The new all-in-one burning suites can be so complicated to master. Instead of being a simple tool designed to enable you to burn a data or audio CD quickly, they've in to mini professional production suites that enable you to edit movies, create a photo slideshow, edit your audio and then combine in to a DVD masterpiece. Sometimes you want a more simplistic tool, without losing the power behind the burning components.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 9 is the latest version of the powerful disc burning suite and has proved to be a popular lower-cost alternative to the all-in-one suites from the heavyweight disc burning developers. New features include a movie editor, the ability to create an audio CD from multiple formats and much more.

Ashampoo Burning Studio 9 link.

When Microsoft first released Windows Vista, it shipped with a number of fairly vanilla drivers to offer widespread compatibility across various PCs. Problem is, since the original release, there have been a number of updates to CPU, graphic chipsets and other hardware. It might be either really difficult or problematic to attempt to install the original operating system on a brand new PC, for example. If you need to re-install Vista on an upgraded PC, you'll want the latest drivers. Plus if you have Vista installed, you'll want an easy way to get support for the latest standards.

Windows Vista SP 2 is now available to download and we've got the 32-bit edition installer, the 64-bit edition installer and the complete ISO image, along with both versions for 32-bit and 64-bit computers. It ships with Windows Search 4, support for a number of new chipsets and much more.

Windows Vista SP2 32-bit, Windows Vista SP2 64-bit and ISO image links.

Like many people, it's so easy to experience problems with your system and, even for the most advanced user, it's difficult to figure what is the root cause of the problem. As an example, I can't install Office 2007 SP2, however many applications are closed when I run the installer. The Adobe updater struggles to update installed apps and the Apple automatic updater is the same. What applications are causing these installers to stop functioning?

One problem is the many applications that launch with your computer. Install software on your PC and they will attempt to start modules and other 'helpers' when you start your PC. Worse, the installers add services that start automatically with your computer and most users won't know how to stop these services. Some don't uninstall when you remove them from your computer, too.

Starter 5.6.2.9 is a popular free tool that you can use to see which applications start with your computer and, if you do not need them any more, disable them. You can also check through your services and see if there are any you can disable, particularly if they are not valid on your computer.

Starter link. 

We all know that, after using our computer for some time, that it tends to slow. With a few startup applications running in the background and a cluttered Registry, your computer can take minutes to start. Hard drive might seem to take ages to find and load even the smallest files and you can often find your drive is full as it's bottled up from the latest temporary files and other data you've got stored on your PC.

Norton Utilities 1.0 is a new commercial tool from Symantec that will enable you to keep your PC optimised and trouble-free. It ships with a Startup Manager to enable/disable problematic startup tools, a Registry defragmenter, a disk defragmenter and more.

Norton Utilities 1.0 link.

My digital music collection isn't particularly organised. It's primarily made up of tracks sourced from my CDs and a number of tracks downloaded from iTunes. However, I have a bad habit of using various computers (with the same iTunes account) to obtain the tracks. Due to the way iTunes is managed, you can't synchronise your own tracks between your computers. You have to either share your collection or manually move them between your machines. It's easy to get confused, duplicate tracks and more.

Factor in tracks you may have, ahem, sourced online from the old Napster days (especially those old impossible-to-buy live tracks that we were released to fans or recorded by fans), it's far too easy to end up with multiple tracks, often with different suffixs, many of which can be deleted.

Similarity 0.8.2 is a free tool that will scan your music collection and check for duplicate files. Particularly the same tracks recorded with different codecs. You can then choose which files you want to delete (ie. old MP3 tracks replaced with newer AAC-encoded tracks).

Similarity 0.8.2 link.

Rather than backing up an entire drive and, if your drive is huge, this can take some time, the more popular option is to backup only your most important files and documents. For example, I make sure my fonts are regularly backed up as they are difficult to replace and, quite frankly, if I have to re-create web buttons years in the future, I can never remember the original font. I also backup key system files before moving to a new system. However, there are few free tools that will backup your files to multiple locations (local or remote, such as your server) and also support incremental backup.

GFI Backup 2009 Home Edition is completely free software designed to backup or restore individual files in multiple locations. It supports some of the more advanced functions you wouldn't find in regular free backup software, including differential and incremental backup, so you don't have to keep backing up the same files every time you schedule a backup routine.

GFI Backup 2009 Home Edition link.

Most browser add-ons are created by a software developer to suit a particular purpose. There are hundreds of them, so generally you'll find one to perform the task you require. Problem is that they are often bundled with all sorts of other caveats. It's very difficult to develop your own Firefox add-on as this requires specialist skills and you need to read up on how to follow the strict APIs or your add-on may be disabled in a future browser update.

Mozilla Jetpack 0.1.5 is an official solution from Mozilla that should enable people with basic programming skills to develop their own add-on. We're not talking professional-level programming skills either, as Jetpack was designed to enable people with basic HTML or web developers to produce an add-on from basic code.

Mozilla Jetpack 0.1.5 link.

It's amazing how quiet a small office can become when one or two people are on holiday or paternity leave (especially unexpected early leave). Difficult to scope work when you're trying to manage multiple tasks and the day-to-day work the missing people have left behind.

Although it's rather old news now, Google Chrome v2 moved from beta testing (or development stage) to a stable release, last Friday. The main advantage of the new browser is that it's over 20% faster than the previous version, which was already an ultra-fast web browser. There's also a full-screen mode, a new tab structure, the facility to zoom in to web pages and much more. Sadly we can't use it for our day-to-day tasks as key sites such as our internal CMS simply won't support the browser.

One further note of caution. Although Google Chrome v2.0.172.28 is the stable release, there are slightly newer revisions (2.0.18x) in beta development. Avoid these unless you want cutting-edge pre-releases.

Google Chrome 2.0.172.28 link.

If you have purchased a brand new computer that's equipped with basic security software you may be unaware that it is still susceptible to a whole host of online threats. For this reason, when you get your new machine up and running it may be worth investing in a solid all-in-one security package that will protect your computer from viruses as well as identify potential threats and be capable of removing them. The benefit of using a single security package is that you won't have any difficulty getting different applications working together correctly.

Comodo Internet Security 3.9 is a freeware suite made up of different security utilities which are designed to provide complete protection for your computer. This tool provides solid protection against almost anything the average user may encounter online and if you require further protection, there is also a professional version available.

Comodo Internet Security 3.9 link.

It's way to easy to get bogged down with work and forget a task or an important meeting. I remember in my last company that people would email me to remind me about a forthcoming meeting and it was so easy to forget to add it to the diary. Worse, it's difficult to know who was going to go to the meeting or the room where the meeting would be held. More often than not, they would show at reception and there would be a mad rush trying to get people together, last minute. It would be far easier to use a desktop diary that enabled you to track your 'to do' tasks and share that information with other users.

EssentialPIM Free 3 is one of the better tools and it also ships in a portable version, so you can take your diary, calendar and 'to do' notes on the road. The latest v3 now ships with an email facility so you can receive email and auto-add a meeting request to your calendar. There are a whole host of other enhancements.

EssentialPIM Free 3 and Portable edition link.

If you're connected to the Internet, one of the cheapest ways of communicating with friends and family is instant messaging. Not only is it incredibly cheap but it's easy enough for anyone to use. The only trouble is that there are so many different networks available; you may find yourself using different clients to communicate with different people. Before you begin installing multiple clients, there are multi-platform clients available which will enable you to use a single application to communicate with others, irrespective of network.

Pidgin 2.5.6 enables you to chat across any platform to single users or groups, simultaneously. The application supports many popular features such as file transfer, away messages and typing notification amongst several unique options. Another useful feature is that you can use your any current IM contacts you may have.

Pidgin 2.5.6 link.

Use your computer for some time and you'll find that it takes longer to boot, applications launch more slowly and it just feels far more sluggish. This performance downgrade is partly due to your drive(s) becoming fragmented, so it takes far longer to find, locate and open files from your drive. Bad fragmentation can lead to a shorter drive lifespan, which isn't good for your long-term system. However, you can get around this using disk defragmentation software, although the free apps generally are limited so you have to defragment one drive partition at a time.

Auslogics Disk Defrag v2 is one of the better free drive defragmentation tools and the latest version now enables you to defragment more than one drive (or drive partition), simultaneously. Better still, the defragmentation process is 30% more efficient than the previous version, so the task will be over more quickly.

Auslogics Disk Defrag link.

There are some web pages which we visit either daily or even hourly. To see these pages, we have to open our web browser, navigate to the page and then login with our username and pass. It would be far easier if we could simply turn our most favourite web pages in to a desktop applications and then drop a shortcut on to our desktop. With Mac OS X, launch your web page as an application from your dock.

Mozilla Prism 1.0b1 is an official add-on that enables you to turn a web page in to a self-running application with its own custom desktop icon. This opens a special version of the Firefox browser which is more like a standard Windows (or Mac) application, than a web browser window. In some ways this is a little like the Adobe Air concept which enables you to create 'applications' which are based around web code.

Mozilla Prism link.

Everyone wants the fastest broadband connection. It's easy to get excited with the thought of a 200MB/s connection as, think about how quickly you'll be able to download files and stream video from YouTube? Problem is, with the race to secure the fastest broadband, it's too easy to forget that 95% of the Internet is plagued with slow websites, poor bandwidth between continents and people attempting to stream movies, rather than buy them on DVD.

The result is that we often receive emails and letters from our magazine readers complaining that download from a particular server is slow, even though they have a 24MB/s broadband connection. Reason is that the server is located in an obscure territory, is served by a slow connection and, worse, if there are, say, 50 people connected to the server at the same time as you, the server bandwidth is shared equally between those 50 users. This means that you could quite easily be downloading at 25KB/s, rather than 1.5MB/s. That ultra fast broadband doesn't look quite so promising as advertised?

DownTester 1.05 is a free tool which you can use to test your broadband connection against various remote servers, located in different territories, so you can see how different it is downloading from a server in Japan, compared to Germany. This might help you make more informed choices in the future.

DownTester link.

Almost all standard printer drivers will include a few basic functions; these may include landscape and portrait printing options and various DPI settings depending on paper quality. Most manufacturers will also require you to use there own, more expensive cartridges which are often used more quickly than we'd like. Why not try a standalone print management tool to help you save both ink and money?

FinePrint 6.08 is a small utility that helps you to get the most from your printer. You can use it to add letterheads, watermarks, footers and other document features. The latest version contains a number of new features including an improved user-interface, the ability to re-arrange pages, better printing settings and more. Not only is this a useful tool for helping you to get the most from your ink cartridges and paper, but you wont have as much wastage either.

FinePrint 6.08 link.

There are a number of drive defragmentation tools, which are all designed to get the most from your internal or external hard drive. However, that's a problem if your laptop ships with a solid state drive. As these are becoming cheaper and more widely implemented (albeit in expensive laptops), you'll need a way of defragmenting the contents so you can get the most from the drive. Some may state that there's little point defragmenting a solid state drive, partly as they are never normally too large and also as there is no drive header and access is far faster than a standard hard drive.

Defraggler 1.10 has been released, along with the Portable version, and this drive defragmentation tool will recognise and defrag the contents of a solid state drive. There are also a number of bug fixes and minor enhancements.

Defraggler and Portable version links.

We're big fans of synchronisation software. As an example, we use Evernote to track downloads and remind ourselves of applications that need writing up, changing or updating. Add the information to Evernote and, as it's cross-platform, the same information is synchronised back to our Mac laptop when we're on the road or logging in from home. However, Evernote only synchronises notes and information. You need more if you want to synchronise and backup your data.

SugarSunc 1.6.1 for Windows and for Mac is a file backup and synchronisation tool that now gives you a free 2GB account whihc will enable you to synchronise up to 2GB of data between two computers. If you want more than that (and most people will), you can upgrade your account and synchronise between various computers, whether they are Windows or Mac-based. You can also share files with other users.

SugarSync Windows and Mac links.

We all know that Google does a great job of finding websites, even if the results can be a little hit and miss. One problem with most web browsers including Google is that although they may be good at finding sites, they struggle to identify which sites are legitimate and which sites aren't. The last thing you want is to find out the hard way and end up on a rogue site accidentally, so surely there's a way of identifying the good from the bad?

GooglePreview 3.20 is a Firefox extension that provides a small visual representation of search results which can help identify any potential rogue sites before you visit them. Although the application is useful for security reasons, one downside is that the add-on may affect browser speeds if you don't have a great Internet connection.

GooglePreview 3.20 link.

When researching a particular subject online, search engines such as Google can come up with hundreds of websites, pages or blogs on a particular subject matter. This can be great for referring to, but not everyone has enough time to sift through that amount of information. Another problem is remembering links and web addresses of numerous sites, it's almost impossible unless you jot them down. Wouldn't it be easier to grab links, build up a database and browse them at a later date?  

Read It Later 0.99.45 is a useful Firefox add-on that enables you to add links, external pages and other information and create a database which may be referred to as you wish. Simply click your right mouse button and store. The addon will also work in conjunction with Foxmarks or Google Browser Sync, so you can automatically sync these saved links to another Firefox, so you could browse them elsewhere.

Read It Later 0.99.45 link.

When Vista was in public testing, Microsoft released the Vista Upgrade Advisor, designed to check whether your PC was suitable for running Vista. They've done the same thing with Windows 7, although this is still a beta version and designed for English (US) users. It seems a little strange though. If you're not using Vista, would you seriously consider moving your old PC from a resource-light Windows XP to a more resource-heavy Windows 7? Surely you'd be better off considering a new machine, along with Windows 7 pre-installed?

Microsoft Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor is now freely available. If you already have Vista installed, there's a very strong chance you'll have no problems with Windows 7. As we said, with older computers there's more of a chance you'll need to upgrade some hardware (if that's possible!), so this Advisor will be designed for you.

Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor link.

One thing common to all editions of Windows, is the Registry, which is a database of information that only serious users understand. The Registry controls where software is located, the application you want to launch depending on filetype and more advanced information such as the drivers installed and so on. Problem is, the more you use your PC, the more likely this Registry will be cluttered with unnecessary information that can cause your PC to perform erratically or take longer to boot, simply as the Registry can't find the files on your computer.

Eusing Free Registry Cleaner 2.5 is, as it says, a free tool that will enable you to run a check through your Registry, check for unnecessary entries and remove them where necessary. This should make your Registry more lean. We do recommend you backup your Registry before using an optimiser.

Eusing Free Registry Cleaner link.

You know the scenario, you've tasked someone in the office to handle some work on your behalf, you show them the ropes and ask if they understand. You head out on the road with your laptop and you receive an email saying that they're confused and need your help. Trying to talk them through the details, over the phone, will be impossible and will cost you a fortune on your mobile. Worse, you have a Mac so there's no easy way of connecting to their computer and showing them how to perform the task.

CrossLoop for Mac 1.1 is brand new technology that enables a Mac user to connect to another Mac or PC, across the Internet and control that computer. This means you could be away with your Mac laptop in another territory, log in to their computer and show them how to perform the task on their computer. They can simply follow the mouse, under your control. Of course, CrossLoop enables you to login and control any computer (with end-user authorisation), so you could even use the software to show other users how to perform tasks or use it to fix their computer, for a fee.

CrossLoop for Mac link.

You've got to ask yourself how corporates make their IT purchasing decisions. In my previous employment, they used a very old version of Microsoft Office (97?) which had trouble reading some of the newer Word documents. You often had to go back to the person who sent the Word doc and ask them to re-send as a Word 97 compatible format, so it could be opened. Talk about making more work for yourself. You could request Microsoft Office 2003, but this was reserved to 'special' employees who put forward a case for requiring the new suite.

OpenOffice 3.1 is now available and this is a free cross-platform Office-compatible suite that ships with a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool and more. Better still, you can assign a multi-seat license and then enable your employees to use the software on their desktop or laptop, irrespective of operating system. It can read/write to just about every format, so few compatibility issues.

The latest OpenOffice 3.1 ships with a number of improvements, although most of them are relatively minor.

OpenOffice 3.1 link.

There are a huge number of useful freeware tools available that perform simple, yet necessary tasks. Screen grabbing tools, download managers and other apps all make laborious tasks easier. A good file renaming tool is another useful utility that enables users to easily change the names of multiple files as well as other renaming procedures. By using such a tool, it saves you time by preventing you from having to manually edit the names of individual files.  

ReNamer 5.50 is a free utility that enables you to easily change and edit the names of multiple files and folders at one time. Often overlooked, such tools have a number of useful implications, especially for people who simply haven't got time to manually edit file names or those with limited patience.

ReNamer 5.50 link.

It only seems a short time ago when we were upgrading to Vista (then, as a result, having to pay to upgrade all of our software so it was 'compatible' with Vista). However, Microsoft is touting Windows 7 as a bigger release, primarily as it's aimed at all those XP users who decided that it simply wasn't worth upgrading to Vista. Corporate users, who use multiple licenses, are still going to be difficult to convince.

Windows 7 Release Candidate (RC) 32-bit and 64-bit editions are now available to download from the Microsoft website. The won't time out until June the 1st 2010, so you can use Windows 7 for over a year, before you decide whether it's worth upgrading or not. Although this is still only a Release Candidate, it should be feature complete, which means that only small bug fixes and improvements will be made between now and the final release, slated for later this year.

Windows 7 RC 32-bit and 64-bit edition links.

You may think that by running a fully up-to-date computer and high speed broadband connection that you've done all that you can to achieve optimum download speeds but, even in this instance, a good download manager could improve them further. Download managers will separate files into smaller pieces in order do download them more efficiently than a single, larger file. Another benefit of using a download manager is that they enable you to resume broken connections and incomplete files.

Flashgot 1.1.8.7 is a download manager addon for Firefox that speeds enables users to easily handle single or multiple downloads. It ships with the usual download manger features such as the ability to resume downloads after your Internet connection is broken and is incorporated with your Firefox browser so there's no need to run a separate download manager. Downloads can also apply to media files on the web, so you can download music and similar files to your desktop.

Flashgot 1.1.8.7 link.

File sharing via the Internet is an easy and relatively hassle-free way of making documents and files accessible wherever you are. By using a shared workspace you can easily work with colleagues by quickly swapping documents, notes and other useful information whilst communicating and exploring other ideas in a secure environment. Some applications will also enable you to chat as a group, much like a conference call, or on a one-on-one.

PeerAware 1.07 is an application that enables you to transfer documents and communicate with your peers. Create a 'shared workspace' for connecting with colleagues and swapping information and create a 'knowledge network' to chat and share ideas on a virtual whiteboard. There is also an 'Emoticons' feature which can help you express yourself when text messages are insufficient.

PeerAware 1.07 link.

When gamers reminisce about their favourite titles they often refer to games produced a number of years ago, obviously they cannot compete in terms of graphics with more modern games but what they lack in visual impact, they often make up for with highly addictive game play. Games such as Tetris and Space Invaders have stood the test of time and although many big budget games of today may push the boundaries in certain areas, it's doubtful they will be reminisced about or played twenty or thirty years on.

MAME 0.131s is an application that uses old data files to emulate classic arcade and console games on your home computer. You can source files from web archives and choose from thousands of games from the 70's, 80's and 90's. The application is great fun for the serious or casual gamer but does require a little configuration.

MAME 0.131s link.

Most people are aware of the importance of maintaining an organised PC, not only does it help the machine run more smoothly but it's also essential for privacy reasons. It's inevitable that files will accumulate on any PC, many of which are harmless, but there will be files that your machine will automatically store that may be more sensitive, even if you think you've removed them. There are tools that are better than others at completely removing these files, so it's important to find a reliable application that's proven to work, so you won't have to second guess its thoroughness.

CCleaner Portable 2.19 is a portable version of the hugely popular cleansing tool. The portable version enables you to run the application without installation on any machine you may be using via a USB stick or other portable media. The application is also useful for ridding your system from old Registry entries such as uninstallers and invalid shortcuts.

CCleaner Portable 2.19 link.