Miro is a cross-platform, open source software that provides you with a free high definition media player and video podcast manager. It allows you to search for video files on the most popular movie sharing sites, organize your local media files into libraries, subscribe to audio and video feeds, build playlists, and get access to legal torrents.

If you want to find any files or emails on your hard drive, search the Web, add an extra level of security to your computer and get a number of free gadgets such as Calendar, Google Docs, Youtube and Gmail, News, Weather, then you would love Google Desktop. It brings you a lot of useful little applications, it is extremely easy to use, surprisingly lightweight and not to mention free.

Yawcam (Yet Another Webcam Software) is an application that lets you use your webcam to capture video or still images, upload them to a FTP server, stream videos real time to a website, and has additional features such as motion detection, password protection, stealth mode, scheduler, and many others. Yawcam works well with most of the latest webcams as well as other video devices and can easily be used for surveillance.

If you want to download files of any kind: movies, music, video clips, documents, software, games and books, then Vuze is the tool that you need. With this based on the bittorent protocol application even the largest files can be downloaded in a matter of minutes, providing that you have fast Internet connection and there are enough people seeding them; this allows independent producers and musicians to share their work with millions of users Worldwide without having to spend huge amount of money on bandwidth and servers. It also lets the regular user share any of his files with all his online friends or the entire community.

Inkscape is a cross-platform vector-based graphics application, which can be used for creating graphics, logos, diagrams, icons, maps and many more. Inkscape was released for a first time in 2003 and has been under constant development ever since; it offers features that can be found in similar commercial software and it aims to be more user friendly, while still supporting advanced SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics )features. The tool also allows the end-user to import many popular formats such as JPEG, BMP, PNG, EPS and TIFF and export PNG file formats.

We’ve reviewed a lot of browsers, and while many are taking the threat of web page scripts seriously, there are few that really specialise in what is a relatively new field in the security world. NoScript addresses that imbalance by offering up additional protection from malicious code that can work with or without additional internet security.

On paper, it’s difficult to describe the point of Launchy.  We can tell you let it lets you launch your applications quickly, but without a more thorough explanation, that simply sounds like something Windows – especially the later versions – can already do. Launchy can be a very useful little application though, especially if you don’t like the way Microsoft uses the start bar and search functions.

TightVNC allows you to administrate a computer remotely. This might not sound like the most exciting thing ever, but it’s actually very useful program with a huge variety of usages. You can use TightVNC for anything from quick technical support to a long lasting solution for people who own more than one computer but don’t want to spend their time running between. Media Centres are a good example of this.

MozyHome is one of two online backup programs offered by Mozy, the other targeted towards business users. It uses the internet to backup your data. It’s a taken a while for online backup to catch on, mostly because of the bandwidth costs involved. The lack of decent upload speed amongst users has also been a problem that high speed connections are now quickly solving. This service could very well save your job or your home life when your computer crashes loosing important documents and family memories, so it’s worth taking a look especially as Mozy offer 2GB of backup for no charge at all.

Most people know about ZIP and RAR, two forms of compression that can make large files much smaller to make them easier to transfer over the net. It’s pretty impossible to use the net for long without running into a ZIP file, but about a 7-Zip file? If you’re curious, or if you’ve just downloaded a file that ends in .7z and want to know what’s going on – read on!