My summer vacation. Product/Link: Media Center Plus Synopsis: Digital media manager. Requirements: Pentium or comparable CPU, Windows 9x, NT 4.0, 2000, 32MB RAM, 25MB free hard disk space. Price: USD29.00-39.00. Rating: Easy to create slide shows. Comment: Jasc's Media Center Plus is primarily a management tool for photo, audio and video files. It lets you catalog your collections, rearrange them, add comments, keywords, all in hopes you'll never lose that one file you know you have. We, however, use it almost exclusively to create Web-based slide shows, though you can produce them just for enjoying on your computer. If your pictures are still in the camera, Media Center Plus may be able to download them, though it's probably easier with your camera's own software. It's not necessary to place your subject files into a special folder -- Media Center Plus lets you pick and choose from your hard drive. The program then enables you to create an album of thumbnails which you can drag and drop into any order your heart desires. One drawback to thumbnails is they often exhibit distortion that comes with uncorrected resizing: wiggly lines, blotchy colors. Rest assured, however, the full size versions will be fine. Files can be added or deleted from the album at any time without affecting the files themselves. You may want to print out your album for future reference. You can add "comments" which appear as captions in the finished thumbnail product, but not the slide show. For that you'll need to rename your files. If you want to audio-enhance the show you can tack on sounds of your choice, but unless they're from a CD, each sound file will play before the next image file, so no background music for a Web show. Those of you with a site can export your slide show in HTML for uploading. Viewers of your creation have the choice of looking at the thumbnails then clicking those of interest for full size images, or watching it as a slide show. Media Center Plus has many options and functions not mentioned here, and almost too much documentation. But if you can't keep track of all that digital media, and/or like creating slide shows, it's very convenient. Return to index of reviewed products.