I got side-tracked by the description of the Mark-My-Time bookmark. Who is worried about the size of a battery that comes with a bookmark? If your child is old enough to read by themselves, they should be old enough to know not to swallow crap (and they should be potty trained too, for that matter). "Little Johnny was half-way through 'War and Peace' when he decided to swallow the battery out of his book-mark. Even though I found it in his diaper the next day I'm still suing."

Anyway, does the bookmark automatically stop itself when you close the book around it? That would be cool.

Ha ha, that cracked me up! I don't know--I know I was reading at a very young age, but I probably still ate things I wasn't supposed to

10 free or cheap Vista apps software programs for your Windows Vista PC



AVG Free Edition – One of the most popular anti-virus protection tool, AVG Free is easy to use and will not noticeably slow your system down. Its features include automatic updates, the AVG Resident Shield (which provides real-time protection as files are opened and programs are run), free Virus Database Updates for the lifetime of the product, and an AVG Virus Vault for safe handling of infected files.

GIMP – Your best free alternative to Photoshop and other paid graphics manipulation software, GIMP performs operations directly on the pixels that make up the image, and is not a vector editor. It’s helpful for photographers who want to edit photographs and are more familiar with Adobe Photoshop as most of the menus and capabilities of Photoshop can be found in GIMP.

Wondershare Video to flash converter Pro–With this you can convert WMV to Flash, AVI to Flash, MPEG\MPG to Flash, MOV to Flash, DVD(vob) to Flash, DV to Flash, MOD to Flash, TOD(JVC Vidicon) to Flash, MKV to Flash etc

Mozilla Firefox – Of course this has to be on the list. What better way to browse the Internet? IE8 is good and will probably work well with Vista considering that they are both Microsoft product. But Firefox is definitely much faster than IE8.

OpenOffice – Who doesn’t know about OpenOffice? It’s your best alternative to the highly-priced MS Office, offering a suite of software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages – including MS Office.


7-Zip – This free archiving tool features a high compression ratio supporting most compression formats such as, 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR (for packing/unpacking) and RAR, CAB, ISO, ARJ, LZH, CHM, Z, CPIO, RPM, DEB and NSIS (for unpacking only).

Adobe Flash Player 10.0.12.36 – What can we say? It’s a lightweight, highly expressive client runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones, and devices. To state it simply, it lets you play interactive online content.

Basecamp – This program offers a fresh and novel approach to project collaboration by providing tools tailored to improve communication between people working on a project.

Cabos – This file-sharing program was based on LimeWire and Acquisition and provides a simple sidebar interface, Mojito DHT support, firewall to firewall transfers, UPnP support, IP2Country support, iTunes integration, searches and more.

ClipMagic – This is a clipboard program that allows you to capture, store and categorize text and images and even record URLs. It also provides extended clipboard capabilities for saving clips in a convenient categorized format.

CuteWriter – This easy-to-use PDF writer supports 64-bit Windows Vista. It integrates well with CutePDF Professional and the latest version of Ghostscript. It also supports foreign language well.
deVault2009 – This program lets you store, classify, organize, compress, encrypt, backup, and share all your files in sophisticated digital vaults.