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By Paul Lanyon (planyon@onepc.net) - February 2, 2001

Infobox

What? MemoWeb 3.1 Pro Product Page Who? GOTO Software Home Page How much? Free/$39.95 USD GOTO Software Online Store

First off I better explain to you what MemoWeb is. MemoWeb downloads and stores different parts of web sites for you. Let's say you find an interesting web site and you want to store it so you always have it and can easily get all of the information from it. This is what MemoWeb does. When you find a site that you want stored on your hard drive or onto a CD, you just click on Grab! and MemoWeb will download this page for you, asking you a couple of questions in between. You have the options to download just the images, just the html pages, just the e-mail addresses, etc. It stores the website to a directory of your choice on your computer. Now that you have the website on your hard drive, you can access it at any time. No need to be on the Internet! You get full access to the page right from your computer, that is, if you choose to download the whole page.

MemoWeb is made by GOTO Software. GOTO has been around for a while, since 1982, in fact, and has a couple of major divisions. MemoWeb is one of GOTO Software's major products.

Using MemoWeb
We're reviewing the 3.1 Pro version of MemoWeb today. There's also a free version of MemoWeb available that has a few ads splattered around your screen. It's really up to you if you wish to spend the extra $40 USD for the ads to disappear and for some free technical support, etc.

MemoWeb is very easy and quick to use, which is its strong point. The installation is very fast and easy, mostly automated, like the majority of programs now--it's easy enough for anyone. When you first open up MemoWeb you are greeted with a nice, easy to use interface. One of the first things to do is read the tutorial. MemoWeb is very simple to use once you've read this tutorial, which explains everything you need to know in 4 easy steps. This is a major bonus! It's also got a more in-depth help section that you can read if you're not satisfied with the quick tutorial.

Once you've set up MemoWeb and read the quick tutorial, you can get started on building your collection of websites. All you have to do is click on New... and you can download your first website. MemoWeb has a couple of different options of what you can download from the website of your choice. You can download the complete site, which gives you EVERYTHING on it, including the outputs from CGI scripts and all. You can get the images of the whole site, a certain page or even a directory. You can also get the audio or compressed files from the whole site. The last 2 are just the html pages, which means you don't get the images or anything, just the actual page with the content, and all the e-mail addresses on the site. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages, which I will discuss later.

Now that you've captured a website, you can do a fair amount with MemoWeb and your site. MemoWeb separates all your files into different sections, one for the html documents, one for the images, one for the files, one for the e-mail address and one last one for inactive links. Just by clicking on which one you want, you will get a list of all those types of files that you have downloaded. It's nice to have them all separated in lists so you can easily find what you're looking for. If you downloaded the entire site, you can now view it--no need to be connected to the Internet. All you have to do is click on Results at the top and you can view the wonderful page that you have downloaded. MemoWeb has a built-in browser so that you can view whichever page you want right from within MemoWeb. It does this through the browser of your choice, though. It's sort of weird, but if you try it, out you'll see what I mean.

MemoWeb also has a feature so you can automatically download pages that you want. You can set it up to download your favorite page at 1 AM, for example, so that you can view it nice and updated in the morning. This is a nice feature because then you always have the most recent version of the site on your hard drive.

Even though MemoWeb is really easy to use and set up, I don't really see a use for it, which is the biggest problem. You can just as easily view the website on the Internet, then you could avoid having to download it. While I was testing this, I downloaded the entire OnePC site on my cable modem; this took me around 16 minutes. I know this doesn't seem like a long time, but I could've just as easily looked at what I wanted to without having to download the site, and it would have taken me about the same amount of time. I think this was probably aimed at people who had a limited amount of Internet time. The problem is that it will take those people so long to download the entire site, because they will have a dial-up connection, that they could have used that time just to look at the site and then they wouldn't have to download it. Also, more and more people have broadband access to the Internet these days, so they don't have to worry about using up Internet time.

I would also rather not have all these websites on my hard drive. They don't seem to take up a lot of space, but if you have a fair amount on your computer, you can use up a fair amount. Even if you have a huge hard drive and you don't have to worry about space, I'd still prefer just to leave the website on the server's computer.

I can see some uses for it, though: if you're on a 56k modem, for example. You can just download the html files, which would only take about a minute; therefore, if you want to read a huge review or something on the net, you don't have to be connected. You can go back and read all the reviews without having to connect to the Internet to find them. Also, if you know a page is going to go down, you can download it and keep it forever.

As I said before, each set of items that you can download has their own pros and cons, but normally the cons out weigh the pros. First off, downloading the entire site. This is time consuming! On my cable modem it took me 16 minutes to download the entire OnePC website; imagine that on a 56k modem! But, you then have the entire page to look at whenever you want. I don't think it's really worth it though, you could probably look at what you want in the time it takes to download. Next is downloading all the images of the site/directory. It's nice if you find a page with a whole ton of images that you love. But normally, do you really want all those images? Most of them you'll never even look at. Downloading all the audio files on the site/page. This is GREAT if you're on an MP3 site with all kinds of great music! But, what if you only want one or two songs? Then you have all this unwanted music and wasted bandwidth. You can download the compressed files on the site, but sometimes this can be a lot of files! Finally, downloading the html pages only is the most useful of them all. When you do this, you can read whatever's on the site and you don't have to be connected. Also, most of the time, the html files are small, so it wouldn't take any time at all.

MemoWeb has an easy, fast interface and it's easy to set up and easy to use. But, it's not that useful. Why would you download an entire page when you can just look at it, without having to download it? With more and more people switching cable and DSL these days, they don't have to worry about using up Internet hours because you have unlimited time. It also wastes time and hard drive space. Most of the options of files to download aren't that great either. You don't want to have to download all the images on a page or on the entire site if you just want one or two of them.

The only time I could really see people using this is if they are on a 56k connection and just want to read the content on a site and not have to use up precious Internet time. This is where MemoWeb would come in handy. But other than that it's not very useful or even practical.

Overall I wouldn't use this software because it's just not practical. You don't need to download a site just to look at it.

Pros Easy to use and quick to install If you have a 56k or slower connection it would be useful for reading large amounts of content Cons Not practical, why download an entire page when you can just look at it on the net If you just want a couple images or files on a page it's no good because it downloads a lot of unwanted files. Takes up hard drive space if you download many pages (especially big ones).

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