It has been said that anything you get for nothing is worth what you pay for it and that anyone who expects anything good, for nothing, generally gets something that is good for nothing, however, there are a number of really useful pieces of software out there which are offered free.

Why do they do it? Well, the writers either do it because they like to produce software and want their work to be used, or they do it because they offer an even better version of the software for sale and hope that you, or the company you work for, will buy it.

Viruses are currently being created at the rate of one or more per day and it is imperative that you are protected from them by an up to date antivirus product such as AVG.

A firewall has the job of stopping the bad guys getting into your machine. Additionally it can (and ZoneAlarm does) stop naughty programs which are on your machine from getting out!

I know Micro$oft give you Internet Explorer for 'free' but it does have very many security problems and, quite frankly, isn't really all that good anyway (in my opinion). Switch to Firefox (also for free) and on the rare occasions when you really MUST use IE, you can still run it. You'll find Firefox is just as easy to use, provides better protection and has some nicer facilities (so much so that Micro$oft are incorporating a lot of them in the new version 7 of IE!).

OK, if you're running Outlook (the full version) and using its various calendar, task, etc. facilities then you might as well stay with it. If, however, you're running Outlook Express then you should consider switching to Thunderbird which provides a lot of the same advantages that Firefox does over IE.

Spam is unwanted email messages offering you online drugs, sex enhancement products, investment opportunities and so forth. You know the sort of things I mean; there's such a lot of it about these days.

A good spam filtering product is SpamPal which requires you (like all spam filtering software) to teach it what is and what isn't spam but it very quickly starts working on its own.

SpamPal requires the emails to be loaded onto your machine so they can be filtered but there are services which filter it externally so you don't even have the cost of downloading them. Such products tend to be commercial but one which s worth looking at is SpamDefy - it only costs £0.99 per month and you can have a 60 day free trial!

Clearing these infections is currently the biggest area of work I get. It's almost impossible to avoid them if you use the internet (and clearly you do!). There are a variety of products available which will scan your system when you ask and currently Ad-Aware SE Personal and Spybot Search and Destroy are thought to be the best, but use both since they tackle the problem from slightly different viewpoints.

However... although these products are free there is a much better product which scans your machine all the time and keeps you free of infections, and that is Spyware Doctor. The slight downside is that it's a commercial product but it only costs around £20 ($30) for a year's subscription (which is a lot less than getting Ken to come a sort out your problems!). You can download a free trial.

Let's face it, backing up is a bind. It can take a long time and it's never needed, is it? OK, this is partly true; so long as you've got a backup, it's not needed, but if you haven't..... well, you know the way life works! Also, these days backups need not be slow. SyncBack can be set so that it backs up only what has been changed, in other words it keeps your backup looking like the original, and if you do it onto one of those USB memory sticks it can be pretty fast and very convenient.