When it comes to honing your observation skills and improve your logical analysis what better role model to have than that of Sherlock Holmes.  This opportunity is offered to you with the remastered version of Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened.  Developed by Frogwares and published as a joint venture between Ascaron Entertainment and 93GAMES, this remastered version of a point and click adventure now features a new third-person view mode, improved graphics and an updated help system.

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It all started with Atlantis Quest which, somehow, managed to escape my attention.  This title was followed by Rise of Atlantis, a game that held me captivated for many hours.  Now Playrix Entertainment has released the third title in this series.  This new game is entitled Call of Atlantis. Rather than stick to one type of game play, Call of Atlantis combines elements of Match-3, Hidden Objects and Adventure within its story line.

As I have mentioned in the past, backing up your hard drive, even in the days when MBs and not GBs were the norm, could well involve long drawn out sessions with a propensity to raise frustration levels to great heights.  Nowadays you do not have that excuse for putting off the task of backing up your valuable data.  There are numerous products available that will carry out an automated backup on a user-defined schedule.  One such product is Drive Backup 9.0 from Paragon.

The recent purchase of Xara by Magix has seen both companies continue to develop their own products for the benefit of the user. However this purchase has also allowed Magix access to the technology behind Xara’s graphics software. One result of this can be seen with Magix’s Xtreme Photo & Graphic Designer 2 title which not only includes the technology but also the name of Xara’s Xtreme product.

Some games immediate grab your attention and hold you enthralled while others have the ability to creep up on you as they keep drawing you back for one more attempt.  Spooky Spirits falls into the latter category especially if you enjoy the challenge of solving puzzles in order to proceed to the next level.   Developed by Legendo, Spooky Spirits, as its title indicates, has a strong Halloween theme as various spirit-world creatures roam the Earth.

Although various competitive formats have appeared since its introduction, MP3 remains the choice for many when storing their music.  It does not matter whether the original tracks were stored on vinyl, tape, CD or Internet based sites, the content generally ends up in MP3 format on a computer’s hard disk.  But once it there, what do you do with it?  Magix MP3 Maker offers a range of features designed to help you take the next steps.

  The product comes on a DVD and took around 15 minutes to install on a reasonably fast XP system. Add another 10 minutes for the basic training and microphone testing and you are ready to go. Give it some documents and emails to analyze (this can take a few minutes) and it will already have a good idea of your style, this will help. My initial few test sentences had only one error that to me is near perfection.

Birth of America II: Wars in America 1750-1815 is not only a lengthy title for a game but also a follow up to Birth of America from the AGEOD and Ascaron Entertainment partnership.  This is a turn-based strategy game that sets the player the challenge of taking part in various battles based on historic events with authentic characters and fighting units of the period.

In the case of Magix Movie Edit Pro 14 Plus, you not only get several additional items as standard but also a bundled copy of CrazyTalk 4 Media Studio from Reallusion.  As a result of this extra software (excluding CrazyTalk 4 for the moment), the installation of Movie Edit Pro 14 Plus does eat up a fair amount of time even when you reject some of the additional items - with some items you are not even given the choice of accepting or rejecting their installation.

Although we appear to be rushing headlong into a digital take-over of the entertainment world, there still remains a vast store of analogue media that many would be reluctant to discard.  One example of this can be seen as VHS players, and their tape content, are superseded by the new hard disk based PVRs (Personal Video Recorders).

Xtreme PhotoStory on CD&DVD Deluxe 7 is the rather long title of Magix's latest software for burning photos to optical media so that they can be viewed on a television.  Various options are available from PhotoStory's installation routine.  These options include either accepting or changing the three different default locations used to store the program; templates and files; plus user files.

When keeping your data safe, especially the sensitive kind that is so attractive to certain individuals, what could be a more appropriate method than to use a safe.  However, rather than the physical metal box used for personal valuables, your data could be placed in the software equivalent of a virtual hidden container on your computer.  This is the rationale behind the Steganos Safe title which is now in its 2008 version and is available from Phoenix Software.

Offering to provide various forms of protection is Steganos Privacy Suite 2008 which brings together nine tools covering different aspects of privacy.  Once installed, and you do have the choice of which tools are included, Steganos Privacy Suite 2008 will need to be activated via an Internet link and the entry of a 39-character product serial number.

As always there are a series of different products (six I understand) but here let's concentrate first on Photoshop CS4. Content Aware is an amazing feature - if it works as shown - in the one slide I have seen, the scenario four people running along a beach spaced out in the original, this is then altered to fit a column and although the image has a lot less width and more height all are still shown more or less in situ.

One way to help is to ensure that the drive is regularly defragmented so that files are stored contiguously rather than being scattered willy-nilly in different locations.  The situation of files being broken up and scattered to various locations on your drive occurs through the normal use of the operating system.  Rather than spend time looking for a space large enough to accommodate a file, the operating system will fill up spaces with portions of a file.

Based in , O&O Software has been in the business of developing tools for use with Windows since 1997.  Sold in over 50 countries, these tools cover various aspects of Windows operating system including cache management and the use of memory with its O&O CleverCache product which is now up to version 6.

Like going to the dentist, making a back-up of your valuable data is often a task that is put off until a later date or perhaps forgotten about altogether.  Even knowing that the results could have dire consequences seems to make no difference as many feel that disaster would never happen to them so why take the time and trouble to perform a backup.

Everything I'm telling you about today was the result of a meeting around a month ago with Mike Lampietro of Adobe a demo and some slides, as and when the new versions are available which I am told is likely to be around the end of September I will try various things for myself in separate reviews.

While most companies involved in the development of graphics software tend to concentrate on a traditional approach to market their wares, even though they might also have a web-based store, Xara is an exception in that the company adopts a total web orientated strategy. If you want to purchase a Xara product, such as the company's Xtreme Pro 4.