Microsoft Windows XP (Home Edition)

Windows has come a long way over the past few years but the biggest leap was the introduction of Windows XP. Windows XP was a huge leap forward from the older versions such as Windows 95 or 98 or the horrible Windows Me. Windows XP is easy to use and very stable compared to the older version. You can buy the professional version if you like, but we think this is unnecessary for the vast majority of people. Just because you are buying it for business does not mean the home edition will not be good enough for you. The home edition does pretty much all you need. If you have a previous version of Windows and the product key to prove it you can buy the upgrade version for less money, if you have never owned Windows before you need to buy the full version.

Dreamweaver MX

There are some people that will tell you that decent webmasters write pages with notepad. These people are idiots! There are so many different browsers out there each with their own little quirks it is important to use a good software package to make your pages to ensure good compatibility. Dreamweaver is the industry standard for making web pages and it offers you the ability to quickly switch back and forth between HTML and WYSIWYG. Dreamweaver is very powerful, although the table manipulation is a little cumbersome sometimes. Having said that we are using the older v6.0.

Ulead PhotoImpactXL

For many webmasters the graphics package of choice is Adobe PhotoShop however in our humble opinion the software is a little cumbersome and expensive. This is not to say that there is any doubt that Adobe PhotoShop is by far the most powerful graphics package available right now, but for anything less than the most graphically demanding web site we think it is an overkill. Our product of choice is Ulead PhotoImpactXL. It is very powerful and allows all kinds of incredible graphical effects without the steep learning curve of PhotoShop. Also Ulead make a program called Cool 3D which is pretty cool too, although we did not use it on this site. Ulead offer trial versions of most of their software so you can try before you buy. Their prices are fair too.

Adobe PhotoShop CS

Despite the comments above about PhotoShop we could no longer ignore the sheer power of PhotoShop. It is the industry standard for a reason, and is simply the best graphics package out there. The latest version is PhotoShop CS (v8.0). Be prepared to spend some money and have a steep learning curve, but the end results make it well worth it. You can make great web sites for less using PhotoImpact XL (above) but the graphics are always going to be sharper, cleaner and better anti-aliased using PhotoShop.

Olympus Digital Camera

The camera we used on this web site is pretty old and basic compared to some of the modern creations. It is an Olympus 1.3 MegaPixel camera that eats batteries like you would not believe. Nevertheless the important thing to remember is that the relatively low screen resolution of computer monitors does not require that you go out and buy something crazy for most web needs. Our old clunker took a nice picture of some clay poker chips for our main logo and we used Adobe PhotoShop for the effects.

SwishMax

Outstanding Flash creation tool that lets you do anything from building a simple animated logo right up to a fully interactive animated Flash web site. Very powerful and easy to use without the steep learning curve (or steep price) of some other programs. We used it to create our Flash intro.

SoThink DHTMLmenu 4.4

SoThink produce some wonderful little utilities to help webmasters. Their menu system is very powerful and cross platform compatible. Our menus work even on decrepit old versions of Netscape thanks to this company. Their menu system can jack right into Dreamweaver so you have full control. Sure you could write custom menus for your site, but these people have already done the extensive research and coding necessary to save you a lot of time.

Cedant Web Hosting

When we launched our first web site BUY-TEC.com in 1998 we tried various web hosts, all of which were terrible. We had some very bad experiences, but luckily the fourth company we tried was Cedant. We've used them ever since late 1999 and their service has been outstanding. As a former web design company we've used them for countless clients and always had amazing service from them and no hassle. We think they are wonderful, their uptime and tech support is just great.

Alexa Toolbar (FREE offer from PokerXL.com)

The Alexa toolbar is a really nice add-on from Amazon.com. Through our association with Amazon we are able to bring you this powerful search tool that has a lot of useful information to help you search the web, and it kills those annoying pop-up ads. This is a great web browser companion, and it's free.

Norton AntiVirus Professional 2004

Despite some poor reviews on Amazon.com we think this is one of the better choices for virus protection. We've not had any problems with it, although we concur with some of the reviews which criticizes the product activation system they are using that is pointless, tedious and ineffective.

Zone Alarm Pro 4

Great firewall system that is easy to use and helps ensure that your computer is kept safe while you are online. A must for broadband users.

Webroot Spy Sweeper

Many people in the past few years have noticed their computers slowing down or doing weird things and displaying pop up windows all over the place. Often this can be due to spyware or adware on your machine. Often when you download a free program the program installs unwanted programs on your machine that do all kinds of nasty things such as transmit confidential information without your consent. This powerful program looks for rogue software on your machine and kills it for you, thus making your system more secure and often speeding up your machine. We like it, it's easy to use and removed various troublesome files for us.

Microsoft FrontPage 2003

We really dislike FrontPage, especially after watching some of the same bugs from FrontPage 98 still exist in FrontPage 2002. We still keep FrontPage 2000 on our systems because it does have one good feature, a very powerful <TABLE> editor that is easier to use than Dreamweaver. Sometimes it is quicker to open FrontPage, make a quick table design and then cut and paste the HTML right into Dreamweaver than to mess with the cumbersome table editor Dreamweaver offers. All that said, Microsoft should be ashamed of this edition to their otherwise good Office suite.

Music Match Juke Box

Okay so this is not really a tool we use, but it is nice to listen to some good music when writing, and be able to burn CDs so you can listen to more music in your car. This is the best program do do all these things.

Text Pad

For any kind of simple text editing this is the best program to use. We used it when we wrote some PHP for the Tell A Friend feature and also the Javascript routines for the random poker hand and date footer. Although you can use Dreamweaver for these functions, sometimes you just want a tiny fast loading program to mess about with things rather than using a big powerful program.

Microsoft Office 2003

The Microsoft Office Suite contains four main programs. Word is the most popular word processor you can buy and it is pretty powerful for most word processing needs you might have. Excel is an excellent spreadsheet that allows you to do all kinds of math and accounting functions. Outlook is a great email program, we have well over 20,000 emails stored and it still works! PowerPoint is a presentation tool, if you need that kind of thing.

PokerStars.com

This is our favorite poker web site to play online at. It is easy to use, the temp of the game and movement of the cards is just right and they have just sent more people to the WSOP than any other site. Their tournament play is unmatched and their ring games are great too. When we are not writing this site we play on here.