There are few things in the computer world that have become quite as convoluted as burning a DVD image. While most people have since become used to burning quick audio CDs or ripping their favourite music, getting a data CD to burn correctly is much harder work. There are so many different formats created by various programs that just trying to figure out what program you’re supposed to use requires some quality time with Google. That is, unless you have ImgBurn, a CD burning program that can handle just about anything you throw at it.

ZoneAlarm offers plenty of paid security products including the typical security suite and antivirus offerings, alongside more unique protection against online shopping fraud and identity theft. As well as their big name products and trial editions, it also offers some completely free software. ZoneAlarm Firewall is one such piece of software – a watered down version of the companies’ full internet suite.

Online Armor is a free firewall program that offers increased functionality far in advance of that seen in Windows’ own firewall program. Kernel mode security, script protection and a process guard are amongst its range of features, so if you’ve been using Windows firewall to protect yourself from online attacks in the past, you’re in for a pleasant surprise.

AVG may not have been the first free antivirus software ever created for Windows, but it was the one that brought the idea to the mainstream. In a world where virus checkers cost nearly as much per year as your operating system itself, AVG blew people away with its new business a model – fully functioning virus software that could scan, detect and clean viruses from your system without you handing over any cash at all. However, the free virus market is crowded these days, so can AVG maintain its crown amongst new competition?

If you’ve got a staggering collection of CDs that you’ve been wishing could join your digital music collection either for space or backup, now might be just the time to do it. Exact Audio Copy does exactly what it says, making perfect copies of audio CDs as quickly as it is possible to do so. The software takes advantage of technology like AccurateRip and multi-reading to provide high quality music rips. We take a look at how Exact Audio Copy works and whether you should entrust your precious music collection to it.

Video files can be tricky things to get your head around. A word document is going to open in word, no matter what the content is. A Jpeg picture will be viewable on your photo editing software on any modern computer without the need to download extra files. Video doesn’t work quite like that, unfortunately. There are so many different codecs and combinations available that you are bound to run into a video file you can’t play sooner or later, and that’s where VideoInspector comes in.

Designed for people who already know what they are talking about when it comes to the world of memory bandwidth and shader cores, GPU-Z is a tool for quickly finding out information about your computers graphic card. If you’re used to overclocking, its in-depth information and real time monitoring of your GPU could be very useful.

The more you use a computer, the slower that computer will function over time. This is a fact, and no matter how much care you take to maintain you file system, micromanagement of things like the cache files are often totally out of your control. KCleaner can help by automating the process of file maintenance, not only clearing files from windows systems but also from popular software applications, too.

Once upon a time, people were perfectly happy to install hard drives with a maximum capacity of less than 1 GB. Nowadays with operating systems alone taking up five times that, we’ve increased the standard size of a hard drive to over over 100 GB, with many computer users having between 500 GB – 1 TB of space. With all that extra capcity, our files are getting harder and harder to organise and keep track of. FlexTk aims to make file management easy with its range of tools designed to quickly maintain even the biggest file systems.

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.