utility that will allow you to show this storage space as a mapped network drive on your computer. This means that you can drag and drop straight into it using the standard Windows File Explorer, bypassing the need for any fancy FTP programs.

Netdrive sits in the system tray, but should only need to be accessed if you would like to add a new site, or change settings.

NetDrive is easy to setup. Once it is installed, create a new site and add in your FTP server settings. You may want to enable load on startup as that will make Netdrive very hands-off in the future. Once the machine is on the storage space will be mapped automatically.

You can then proceed copying and pasting to and from it just like you would with any of your other files or folders.

I have recommended this to a couple of friends, and they have experienced their internet occasionally dropping out while this software is running in the background. Because of this, you may want to load up Netdrive as you require it, rather than loading it at startup.

NetDrive is available from Netdrive.net and is free for home use. Novell also offers a program called Netdrive that does exactly the same thing, with a few less bells and whistles. This is available from Peter’s Useful Crap.

Waking a machine up through a LAN connection can be very useful to turn on a computer if the power button is a pain to get to; say if you have a computer under your desk. It is also handy if you want to turn on a group of computers.

There are a number of Magic Packet senders that will wake a computer up over a LAN connection, but these are usually stand alone programs that need to be opened up and have data entered into them before they work. I wanted a more customizable solution.

Mc-wol is a command line utility that enables you to wake up a machine on your local area network. Being a command line utility, it is easy to utilize in a shortcut on your desktop, place into a batch file, or use it in a scheduled task.

Don’t let the command line scare you. The syntax is really simple. To launch a computer, type mc-wol followed by the mac/ethernet address. i.e.:

mc-wol 91:34:eb:de:45:32

Wake on LAN software only works on computers which are in standby or hibernate modes.

Mc-wol is free and available from Matcode.com. You will also find a bunch of useful information on the page about simple settings you will need to check before WOL will work.

Accessing a home or office computer from your phone while you are out and about may be a bit too geeky for some, but there can be real benefits. I normally use it to view sites that are not compatible with mobile browsers, or to set my computer to record a TV show.

Windows Mobile already has remote desktop and VNC options, but Remote Touch offers some benefits over these. Remote Touch is quick, the screen will not shrink to an unusable size, and you can zoom in on the part of the screen you are interested in.

Another handy feature is that the computer screen doesn’t get locked. This allows the computer to remain active after you have disconnected, or you can use the software as a remote control.

Remote Touch works over IP, so after a little bit of port forwarding, your remote desktop is accessible from anywhere with a wireless network connection. There is a client which is installed on the device, and a tiny server that runs on the desktop.

Remote touch is still in Beta so you may come across the occasional bug. On the bright side, you can also expect improvements in stability and features over the coming months. It worked fine for me on my HTC Touch.

For a detailed video on Remote Touch, and the download, visit the authors website.

If your company runs an Exchange email server, but you have had trouble connecting to it from your Windows Mobile device, you are not alone. Many companies block the mobile features of Exchange, often because they don’t want to support it, or because they set a preference for BlackBerry devices. Shame on them!

Chronobis is a utility that is a nice workaround to this problem. Chronobis accesses the Outlook Web Access data, and synchronises it with a Windows Mobile calendar client. The only requirement is that you are able to access Outlook Web Access from a public or home computer. This should be available to most people.

Chronobis is still in Beta development, so there are a lot of things lacking over a direct Exchange connection. The sync currently only works with calendar, and it only transfers data to your device. If you add new calendar entries on your device, these changes won’t be transferred back to your Exchange account. This problem can currently be solved with an ActiveSync connection when you are next at your computer. This makes it convenient enough to use.

I look forward to seeing Chronobis evolve. Of course mail, tasks and contacts are important features to sync. There are lots of hints in the software and the forums, that these features will be made available in the future, and that the sync will occur both ways. This will be a real gem if all these features become a reality.

This program is of no use to you if you are already able to connect directly to an Exchange server directly from your device.

Get your copy of Chronobis for free from Chronobis.com.

RSS feeds are a great way to see all the latest updates on your favourite websites. Unfortunately, not all sites offer RSS feeds, and sometimes it would be inappropriate for them to do so. So how do you know when sites have changed their content without having to constantly visit them?

WebMon is a small utility that sits in your task tray, and alerts you if any of your predefined websites have been updated.

You can set it up to monitor any number of websites, and then define the frequency that each of your websites will be checked for updates.

WebMon stores a copy of a web page, and then after a predefined time, it will download another copy and compare the two. If there have been any changes, you will be alerted with a sound, or a pop-up.

WebMon is going to be great for me as I look at the same sites regularly doing research for this site, only to find no updates have been made. I will no longer need to visit each site individually or repetitively, thanks to this program. I read how someone else uses WebMon for alerts when the box office opens. Now he can buy tickets as soon as they are made available. 

WebMon couldn’t be any easier to use. It is also highly customisable. The only concern I have with WebMon, is that it is downloading pages regularly in the background. This could chew into your monthly bandwidth. You can specify how often the sites are checked for updates. Setting your update checks to happen every few days instead of every few minutes, will ensure your bandwidth is not wastefully consumed.

Get your copy of WebMon for free from Colin Markwells website. 

Thanks for the tip Matthew. This will be program I wondered how I ever did without.