QA Engineers
Quality Assurance Engineers not using virtualization should find a new job. Period.

Preservationists
Virtualization allows you to create easy backups of your entire virtual instance because your entire virtual machine is just a file. How much easier does preserving your precious data get than that? Go one step further and use some cloud computing to place your backup on your cloud server.

Environmentalists
With multiple machines comes lots of material that in turn came from nature. Not to mention all the electricity that goes into powering those things and, of course, if you are a real pro you’ll be using water cooling systems and especially in California water is a precious resource. Virtualization is one of the greenest things you can do by putting all of those machines in one place.

Educators
Kids these days are very tech savvy, I recall what we were doing to our school systems when I was younger and it wasn’t pretty. But you don’t have to worry about students saving work to a machine, changing settings, etc, when reverting everything back is as simple as installing a new instance of the virtual machine.

IT Guys
“I didn’t do anything” is that they all say when they completely wreck their work computer, but you can I well know that it’s almost ALWAYS operator error. So when they operator error their computer into oblivion just replace it with the virtual instance you have that you know works perfectly with everything they “should” have installed on their work computer.

Neopet.com is a virtual pet website that was launched about ten years ago and eventually purchased by Viacom. Neopet.com essentially allows a user to create and play games with an online “virtual pet.” The pets travel through their online world, Neopia, and encounter various challenges along the way, including fighting with other Neopets. The site is filled with games such as puzzles and general chance contests. Primarily a children’s site, it also includes educational word games. The site is packed with features that will brighten any child’s day.

Features

Neopet.com is flooded with various components, from games to pet creation to shopping to a section featuring Neopet videos. To create a Neopet, a user must first complete a simple registration process. Creating a new pet is quite easy and the user is given a multitude of options to choose from. Children will certainly enjoy this feature.

One excellent feature of the site is the Neopedia, a Neopet Wikipedia of sorts. It contains a vast collection of articles, poems, short stories about Neopia and the virtual animals that inhabit it. The section can be found under the explore tab on the homepage.

Neopia Central, located under the “shops” tab on the homepage, is a one-stop shopping center for all things Neopia. There, users can purchase various items for their Neopet.

Tips and Tricks

Users will want to check out the “explore” tab located at the top of the homepage. A list of definitions is there that introduces the beginner with the world of Neopia and the various playing options.

Parents looking for the educational components of the site can check out the games section at the top of the homepage. From there, look for the educational section and click on “Spell or Starve,” a simple word game that incorporates the Neopet characters and spelling.

Parents will also want to check out the site’s safety tips at the bottom of the homepage which discourage users from giving away personal information to other users.

The new user’s best bet is to take advantage of the navigation bar at the top of the homepage. Everything you will want to do can be found there.

Newbie Friendly Rating

The site is rather congested and users will quickly notice the array of colors and general disorganization of the homepage. Finding exactly what you’re looking for can prove to be a bit confusing at first. The site is also filled with imbedded advertising, which distracts from the primary features of the site. Overall, we give Neopet.com a Newbie Friendly Rating of 5.

Addthis.com is one of those very many social networking or sites built around social networking or sharing site.  This particular site deals with social bookmarkings and sharing them.  Addthis.com is nothing but a too or a button which you can use to subscribe to a particular blog or blog post or anything or any sites for that matter.

This site or tool was born out of the need for a single tool or button to access all or the famous social bookmarking or sharing sites.  This came as a boon for the blog owners and site owners so that it saved them a lot of space on their page as this button occupies very little space and can hold as many social bookmarking sites for everyone’s needs.  This also made the life easier for the readers who find it hard to bookmark a particular blog or site of their interest to their favorite social bookmarking or social news sharing sites from a single point console and Addthis.com made it possible.

Within a short span of one year Addthis has become the number one social bookmarking and sharing button or site.

Features:

One important feature with Addthis is that you get to choose any social bookmarking site that you like and they have them in their button, so that you can use any one of them and proceed.  It is easy to use and bookmark and share.  It helps in promoting ones blog or website from their perspective.  From the webmaster’s perspective this helps in increasing ranking or popularity of their blogs or sites.  Apart from helping in bookmarking and sharing, Addthis.com has the option of giving the detailed statistics for both the webmasters and the end users.  It is very easy to install and use.

The best part of Addthis.com is that using this you can easily add any page found on the net to your favorite site sharing or bookmarking sites like Digg, del.icio.us, MySpace, Facebook, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo Buzz, etc.

Tips & Tricks:

For the webmasters you can easily install them by customizing it according to your needs and add them to your blog or website with just a push of a button.  For others you can just look for this button and choose the bookmarking site that you use and proceed.  If you want to have an extensive collection of sites and blogs to subscribe or bookmark to use the most popular ones as you can easily bookmark them through Addthis in a single click, else you will have to proceed to a new page and search for the bookmarking site and then proceed, this will save some extra time for you.  Sometimes you will also not find the bookmarking site that you use, here and hence making it tougher for you to use Addthis.

Newbie Friendly Rating:

Since Addthis has made life easier for both the webmasters and the readers together by removing a lot of clutter and saving time and space, Addthis.com can be offered a rating of 9 out of 10.

Popularscreensavers.com offers users a toolbar download that gains them access to what they call “a world of fun.” The homepage has a large blue box on the left side prompting users to click to begin the installation. Once installed, the user has an organized set of hundreds of unique screensavers for their PC.

Features

The product download takes about two minutes to complete and the site “congratulates” you upon successful completion. A yellow button appears asking users to click to finish the installation process. Users are then required to submit a working email address. A series of somewhat annoying promotional offers appear and the user can either accept the offers (and junk email) or click a button to bypass the solicitations.

The toolbar then automatically appears on your screen. It features five components: a “mywebsearch,” smiley central, cursor mania, myfuncards and the screensavers.

The search is a standard search engine, with a user-friendly typing box and quick results.

Smiley central offers thousands of smileys in a pop-up box that is organized by categories on the left side. My Fun Cards is a general card personalizing application. Cursor mania is similar to the smiley feature in that it gives you a multitude of alternative cursors to use in lieu of the standard arrow cursor on most PCs.

The toolbar simply allows quick access to the main web page. Using the main page provides a more in-depth using experience and is quite friendly to navigate.

Tips & Tricks

The screensavers site is user-friendly. The most useful tip for the beginning use is to utilize the gray topic tabs at the top of the homepage. For example, one of the categories is “holidays,” which takes the user to a list of all the popular holidays. A click on Christmas shows the user more than a dozen attractive Christmas scenes, including some very nice wintry tree pictures. The photos are high-quality and of sharp resolution. A button at the top of the screen prompts the user to download the entire collection of Christmas screensavers. The site also features a FAQ section and a user guide at the very bottom of the home page. A simple click takes the user to 45 questions and answers provided by the webmasters.

Newbie Friendly Rating

Popularscreensavers.com is an exceedingly newbie-friendly site. The site is easy to read and well-organized. Any problems that arise are easily answered by the FAQ section at the bottom of the page. It’s hard to believe any problems would crop up because the site is just that easy.

Overall, we’d give Popularscreensavers.com a Newbie Friendly Rating of 9.