| Wired households and small-business owners will love this WinProxy 3.0 package. The sleek, easily installed software will let you plug several PCs into the same (presumably, although not necessarily, high-speed) Internet connection. By far, the hardest part of using WinProxy 3.0 is setting up the LAN, which you have to take care of separately and beforehand; after that's behind you, load up the surprisingly small program (about 25 MB), configure it, and start browsing. As a special blessing to administrators, Ositis Software has made WinProxy 3.0 nearly transparent to most users. The user or administrator will occasionally have to reconfigure software, but the clear, abundant documentation makes that task fairly simple. WinProxy 3.0 provides a six-month subscription to Trend Micro's antivirus updates and Smart Computing's filtering definitions, so that you don't have to worry about sneaky attachments or unauthorized browsing. In fact, in addition to blacklisting, admins can create "whitelists" that restrict browsing to a prescribed set of sites, useful for schools or homes with children. With the power of a proxy server to reduce bandwidth use and the ease of use of a NAT server, WinProxy is unbeatable for most small networks. --Rob Lightner --This review refers to the 5-user version. |
