PC World's 100 Best Products of the Year

PC World Magazine announced its 100 best products for 2008.  Some of these products will be of interest to tech-oriented lawyers.  Depending on the nature of your practice, your hours may be irregular or require working at night while your favorite TV show is playing.  We all know about time-shifting via VCR (old-school) or DVR (newer tech).  But the newest tech is web-based video streaming of TV shows and movies via sites like Hulu, the number 1 tech product for 2008.  Hulu is a free site sponsored by NBC Universal and News Corporation.  The selection is wide, varied, and growing.

You are almost out of time to order a new PC with the Number 4 pick this year, the Windows XP operating system.  Microsoft officially stops selling Windows XP Pro (the version most lawyers will want) on June 30, but many PC makers are setting earlier order cut-offs.  The partly good news is that XP Home will continue to be available on a number of low-price Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC's) for the next couple of years.  There may also be options to buy Vista and "downgrade" to XP Pro.   

If you or a family member is into digital photography, you know that the least enjoyable part of the process is transferring images from the camera to your computer or photo storage/sharing web site.  Number 7 on the list is a marvel of miniaturization, the Eye-Fi.  The Eye-Fi comes in three different versions ranging from $80 to $130 depending on the extend of web-based services you desire.  It combines a 2GB SD storage card with a Wi-Fi radio.  Amazing and convenient.  Your photos can be up on a photo sharing site like Flickr before you have moved on to your next destination. 

Lawyers need to be well-informed, but what news sources can you trust.  Cable news networks all seem to have an agenda.  The answer may be Number 23 on the list, NPR.org.  It is the online home of NPR's lauded national news coverage and commentary, special reports, and documentaries. NPR's site has done a lot in a short time to convey its rich content in compelling digital formats such as podcasts and live and recorded streams.

If you are a solo or very small firm without an Exchange Server to host your own email, you may be stuck with a woefully inadequate free email account from your ISP.  Some of these accounts have Inbox storage limits of as little as 10 MB.  If you receive a couple of large file attachments (PDF scans, images, etc.), your Inbox will be full and your incoming mail will start bouncing back to the sender.  Not a good thing is you depend on email (as most of us do).  A solution is at Number 41, Google's free Gmail service.  It has tons of storage, works with desktop email clients like Outlook and Thunderbird, and now has IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) to keep your email in sync between your office PC, your notebook PC, your home PC, and your mobile phone.  It is not quite as seamless as Exchange, but a whole lot better than regular POP email. 

Speaking of Outlook, if you are tired of the bloat and expense of this Microsoft offering, Mozilla's free Thunderbird email client does just about everything Outlook does (except directly sync with certain practice management programs), especially when you install some of the many free add-ons available on the Web.  Thunderbird is Number 43 on the best of 2008 list.

If you need to add storage to your small firm network, Number 57 on the list may be the right choice.  The NetGear ReadyNAS Duo has room for a second hard drive to create a duplicate copy of all your data in case the primary drive fails.  It connects directly to your network and works with Windows and Mac computers.

If you are tempted to make the switch to a Mac, but have Windows software you need to run, Number 79 on the list will solve the problem.  VMWare Fusion is rated the simplest and easiest way to run Windows programs on a Mac.

Finally, at Number 99 is a continuous source of time-management tricks, productivity downloads, and easier ways to get done what needs to get done.  Yes, we are talking about the Lifehacker blog.  And not all of the tips are tech-related.