The old adage that you get what you pay for doesn’t always apply to the software market, where the overpriced and the totally free often go head-to-head. OpenOffice.org won’t cost you a penny, yet it’s a full-featured office suite that aims to be taken seriously by big corporate users as much as by budget-conscious individuals.

Digital authoring is less of a niche pastime these days. People are happy to spend their free time putting together their own Web sites, DVDs menus and multimedia discs.

DVD playback on your PC is pretty cut and dried. All new machines come with DVD software, whether it’s Windows’ own or, more often than not, from CyberLink itself. So why would anyone spend money on a tool that costs more than most DVD players?

Cleaning out your Registry, startup items and other Windows tweaks are all free to execute, but there still exists a trade in so-called system tuners. Largely, these products fail to live up to expectations. Many either do very little or are too destructive in the way they purge system files.

Off-site backup guards your data against fire, flood and most acts of the gods. With broadband connections becoming more reliable and more efficient, online backup has become a viable option for many home users. BullGuard Backup 8.0 provides a year’s subscription to an online drive of up to 10GB, with an option to use local back-up sources for any other data.

Doozla is play-to-learn graphic design software for youngsters. In our office it got the thumbs-up from parents and grown-up kids alike.

Although a cursory glance at the dictionary reveals that Flux means ‘fluidity’, other synonyms include ‘unsteadiness’ and ‘yo-yoing’, and those are perhaps more appropriate for this newcomer to the web-design scene.

JoeSoft’s Hear is a sound-engineering tool that can alter any audio playing through your Mac. It has many different ways of doing this and is easy to use.

Virtual Sounds is a bundle of professional quality sound clips. You get drum loops, FX, strings, bass lines, beats and even vocals. All clips are a few seconds long.

Adobe Photoshop may well be the most powerful piece of software you’ll ever own. It may well also be that you only ever scrape the surface of its abilities, hovering around the Filter menu

Any project that requires planning benefits from the use of project management software. The problem is that a lot of this software is so complicated, it’s a project in itself just to figure it out.

AVG 8.0 includes all of the core elements you'd expect, including anti-virus, anti-spyware, firewall and anti-spam. Taking things up a notch, the suite now includes root-kit scanning, as well as instant messaging and Web surfing protection features. Is it enough to keep your PC protected?

Apple’s Aperture development team must be furious. No sooner does it release a shiny new version of Aperture that works nicely and runs quickly, than Adobe announces that it too is updating its RAW image editing and cataloguing app.

The chore of editing and burning digital video onto DVDs seems sufficiently off-putting that, for many of us, our hard drives have become video bottlenecks. The new edition of PowerProducer, with a quick-fire, step-by-step interface, aims to make it quick and easy to put your video creations on to disc, so they can be viewed on TV, as nature intended.

One of the biggest traumas of producing any Web site is the constant back and forth to image editors, browsers and FTP sites every time you decide on an alteration. What makes WebPlus a joy to use is its convenience: all that stuff can be done in one window.

Drivers are the pieces of code that allow devices you plug in to your laptop to communicate with the OS. So it’s important to have the latest versions, as this will speed up your laptop as well as resolve any potential compatibility problems.

Despite its low price and small footprint, ACDSee Photo Editor 4.0 is neither the smallest nor the cheapest software. The 57MB download gives you a seven-day trial and if you register with ACDSee you get a CD key that extends the trial to 30 days. Should you decide to buy, the online price is £22 (inc. VAT) with an optional £4.99 for an extended download service.

A re you worried about what your children get up to online? Then a parental control package could help you out... just not this one. Webroot Parental Controls is wrong in several ways, but we’ll start out with the most fundamental problem: it just doesn’t do its job.

For years, PC users have craved something as intuitive as Apple’s iLife suite and as powerful as Adobe Photoshop Elements to share, display and edit photos and videos. There’s no shortage of excellent applications, but a one-stop shop has never really made the grade. However, MediaShow 4 gets pretty close.

Take one look at the box and you might think that Christmas has come early. Not only does CA Internet Security Suite Plus contain just about every type of security software you think you might need, it works on three PCs and promises to pay you up to £2,500 for any damage that’s caused through virus infection after it’s been installed.

Genealogy software has grown in popularity of late, largely due to easier access to family data online. Now in its seventh generation, this is one of the older suites on the market, but the developers haven’t been tempted to update it too much, still offering a simple interface from which you can plot your family tree.

Another day, another new version of Toast. Ultimately, our verdict tends to be consistent: it's the best disc-burning app, it's pricey but bundles well-designed and useful software, and it's not a particularly compelling upgrade if you already own the previous version. But there are some things worth noting in this new release, so let's delve in.

TeamViewer is a tool for viewing and controlling remote desktops. You need to install it on two different computers, either Mac or PC, then enter an ID and password to open two ends of a secure tunnel.

We’ve always found Safari frustrating, in that it’s full of potential, but always manages to fall short of being great. And so it goes with Safari 3.1, although this release at least continues the browser’s agonisingly slow crawl towards its superior contemporaries.

Freeway Pro is a web design program that doesn’t edit HTML code. Much like a desktop publishing program, your website is displayed and edited as a single document. Once you’re done, Freeway Pro converts your document into HTML and uploads everything to the appropriate server.