It never ceases to amaze me how a company such as Microsoft can spend millions of man hours and dollars developing a program and then from seemingly out of the blue appears a free alternative on a shoestring budget and beats them hands down.Recently this has happened with the release of FireFox 1.0 which is an alternative for Internet Explorer; a program Microsoft once relentlessly improved but now seems to have lost any interest in developing any further.

Slipping in at only 4.7mg (compared with around 80mg for Internet Explorer) the Mozilla developed Firefox browser offers several important advantages over its Microsoft counterpart which I’ll detail below so you can decide for yourself whether it would be worthwhile downloading to improve your Internet browsing experience.

Tabbed Browsing:

This allows you to have only one browser window open which then has all the pages you are currently viewing available to switch … Read the rest

One site that I have always believed to be under appreciated is www.download.com which hosts many thousands of programs which are either completely free of charge or free to try for a certain period.Many of the programs online are extremely useful and can be downloaded without having to subscribe or to give any personal information whatsoever.

Obviously such a service is extremely useful but I believe it is under appreciated because the site is often used as a mirror for other websites with little credit given if they don’t want to users downloading files directly from their own servers.Let’s assume I am talking about the program Spybot on my Internet site and I want to give my readers the chance of downloading the program so that they can try it themselves then I have two options.I could either host the file on my own website or link straight to the … Read the rest

As the resolve of Microsoft strengthens against the constant band of people taking advantage of security vulnerabilities in their most popular Operating System, we see an interesting new piece of software available to download from the Microsoft website designed to tackle Spyware.

Spyware is the collective name for an almost always unwanted program that either installs itself automatically when you visit a suspect website or along with a legitimate free program as a way of financing its development.Spyware can compromise your computer in a variety of ways including collecting sensitive information from your Internet sessions, exposing you to unwanted adverts, changing your home page settings or even your Internet settings in general which is severe cases can lead to your computer dialling a premium rate number when you connect to the Internet.

Still in beta (un-finished) version, Microsoft AntiSpyware is designed to prevent such programs from compromising your computer. Of … Read the rest

Since the devastating tsunami that hit Asia there has been fantastic resolve to get the counties affected back on their feet again.At the time of writing the British public have managed to raise a fantastic £100 million to put towards the International fund with many people choosing to make donations over the Internet by choosing the webpage of an involved charity and making a payment using a credit or debit card.

Most notably is the website www.dec.org.uk which is an organisation which co-ordinates the UK’s National appeal whenever there is a disaster overseas – By heading to this site you can choose to make a donation of any value in order to help those in need.Although the website is very poorly designed and isn’t doing a particularly good job of handling the large amount of traffic that has been thrown at it in recent weeks I still appreciate the important … Read the rest

I get a large number of questions from people asking for technical support concerning potentially easy to solve problems.Such issues can usually be solved simply by typing the problem into Google as you will often find that a user has most likely had a similar problem at some point in time and posted a solution to it on one of the many relevant websites and forums.

One site that I’ve recently discovered that provides a solution large number of common questions users have regarding their Windows installations is www.annoyances.org.The site is divided into a number of different sections including ‘Using Windows’, ‘Customising’,‘Annoyances’, ‘Reducing Clutter’, ‘Performance’, ‘Troubleshooting’, ‘Applications’ and ‘Humour’ which have all been written by the website authors.

There is also an extremely comprehensive forums section that consists of questions and answers maintained by visitors to the site and this can be searched by keyword or by the genre … Read the rest