It’s a tech subject that allows us to rant on one of our favorite pet peeves:  that something as vital as health care is still in the dark ages. You can rent a movie 24 hours a day, get email notifications from any company, and get lower prices on better products every time you visit an electronics store. But when it comes to medicine, prices continually rise and problems abound. There are at least three reasons:

• The over-used insurance system (If car insurance were like health insurance, we’d use it for tune-ups.) This makes people less price-sensitive, because after all, “insurance is paying for it.”*
• Frivolous lawsuits.
• Lack of competition among doctors. Physicians’ assistants and nurses, for example, can’t open their own practice.

*In the U.S. in the 1940s, there were wage and price controls. Employers who wanted to raise wages were stuck. So they started offering insurance benefits instead of wage increases. A few years later, the I.R.S. started taxing them for this and there were howls of protests. So a law was passed that gave employers a tax break for offering benefits. Gradually Americans started using insurance for everything and became less price-sensitive.

According to the survey:

-     72% of US employees receive their pay via Direct Deposit (DD)

-     Only 4 in 10 small businesses use DD for their paycheck.

-     86 percent of large companies use DD.

-     The consumer services, food/leisure, and construction sectors lag the most in offering DD.

-     Small businesses waste an estimated 3 to 5 days annually writing checks.

-     Employees waste 9 to 24 hours each year cashing their checks. (They could be using this time to watch soccer.)

You can read Kindle books on your Android phone now. There are 620,000 book titles, mostly for $10, though classics tend to be free. You don’t need to own a Kindle to do this.

That brings the list of devices that Kindle books can be read on to nine:  Kindle, Kindle DX, BlackBerry, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac, PC, and  Android-powered phones. On all of those devices, you can read sample chapters before you buy, and go right to where you left off, no matter which device you turn to. The screen brightness can be adjusted, as well as the background color, font color and font size.

Get it at amazon.com/kindleforandroid and can download the free app from Android Market.

Nero’s “Burning ROM” (a cute word play on the Emperor Nero’s burning of Rome) lets you copy across discs. If you start out burning data to a DVD and run out of room on the disc, you can continue with other discs. The program lets you switch to CDs, and switch again if you run out of those. (Nero says they have the only program that allows a mixture of different media for one disc burning job.)

If the content you are burning to disc doesn’t fill it up, the program will then duplicate the content across every remaining empty track. This means that if the disc gets scratched and unreadable in one place, the laser reader can usually pick up the content from a track further on.  An “auto-run” feature is included, so when you give the disc to someone, it starts right up.

Burning ROM allows you to encrypt the files you burn to disc and add what’s called a “digital signature.” If someone changes the content and burns it to a new disc, the lack of that signature will prove that it did not come from the original author. This can be important in some business situations.

You’ll probably need to read the help files to do half of the stuff in this program, such as editing your music, or choosing the right kind of format for your video. We just left the default settings in place and were OK.

Burning ROM is $50 from nero.com. You can try it out if you download the free trial version of the $80 three-product “Multimedia 10” suite at Nero.com; this set includes Burning ROM.

If you haven’t bought a Kindle for $259 or an iPad for $500, the $149 Aluratek Pro Reader looks like a good option. It comes with 100 free books: These include The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Frankenstein, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, etc. You can get over one million more free titles from ebook sites like books.google.com and gutenberg.org.

The Aluratek has a slot for an SD memory card – the same kind used with digital cameras. (The iPad and Kindle do not have an SD card slot.) That means you can have separate libraries to plug in and out as you choose. It can handle cards with a capacity of up to 32 gigabytes (a little over two gigabytes would hold the entire Encyclopedia Britannica). It can even play music while you read. Find it at Aluratek.com.

Users of Bento 3, the database for Mac users, can download more than 400 free database templates. These include templates for customer appointments, monthly bills, sales opportunities, medication records, lecture materials, job searches, scuba logs and even “beer hunting.”

Downloaded templates also work with the iPhone and iPod Touch versions of Bento.

There are extra features for Windows 7 users.  They can  touch the screen to choose books, or zoom in and out of text with a pinch of the fingers. In a later version of the Kindle app, Windows 7 users will be able to turn pages with a finger swipe.

Even with Windows XP or Vista, you can choose from 10 font sizes, view your notes, add bookmarks, etc. Kindle books are typically $10, though there are thousands available for free as well. To get the new Kindle app, which comes out next month, you can sign up here: amazon.com/KindleforPC

The app will also be available for Mac users at an unspecified time in the future, Amazon officials said.

You can look at a PDF document but you can’t touch – meaning you can read it but you can’t change anything, at least not without some additional software. Adobe invented the PDF, so understandably the granddaddy of PDF editors is Adobe Acrobat. But at $300, it does a whole lot more than most people need or want. In the past, we have used and recommended PDF Converter from Nuance (formerly called Scansoft), which sells for around $50. But recently we found something cheaper. It’s “PDFZilla,” the Godzilla of PDF converters. We got it for $30 from pdfzilla.com.

 Comparing PDFZilla to the Nuance product, we found they did equally well on our test documents. We liked the fact that PDFZilla could convert a document to Word or HTML or even Adobe Flash (for animations). More importantly, you can try it out for free. You can only try out the Nuance product for free if you sign up for Netflix or one of a few dozen other offers. However, Nuance does some conversions that PDFZilla doesn’t: It can convert PDFs to Excel or PowerPoint or WordPerfect, for example.

 PDFZilla works with Microsoft Word as well as the OpenOffice word processor, which anyone can get for free from OpenOffice.org. This is good, because Joy’s copy of MS Word hasn’t worked since early in the Bush administration and we were getting desperate.

This is what’s called a digital switch box, and that’s what the “DGS” letters stand for. It’s the size of a paperback book. On the back of the box there are eight Ethernet ports. You plug an Ethernet cable from your router into one of them, and your computers and other devices into the others.

That’s pretty much it because this D-Link switch is “self-managed”: It automatically recognizes everything connected to it, and there are no configuration routines to figure out. Everything connected is now linked. The package comes with a copy of Network Magic, which allows all users to share files and peripherals.

Aside from computers, the most common devices hooked into a network are printers and scanners. But no matter what is plugged into the digital switch box, they are all connected, with one proviso: The computers and peripherals must be network-enabled. This means they must have chips that allow them to be connected to a network, but this has been common for the past few years, and most computer equipment is network-enabled.

We want to point out that this creates a wired network, not wireless. We much prefer wired networks because they are secure from eavesdroppers, and they are less subject to interference. The DGS-2208 digital switch box operates at gigabit speeds. This is extremely fast, but please note that the data transfer rate you get is dependent on the weakest link in the chain, meaning if you have a slow router or slow service provider, your transfer rate is limited by that unit. The DGS-2208 sells for around $50 from discount retailers. It has been getting four- and five-star ratings from users. More info is available at dlink.com.

You can get some of these programs for free from Web sites like Download.com and TuCows.com, but the advantage of paying for the PC Mag list is that the programs have supposedly been vetted. That means they’ve been tried out by the magazine’s staff, they work and are bug- and spyware-free. Bob has tried several over time and found that some of them work well and some don’t, and some of them are kind of pointless. Still, $20 isn’t much to pay.