Full commercial app: OrgPlus 6 SBE, worth £15
Many organisations aren't always managed very efficiently. Managers are installed to manage their departments and become your 'boss' when you have an issue with that department. However, few organisations bother with any kind of organisation chart so that an employee can see for themselves who reports to who and why. Indeed, many organisations themselves aren't always aware of the management structure within their organisation.
OrgPlus 6 SBE, a full commercial download worth £15, is an organisation charting tool for the small-business user. It enables you to create an organisational chart for your department or your company. It's easy to do, too, as you're supplied with a number of visual templates to get you started. Once you've finished your chart, you can output it to your website, print or incorporate within your literature. Download OrgPlus 6 SBE.
In the same way that if you install and uninstall software from your computer, your hard drive becomes fragmented, if you start and close applications, your memory becomes fragmented. When you use and then close an application, the files aren't always completely removed from your memory, resulting in a reduced capacity. Not ideal when you only have less than 1GB of RAM installed in your PC.
Creating your own internal home network is relatively easy, if your computers are all sharing the same router. Sharing your files between these computers is as straightforward as choosing files you want to share and then assigning a password so only authorised users can access the files. Sharing the same files across the Internet is a little more problematic.
With probably the last Download Junkie post before the Christmas break, I thought it might be wise to have a roundup of the full commercial software still available to download from vnunet.com. With many off us of work until the 2nd of January, it's an ideal time to download these apps and give us your feedback on what you like and dislike. There will be another full commercial application available to download around New Year and through 2007.
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Although most advanced users are clued up enough to work out whether a website is a rogue site or legitimate (mainly due to phishing email scams using rather poor English to try and catch us out!), there are so many security applications on the marketplace, many novice users wonder if it's actually safe to download or not.
You'd expect software development to be rather quiet at this time of the year. Came in to the office this morning to find a press announcement for the first public beta of VMWare Fusion for Mac. This enables you to run Windows (and other operating systems) in a virtual environment on your Intel-based Apple Mac. It's also free, whilst in beta. You'll need an operating system, and you'll need to buy a copy of Windows XP SP 2, but an OEM version can be bought for around £50 these days.
Believe me, if you're an Intel Mac user, this is exciting. Recently I purchased a 20¨ Core 2 Duo Intel iMac from the Apple refurbished store (these go through a rigorous testing procedure) and Bootcamp makes the machine an ideal Windows XP machine. I still enjoy Mac OS X, so the new version of Parallels should enable me to use my Bootcamp installation through Mac OS X, from time to time.
Many families share one computer and, although they have their own user account, you only need to move away from your computer to answer the phone or have something to eat and your account is open to anyone who uses the machine. When you browse the Internet and enter personal information online, this information is stored on your computer. Even if you drag the items to trash (or simply delete them), they're easily recoverable.
When you write files to your hard drive, these files should be stacked on your drive incrementally after the next file. However, this doesn't always happen and files are stored all over your drive, meaning that it has to work even harder when you start an application at a later date. This is called fragmentation and a fragmented hard drive takes longer to start, longer to load applications and seems slower. Your whole PC seems more sluggish, as a result.
Windows XP is far more customisable than most people realise. For instance, OEM PC manufacturers customise their Windows XP installer CDs and refer to them as a 'restore CD' so, if you ever need to re-install Windows XP, the process is as automated as quick as possible. How do they do this? They customise the original Windows XP install CD - they add their own logo, serial code, localisation, drivers required for the system and more.
There are a few small tools that should be kept on your system and wheeled out on the odd occasion that you need to use them. A decent screen-grabbing tool is a good example. Once these tools were all commercial or shareware and you had to pay decent money to take a grab of your workspace. Now tools such as the fantastic 5-star rated 
Microsoft Outlook is the default email client for many corporate users. With good reason too. It's well structured, highly-configurable, enables you to manage your diary and meeting schedule and links to an Exchange server so you can share information between users. However, it's also very slow. Due to the sheer amount of spam we receive, Outlook can take a while to start, downloading email can take up to half an hour and it is very processor intensive. Searching can be slow, too. Much of this will change with Office 2007, but that's still forthcoming for the average end-user.
When Firefox 2 was released in October it was a much-anticipated web browser. However, there aren't too many changes or improvements over 1.5x. One of the key advantages is the inline spell checking feature which makes writing these blog entries an easy process - simply check your spelling as you type.
New PCs ship with large hard drives. Unless you work with large video files, how are you ever going to fill that 500GB hard drive? One option would be to use a virtual CD emulator such as 
Back in 1999 most web developers didn't use templates or a WYSIWYG editor to produce their web pages. It was all done by hand, by coding up the pages within an application such as the fantastic Homesite (which was taken over by Macromedia and elements included within Dreamweaver). However, coding your own pages is the best way to learn how to understand web code.
Whilst most of the online talk is about Firefox versus Internet Explorer, many of us completely overlook the superb Opera. This is a web browser that's produced by a commercial organisation, but is available free of charge. Highly-customisable and rather fast, it has a loyal following. 
Since the announcement of the move to the Intel platform, and the launch of Intel-based Macs at the start of 2006, there are a few applications that require the move to the Intel platform. One of these applications is Adobe Photoshop, a processor-intensive tool. The wait is over, for both Intel Mac and Windows users as Adobe have released a preview/beta of 
There are some key apps that everyone has installed on their computer. Security software is a cert, so is a web browser and an email client. Another is a commercial office suite. Most of us use Microsoft Office, as we believe that we need the compatibility. Some of us use the free 
It's always wise to install the latest security software on your computer. This week we've seen a few new security updates, including the anti-spyware apps 
One fairly recent Mac OS X innovation is the ability to find files with immediate results. Called 'Spotlight', the tool continuously builds a database of your drive contents so when you want to search for a file, enter the file name and the results and location will be displayed without delay. Windows XP has a similar search tool, but it isn't as glossy or advanced as Spotlight.
The last few days have seen a number of key software releases and updates. If you like to chat over the Internet, check out the latest version of 
Microsoft Windows Live is a collection of tools that combine web storage with software you can run from your PC. For instance, the next version of Outlook Express is built on Windows Live technology, so is the Hotmail replacement (live.com) and Windows Messenger. However, Microsoft has gone further and now enables you to point your own domain to live.com rather than use a live.com or hotmail.com domain name. The point? You can use the live.com services, with your professional domain. It's all free, too.
After a relatively short testing period, the official version of 
It's the time of the year where we get ourselves ready for the festive season by creating Xmas wallpaper, screensavers and by downloading games with a Christmas theme. Although it's mild outside and doesn't feel like Christmas is just over a week away, there are many new Christmas-themed downloads made available this year.
Some of the old computer games are the best, certainly in terms of gameplay. Due to the lack of any decent graphics card, developers concentrated on gameplay, rather than the look and feel of their computer games. Therefore the games were fantastic to play and rather simplistic. However, simplistic can be better if you want a distraction from your work.
When we want to delete important files, most of us simply drag our files to the Trashcan and then empty our trash. Finding or recovering these files is easy, as they aren't really deleted from your system. If you want to trash your hard drive, at a later date, your drive will be a hive of important personal information that you think you've deleted, but an expert can easily retrieve. You need a tool that will permanently erase the files by overwriting them with other data.
Modern PCs rarely go wrong and if they do go wrong, it's generally software related. However, we don't always think about system recovery or pro-actively analysing our system for problems, until the problem occurs. We then struggle to create a system restore disc if our system doesn't boot at all.
Digital photography enables to capture a particular moment, but many of us don't really do much more than simply print our photos on standard printer paper. You could turn them in to desktop wallpaper, but that might be overkill. Another option is to display photos, randomly on your desktop, so you can be inspired by your photos.
How many of us use Microsoft Office or another commercial office application, yet only write simple documents or produce basic calculations, through the spreadsheet? Do you use a commercial office application purely on the basis that you worry about compatibility issues? Generally there are fewer issues that you'd expect, primarily on the basis that most of us only use the basic features within our office apps.
Christmas is a time where we should offer care and forgiveness. Don't forget the presents, too! Avanquest UK have teamed up with us, vnunet.com, to offer readers various free downloads, promotions and money-off vouchers as part of their seasonal 
We've been promised that Mozilla Firefox 3.0 will be more of a jump from the current Firefox 2.0 than the previous v1.5 release. For instance, Firefox 2.0 contained new features based around the current web engine. Sure, features like inline form spell-checking are useful, but they don't add much to the overall web experience.
Your standard printer driver only has a number of the usual functions. Print landscape, portrait, use a higher DPI setting for better quality paper and so on. If you want to do more with your printer, you'll need to find an application that has it's own print management system. For instance, if you want to create your own photo album, you'll need an application that supports this feature.
Adobe Acrobat is a fantastic workhorse for creating PDF documents for both web and commercial printing. We don't mind waiting for Acrobat to start up if we need to spend time compiling or editing a PDF document. However, we don't want to have to wait for Adobe Reader to launch slowly, each time we want to view a PDF document. With some of the Acrobat technologies appearing in the latest Adobe Reader, opening PDF documents can be a long-winded process.
Fast broadband enables us to do many new things with our computer. As well as download large files, quickly, or playing online games more effectively, we also have the facility to upload content and to get large files on to the Internet. With many of us having old PCs or Macs lying around doing nothing, why not turn these computers in to a personal web server and host your own website, at home?
Most of us obtain our audio files legitimately through importing audio from our CD collection or purchasing music for download from the Internet. However, there are loads old tracks that are not available on CD or online. These are either live tracks or old mixes that shipped on vinyl. You could import the audio in to your computer, but then you'll need an audio editor to cut and enhance the file.
ZIP technology has become the industry standard as it's supported within both Windows and Mac OS X, with the basic feature-set available to third-party developers so that they can incorporate the technology within freeware ZIP management application such as 
Applications are becoming larger, often shipping on DVD. Unless you want to keep accessing the application resources, you'll need to get these on to your hard drive. One way of doing this is through a CD-ROM Emulator package that will enable you to setup a virtual CD. You can then copy the contents of a CD to this virtual CD, on your system, and the next time you need to access the application DVD, you can point it to the virtual CD instead.
External hard drives are highly affordable and portable. These drives could be used to backup the contents of your internal PC drive. For instance, if you purchase most of your music online, the last thing you'll want to do is lose your digital music. There's no easy way of re-downloading music obtained through iTunes Music Store, for a second time.