The 100 Best IT Products of 2006 – Part 1

Today is the 1st of September. Can you believe it? Two-thirds of 2006 has already gone. Now it’s time for us to review some of the best IT products of the year. The results are based on PC World’s “The 100 Best Products of the Year” award and products are rated on their design, performance and specifications. Let’s start from the bottom and work through to Number 1 over the next few days.

# 100 Sysinternals RootkitRevealer v1.7

It’s a free Antispyware and you can download it from here. The file is only 210KB and doesn’t require an installation.

# 99 NewsGator FeedDemon 2.0

RSS Reader software for Windows, costing US$29.95 (NZ$46) to buy. There are lots of free RSS reader software in the market so you have to ask yourself if this one is worth the money? You may want to find out for yourself by downloading the free trial from here.

# 98 Greasemonkey

A free Firefox extension which allows you to add community-built scripts to the Firefox browser. There are hundreds of useful scripts which can be downloaded for free. Click here to download.

# 97 ThinkFree Office Online

A free service that lets you create, access and edit Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents within a Web browser. Still prefer Microsoft Office? I do. Click the link for the special pricing on Microsoft Office 2003 products.

# 96 Amazon A9 Toolbar

There are so many browser tool bars you can choose from, but the Amazon A9 Toolbar allows you to share bookmarks among multiple computers and store notes about sites. Click here to download. Of course it’s free!

# 95 WordPress

A free blogging tool! What makes it stand out? Photos and art are resizable on the fly inside the editing space, and dividing a blog entry into two parts is simple. You know where it is, right? – www.wordpress.com

# 94 Serious Magic Ovation

Do you remember how many boring PowerPoint presentations you have had to attend? Or how many (boring) PowerPoint presentations you have made while your audience fell asleep? This Serious Magic Ovation is a PowerPoint add-on that imports PowerPoint slides and adds fancy video effects to make your otherwise boring presentations much more attractive. It costs US$84.95 (NZ$131) and you can visit www.seriousmagic.com for more information. Don’t have PowerPoint yet? Then you must buy one from by clicking here - Microsoft Office 2003.

# 93 Del.icio.us

This is both an excellent way to store and categorize your bookmarks as well as an impressive social experiment. The free Del.icio.us invites you to share your favourite links with friends and larger communities. Check it out at http://del.icio.us/

# 92 NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX

The previous products are all software products and most of them are free. Now let’s move onto some serious hardware products. The NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX is a power graphics card - it’s not cheap, but the payoff is excellent gaming performance. I have introduced the Gigabyte NVIDIA GeForce 7900 GTX into my post on 18 August 2006 (scroll down the page for the post). Want to know the latest price and more information of this video card? Click the above link.

# 91 Fujifilm FinePix E900

The Fujifilm E900 is a very good point-and-shoot digital camera. It has a 9 megapixel Super CCD and 4x optical zoom (32-128mm). Click the link for digital cameras from Fujifilm and other brands.