There is a company named Play that has a neat video digitizer called Snappy. They also have some pretty cool software. One of the latest software programs from Play is the Gizmos Mega-Pak. Gizmos aren't just the furry little creatures from the movie Gremlins. This is a suite of utilities and fun things that the folks at Play feel might ought have been included in Windows.

There are four areas that Gizmos Mega-Pak addresses. They are File Security, Picture Management, Games & Screen Savers and Desktop Accessories. For File Security there is The Vault and The Shredder. In the Picture Management arena we have Performer and Picture Explorer. In the Desktop Accessories section you will find Clocks & Calculators, Advanced Calculators and a Pro Linear CD Player. And last, but not least, the games & Screen Savers area has Card Games, a Picture Puzzler, some cool screen savers and a retro music gizmo called the Color Organ. All together there are 25 different programs that make up the Gizmos Mega-Pak.

The way to get to any of your Gizmos is through the Launch Pad. It comes up on your desktop when your system boots up. From here you can click on the icon for any Gizmo to open up. It even included an icon for Snappy when I installed it on my system. Simply scroll through the selections using the arrows at the bottom of the Launch Pad to get the Gizmo you want and click on its icon. The Gizmo will then be launched. You can also open up the Launch Pad from the Windows Start menu. If you don't want it to come up on the Desktop each time Windows boots up, just click on the Options button at the top of the Launch Pad and deselect the check box for Windows Startup.

Gizmos features four different calculators that you can use. The PC-10 Simple Calculator is like its name, a simple 10-key calculator. It has the basic add, subtract, multiply and divide functions of a throwaway calculator. The next one is the PC-50 Financial Calculator. This one has some memory functions along with a few numeric switches. Round to either the next higher or lower number. Set the decimal point and have the item count either on or off. Use the add or subtract tax buttons for help in determining things like sales tax. The PC-100 is a Scientific Calculator. It has all of the fancy features that you expect from a calculator of its class. There are buttons for summations, the mean of a square and factorials. There are OR and XOR Boolean functions on this calculator. The PC-500 is a Programmer Calculator. This does things like logarithmic and exponential functions at a touch of a button. It does financial calculations along with scientific ones.

There are four clocks that are included in Gizmos Mega-Pak. They are the Wall Clock, Sports Clock, Night Stand Clock and the Desk Clock. Each clock has basic time telling features. The Night Stand Clock and Desk Clock have additional features that might come in handy. You can even synchronize your clocks by connecting with the U.S. Atomic Clock over the Internet.

You get a choice of calendars with Gizmos Mega-Pak. There is a Daily Calendar, along with Weekly, Monthly and Yearly calendars. You can add appointment or event information to the calendars and even print them. Each of the calendars with the exception of the Daily one will let you jump between them. Open up the weekly one and click on a specific day. This will bring up the Daily Calendar. And so on.

Some of the games that are in Gizmos Mega-Pak include the Picture Puzzler and several card games. The Picture Puzzler is more than just a jigsaw puzzle game. It has several challenging levels. For each puzzle that is completed, you get a piece of another puzzle revealed. After several puzzles are done, the picture on the other one is revealed.

The card games that you can play are Forty Thieves, Free Cell, Solitaire, Nerts, Pyramid and Spider. Each game is a specific solitaire type of card game. Only Nerts will allow for moiré than one player.

Gizmos Mega-Pak comes with some real cool screen savers for you to use. Electro 98 is one of the electrons from the Play Inc logo that wants to be free and bounces around on your computer screen. You can set the speed and angle of this escapee from the Electro 98 Control Panel. There is also the Video Cube that rotates around your screen. You can add images to each side of the cube. The Scene Savers are a 360-degree panoramic view of scenery that is displayed on your computer screen. The Color Organ pulse a psychedelic wave of color on your screen as it keeps the beat with music that is being played on the computer.

The Pro Linear CD Player is an enhanced music media player. It has track programming modes along with sound controls. Create a playlist so that only the songs you want to hear will play.

Picture Explorer is an image manager and cataloger. It will view images in a variety of formats. The program will keep track of where your images are and allow you to view thumbnails of each of them.

Performer 98 is a program that allows you to make a multimedia slide show. Add pictures, sound effects, music and very cool special effects to your slide show. Add pictures, sound effects, music and very cool special effects to your slide show. You can even package your slide show and send it out to a friend, even if they don't have Performer.

The two best things that I feel are in the Gizmos Mega-Pak are The Shredder and The Vault. The Shredder gets rid of unwanted files and permanently deletes them from your hard drive. They folks at Play came up with a way to do this so that even an exhaustive file recovery program couldn't even retrieve a shredded file. The Vault keeps your files secret by way of a special encryption method. Again, Play has made it so that nobody can get to your files without having the proper key. Not being a hacker, I don't know how safe either of these programs really is. But the wording in the manual seems to indicate that nobody should be able to recover a shredded file or access one once you have put it in the Vault.

You can find Gizmos Mega-Pak at your local software retailer. You can also purchase it directly from Play by calling their toll free number, 1-888-888-PLAY.

For additional information about Gizmos Mega-Pak or other Play Inc. products such as Snappy, visit their web site at www.play.com.

If you want some fun things for your computer and a few sharp utilities to make computing easier, then grab a copy of Gizmos Mega-Pak. It really does have some handy, dandy tools that Windows forgot.

System Requirements:

Windows 95. 98 or NT 4 w/ Service Pack 9
Pentium PC (100mhz for use w/ Performer)
16 MB RAM (32 MB for NT)
CD-ROM drive
150 MB free hard drive space
Video card w/ 800x600 resolution
2MB Video RAM (for Performer)

Copyright © 2000 Bruce E. Von Stiers