Really Effective

Welcome to the home of Really Effective, producing quality Windows based Freeware software for over nine years.  If you are already familiar with Really Effective and our products please scroll down past this Announcement for the latest news and release information.

We pledge that all official Really Effective software contains no Spyware or Ad-ware. All Freeware software contains no nag screens, no expiry dates and no other restrictions. To encourage and ensure further development you can show your appreciation, provide feedback or just say thanks via the Contact Us link that can be found to the right of this page.  For further information on Really Effective products, download details or support please select the appropriate Really Effective product from the list of pages to the right.

Our first product TICK was first released in August 1998 and has been updated frequently since.  TICK is a freeware dial up enhancer that logs all dial up networking calls and has a POP3 mail checker, finger, ping, web notify tools, popup digital display, password database, IP Address finder, context sensitive help and lots more.

Our second product Sound Control was first released in July 1999 and has been updated regularly since.  Sound Control is a freeware replacement Windows Sound Mixer applet that allows you to add hot keys to adjust any combination of your sound mixer volumes.  Support to control Winamp with a series of hot keys, CD Player and an On Screen Display is also included.

 An RSS feed of all the items below is available to enable you to keep up-to-date with all the news and latest releases by Really Effective.

None of our products are officially supported or tested using the Windows Vista operating system.

However, as more and more people are using Windows Vista this post will be updated with any significant problems (and resolutions) that are reported by users with this operating system.

This is not an exhaustive list and due to several fundamental changes in the Vista operating system it is expected that there may be issues especially with respect to volume adjustment and installation.

Sound Control

• Volume adjustment does not work - there are no known workarounds or resolutions for this issue.

TICK

• No reported problems

After an extended break, some effort has been spent on a brand new and more modern design for the site.   Unfortunately both Sound Control and TICK have not had an update for quite some time now.  No promises and it depends how involved it becomes but I am hoping to release updates soon starting with Sound Control and if the update is well received it will be followed by a new version of TICK.   The new versions will be made available via the new Current Downloads feature, first as BETA releases to gather and fix any bug reports.  Depending on the general feedback and success of the release it will then be made the official download version.  When a release is made details of the changes will be posted as a new news item.  Please feel free to Contact Us if you have any feedback.

After many years of success I have made the decision that due to personal reasons I have unfortunately decided the current version of TICK and Sound Control will be the last. With regret, this means Vista operating system support will not be implemented. The web site will remain open for the time being and support questions will still be read and answered if time permits. I am not totally discounting future versions but I currently do not have the energy, time, willpower or interest to continue these projects. It has been a difficult past few years and I wish to thank all users for their support and past interest in both TICK and Sound Control. When I think back to 1998 when I made the first public release of TICK (as it is called now) and back to 1999 for the first public release of Sound Control I have received great joy from these projects especially in the early years of development. If you wish to contact us please use the Contact Us facilities. Thank you and goodbye (for now).

Before a piece of software is made available to a wider audience software developers usually release a set of BETA releases that allow the potential audience of the application to provide feedback before the final release is made. This feedback usually includes details of parts of the application that do not function correctly on their specific hardware or details of changes they would like implemented.  BETA releases however by their nature are usually contain problems, are feature incomplete (for example, unable to import previous settings) and may not be compatible with any existing version of the application installed. This generally means BETA releases are not recommended to be installed in a production environment or by inexperienced users.  A more detailed explanation of what a BETA release is and the full software release cycle can be found on Wikipedia.

Related Posts

• What Is A MD5 Checksum?
• What Is A Member Only Release?

A Member Only release is a special version of an application (usually a new version which is not publically available) which is made available to members of the web site only.  A member of the site has registered to show their interest and support of the freeware applications available. Membership of the site is free.  Member only releases facilities are currently not available.

Related Posts

• What Is A BETA Release?
• What Is A MD5 Checksum?

Regular visitors have no doubt noticed that over the past couple of weeks the site has been experiencing difficulties. These problems started when the host company decided to migrate my account to a new server without my knowledge. This then involved me updating the domains so they resolved to the new server which causes a couple of days of the server appearing to alternate between up and down whilst these changes were propagated. The problems over the past several days have been caused by the new server suddenly having some kind of problem which resulted in no scripting being executed causing incomplete or even blank pages being served to visitors. I have since implemented a workaround but the original problem has still not been resolved and the server appears to be sluggish and unreliable at times. Please use the Contact Us facilities if you find any problems or to provide feedback on the speed/reliability of the new server.

Here at Really Effective we take pride in trying to release our software for all Windows operating systems since Windows 95 and NT4 even after Microsoft no longer officially offers technical support anymore. At the time of writing Windows NT4, 95, 98, 98 Second Edition and Millennium Edition have reached their end of support cycle. This means it is no longer possible to get developer support from Microsoft and many developer tools are no longer supported by their respective manufacturers on these platforms. Although here at Really Effective we will try to continue to support these operating systems it will inevitably result in specific functionality being disabled in future releases for end of support cycle operating systems or at worse the operating system no longer being supported at all. This will unfortunately mean new releases, updates and bug fixes may not work unless you upgrade your operating system. If you have any queries on this policy please use the Contact Us link or refer to the official Microsoft article.