If you're a big fan of Mozilla Firefox (and there are many of you around), you'll be pleased to note that beta 2 of the forthcoming 2.0 release has been made available for public download.

Amongst the new beta 2 features, you'll find an improved user interface which, at first glance, is rather similar to the old beta 1 interface. However, look deeper and you'll find that there is now a graphic included on each tabbed window, to close the tab. The icons have been improved, too. Many of the beta 1 features are still present within beta 2, including anti-phishing support to prevent you from accidentally giving out your username and password on sites that spoof as an eBay or your online bank.

If you like to live on the edge and want the very latest version of Firefox 2.0 (which is still planned for an October launch), head to the download page. However, we advise that you run 2.0 beta 2 alongside your existing Firefox 1.5, as beta 2 is still not ready for using on a daily basis - you'll find that your favourite theme might not work the beta, for example.

The Windows XP interface has been around for a few years now and, apart from enabling some minor visual changes (such as changing your desktop background, fonts and colour scheme), you can't change too much from within Windows. Whilst Vista promises a new improved user-interface, you don't need to wait for Vista to make major visual improvements to Windows XP.

StudioTwentyEight are pioneers of visual components to improve Windows, designing and supplying themes (visual styles) for StyleXP, new icons, wallpapers and interface skins. If you want an interface based around the original Longhorn, there's a style available. If you want a Mac OS X feel to your interface, there is a theme available.

If you're a big fan of Mac OS X, the recently released FlyaKiteOSX 3.5 will enable you to change every part of your Windows interface to reflect OS X. However, why anyone would want to do this is anyone's guess. Check out FlyaKite for yourself.

It must be close to Autumn. Around this time of the year we seem to see an influx of security releases from all the major security developers. McAfee Internet Security 2007 has been released in the States and is expected shortly in the UK, Symantec are beta-testing a version of Norton Internet Security 2007 and Panda have just released their AntiVirus 2007.

We all need a firewall to protect our system from intrusion when we connect to the Internet. Many of us choose to rely on a hardware firewall, built-in to our broadband or cable router. Others do not have the luxury of a hardware firewall and some feel 'safer' with the addition of both a hardware and software firewall installed.

Either way, two new free firewalls have recently been released. First up is Ashampoo's brand new Ashampoo Firewall 1.00 and the other is Jetico Personal Firewall 2.0.0.7. Both highly-recommended and from established developers. Check them out.

There's limited support for burning CDs within Windows XP. You can simply drag files to an Explorer window and then choose to burn those files to a CD. Dead-easy, but very limited. You can't produce your own customised audio CDs, you can't create your own DVD photo slideshow nor does it have any support for creating disc artwork.

This week we've got the full commercial version of Ashampoo's Burning Studio 2005 for you to download. This is a media compilation and burning suite that can be as basic or complicated as you require. At its most simplistic, you can use this to manage the burning of data CDs. If you want to go further, you can create a customised audio MP3 DVD that will store hundreds of your audio tracks.

The full program download offer will be available until the end of September, so make sure you take advantage and download Ashampoo Burning Suite 2005 immediately.

Registering a domain these days is super-cheap. You can register a .com or .co.uk domain through a UK or US reseller and, if you do not need a website, simply point your domain to your existing email address so you can catch-all incoming email. However, you can do more with your domain and move it across to the beta version of Google's Apps for your Domain service.

Google's service enables your company, or a group of users, to use the Gmail service for their email. Being an online service, your users can access their email anyw here in the world. An email sent to mike@yourdomain.co.uk would be accessed through Mike's Gmail account. When Mike replies to his email, the email sent back via your domain, so it appears as From: mike@yourdomain.co.uk. All very professional.

Other services include the Google Calendar so you can share and access group calendars and Google Talk, so your users can share and collaborate through messaging or through voice conversations over the web. Add the Google Spreadsheet service and as your users have a Google account, they'll be able to upload and share an Excel spreadsheet, online.

Find out more information about Google Apps for your Domain.

Surprisingly there are some essential applications missing from Windows. Mac OS X ships with a font manager called Font Book, which enables you to to quickly view and manage your font collection. Want to add a new font to the operating system? You can just import or drag it in to Font Book. You can easily remove fonts, too.

Within Windows, you're given a Fonts folder. Nothing more. You can view your fonts, but you can't analyse the collection as a whole, search for problematic fonts, duplicates, nor can you understand why a certain font appears within one Windows application, but not in another (most likely as it is an Adobe Type 1 font).

Font Expert 2006 is a recently released, well designed font manager for Windows, supporting all font formats. Download yourself and offer us your feedback.

If you purchase a domain name, you can select to include web space to host your domain. You don't need to use this space as a website, you could use it as a closed (requires username/password) FTP server to store your important files. There's also no reason why you couldn't use the space to store large work files so you can download at home or when you're on the move.

Cobian Backup 8 was recently released and it's an excellent free backup tool that will enable you to select files for backup, schedule a time for backing up the data and a location. This location could be your web space - simply enter the domain name (ie mydomain.co.uk), your username and password, select a folder where you want to store the files and Cobian Backup will do the rest.

If you ever find you lose your files on your system, you can always restore from your server as Cobian Backup will synchronise in both directions.

Rated highly by VNU, give it a try and let us know what you think.

Go on, admit it. Many of us don't know what to do when we're forced to take long holidays from work. There's only so much shopping, wandering around town and tidying up we can put up with. Work to many is like a fixed routine and, take someone out of the routine, and they're like a fish out of water.

Luckily you've now got an excuse to use your computer at home. Goggles is an interesting 'flight sim' (a term used loosely) that takes the Google Maps and turns them in to an interactive experience. You can fly over London, New York and many other sights and swoop down for a closer look. If you're prepared to do some groundwork, you can even use your local Google Map and link this to Goggles, so you fly over your hometown.

Due to the interest shown in Goggles the site can take a while to load. Even so, give the flight sim a go.

Just about everyone that uses broadband was given a free homepage when they signed up to the service. This homepage was designed for you to setup your own website but, quite frankly, how many people actually get around to designing and maintaining a website? With up to 150MB of free space, this homepage could be used for something much more productive, such as backup and storage for important files and information.

Before the use of a content management system to manage web content, nearly everyone used an FTP client to manage the files on a remote server. An FTP client contained two windows - one containing the files on your computer, the other containing the contents of the remote server. You dragged and dropped files between your computer and server to update the contents. You can use an FTP client to backup and store files from your computer and then access those files from any remote location.

Within the last month, two of the most popular FTP clients have had a major refresh. CuteFTP 8.0 and WS_FTP 2007 have been launched. You can decide which FTP client you'll use to maintain your homepage/server. However, the choice is not limited to commercial FTP clients. There a wide range of powerful freeware alternatives such as SmartFTP, FileZilla and CoreFTP. Another option is our free full commercial download, Directory Opus 6, which has extensive FTP support. Go on, check them out.

Peer-to-peer technology has been used for all the wrong reasons and received a lot of bad press. It's technology that enables you to both download and share files, online, between a number of users (peers). It generally means files are nearly always available to download, as there's always someone connected to the Internet with the file you're after. However, this means that the technology has been used to share pirated music, files, pornographic material and mo vies.

This is all about to change. It's rumoured that, due to bandwidth restrictions and the size of downloading (or streaming) movies across the Internet, peer-to-peer technology may be used to stream movies to your computer in the future. Peer-to-peer technology is also surfacing in other areas and one of them is through AllPeers, a Firefox extension that can be used to share files with authorised friends and family. As it is based on around a private file-sharing network, you can share your personal photos and movies in the knowledge that they won't appear outside your network.

AllPeers has had mixed reviews so far and shouldn't be used with the beta of Firefox 2.0, but check it out and make your own decision.

There are a wide range of freeware PDF tools available on the market. Indeed, if you're a Mac OS X user, you can produce PDF documents from within the operating system. Instead of printing your page, you can output the document as a PDF.

A PDF is a truly cross-platform document and a file created on a Windows machine can be viewed on a Linux operating system and vice-versa. It's an ideal way to send someone a draft of a newsletter or, if you want to print commercially, a printer will use your PDF document as a master. Commercial printing is a key area where you'd need an app such as eXpert PDF 3 rather than a freeware PDF tool, as it will embed your fonts, images and output your document in a print-quality format. You can add watermarks to your PDF, secure the PDF with encryption and enable other users to add comments, before you go to press.

Luckily we're giving away the full version of eXpert PDF 3, worth £40, and you can download it immediately. Hurry though as this download will not be available after 19th of September 2006!

From 1999 to 2002 there seemed to be regular updates for Internet Explorer. So much so that few rivals bothered competing. Only Netscape made a similar number of releases, but even they gave up after a while. However, Microsoft got rather complacent with the Internet Explorer 6 release and, apart from a few minor security fixes, we've seen no update for a few years now.

Within Windows Vista, this is all about to change and Microsoft have realised that they need to drastically update Internet Explorer to offer a modern browsing experience. Luckily for existing Windows XP users, Internet Explorer 7 will be released as a standalone application....as long as you use XP with Service Pack 2.

New features include an overhaul of the webcore (HTML engine), better support for CSS, tabbed browsing, anti-phishing feature, an instant search feature and a new interface.

You can download Internet Explorer 7 Release Candidate 1 but, be warned, installation takes a while to complete.

There's just so much content on the Internet, how do you filter through the wheat from the chaff to find the best stuff? You could start by concentrating on your strong subject areas. If you're in to biking, then you could simply search for the biking websites, then follow the 'recommended links' which you'll find on most information portals. You'll soon build a database of important biking websites.

Searching for for a website isn't always the most productive way of finding the best sites around at the moment. Why not let someone do the hard work for you?

The Technical Lists are a collection of the 'best of' in particular areas. For instance, 450 of the best freeware utilities or the best Firefox extensions. How about the best online file transfer services? Each list is designed so you can quickly find the application or site you require. If you want an application to notify you when you have new email in your Gmail account, the best solution is provided.

For more information, head to the Technical Lists website.

Most of the web and magazine talk is based around Mozilla Firefox as the number one alternative to the ageing Internet Explorer. However, we seem to easily overlook the alternatives. For instance, there are a number of Internet Explorer based web browsers such as Maxthon and Avant that add additional functionality to the IE engine. Both worthy alternatives and worth considering, if you still use IE.

There is another alternative: Opera. This isn't a new web browser, it's based on established technology, is extremely fast in operation, uses its own HTML engine and the latest version ships with support for sharing torrent files. It's also highly customisable and available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux platforms. You'll receive the same browsing experience across all three platforms.

Until recently, Opera was shareware. It's now completely free and Opera quietly released 9.01, earlier this month. Click here to download.

Following on from our previous post, there's also a portable version of Opera 9.01, which will enable you to install on your USB stick. Check it out.

These have been floating around on the Internet for a few days now, but they're a must-see for Office fans. Yes, Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant get involved with some professional training for Microsoft UK employees. David Brent is back and this time he's offering both his professional advice and, at the same time, using the opportunity to pitch for the role of Microsoft UK's MD.

Well acted, written and performed, if you're missing the original UK edition of the Office, you'll find these two 20-minute training videos are very similar to the original concept. Hosted by Google, view these whilst you can as they were leaked unintentionally, so may not be around for long.

Part 1 - The Office Values

Part 2 – The Office Values ‘Realising Potential’

You can download the Google Video Player if you want to view the videos on your desktop.

A recent conversation with a friend got me thinking. Their dilemma is that they work for a large organisation that provides them with a laptop that is "strictly for business use only", yet this person uses their laptop for all email and other correspondence. The rule is that they can't install their own software, even an alternative web browser.

The ingenious guys at Portable Apps have come up with a solution to this problem. Create portable applications that can be installed on media such as a portable USB stick. Mozilla Firefox is available as a portable application, so is the multi-network chat client Miranda. You can even download a portable video player. Install these on your USB stick and you wouldn't need to install apps on your laptop.

For further info, check the Portable Apps website.

Some people don't seem to have enough security software, opening themselves up to potential attack when they surf the Internet. Actually, that's supposed to sound ironic as the opposite appears to have happened - due to all the extended hype regarding Trojan, spyware and virus attack, in order to prevent their computer from being attacked, some users have taken the approach that the more security software installed, the more likely the system will remain intact. However, some security software can poorly interact, leading to more problems than those solved.

Norton Internet Security 2007 is an all-in-one security suite and the latest version has gone in to public beta-testing. If you like to live on the edge and want to see the brand new interface designed for the new release, why not download and view for yourself?

It's only a 30-day beta trial, but that means that the final release is due any day now.

Recently we started giving away full free commercial software through the Downloads section on vnunet.com. Have you noticed? These full applications are available to download within a limited period of time and the first, Directory Opus 6, is due to be taken offline on the 3rd of September 2006. Hurry as this full download won't be repeated in the future, hence the reminder.

Directory Opus is a superb Windows Explorer replacement tool. Makes the standard Windows Explorer look rather simple after using Opus for a few months. Indeed, if I need to work on a computer without Opus, my work flow is badly affected. Something simple, such as being able to double-click on your desktop to open a new lister window.

Go on, give it a go and you won't be disappointed. Head over the the Directory Opus 6 download.

A few years back, we'd have all got rather excited by the prospect of a free online Word-compatible word processor. These days there are numerous free (Sun's StarOffice 7 was given away recently on the PCW coverdisc or as a free download through Computeractive) office suites and most of them will both read and write to Microsoft Office documents.

Regardless, Google has opened up its new Writely service which will enable anyone to write, edit and share their documents, online. Could be useful for those who using a temporary computer that, for some reason, doesn't have a word processor installed on the system. For more information, check the Google Writely website.

Mashups are applications that combine content from more than one source to create cool and original web services.

Mapping service Google Earth is totally open for third party developers to alter and enhance with new apps. As a result, there has been a massive number of mashups combining Earth with programs like Flash and Java.

I’ve been trawling the Web for some of the best Google Earth mashups. Tomorrow I’ll feature some other mashups that have caught my eye.

http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html
Goggles combines with Google Earth to allow you to fly around your chosen city – including London. It's an alternative way to explore Google Earth and you can even shoot at things if you want.

http://www.mindpicnic.com/maps-quiz/
This mashup is a quiz designed to test your geographical knowledge. A section of a map is shown and you have to decide where on the world it is. See if you can best my high score of 104 miles.

http://services.google.com/earth/green/gg_interior_sf.html?3 
Summer of Green mashes video with Google Earth to create an alternative online tour guide. Clicking on different locations provides you with a short video describing places of interest. Unfortunately it currently only covers 5 US cities.

http://www.soundseeker.org/ 
Sound seeker is a bizarre project mashing up QuickTime with Google Earth to share the sounds of New York with the world. The sound recordings include everything from bustling streets to peaceful parks and show the contrasting factors that make up NYC.

http://www.xplanet.net/ 
Another Flash-based mashup used to publicise the latest X-men film. Design your own super-hero or super-villain and indicate their location on the Google Earth map. There are currently thousands of "mutants" worldwide.

Console Classix is a downloadable client which allows you to access an online emulator. The client features a staggering collection of retro titles including almost all of the games on the past Nintendo and Sega platforms.

Upon downloading the client, you get every single NES game they have to offer absolutely free. For other platforms, there’s a $5 per month subscription fee.

Considering the sheer number of titles you will get for this price, the fee seems very reasonable, but for those of you who can't pay Console Classix offers another, more innovative way to pay. Send them enough old cartridges and they'll give you free access to their system.

So, is it legal to emulate published games? It's a good question - after all Napster had to pay a $26m settlement to copyright owners for publishing unauthorized music. Console Classix reckons that is – you can find out more here if you’re not sure.