While most suites pile on as many features as they can, Symantec is going back to basics: anti-spam, parental controls, pop-up blocking and privacy protection are all available only in an add-on pack

The reputation of Grass Valley (formerly Canopus) for rock-solid, well-designed video editing tools is second to none. But it's a reputation that has been earned more through the company's hardware development than its software.

Taking a step up from the normal world of taking photos, viewing and storing them on your computer and printing them out, professional photography demands a more 'workflow' oriented ethic.

ACDSee 7.0 is a PC-only cataloguing andimage-editing tool that's supplied in a bundled form with some digital cameras.You can use it as a folder browser with a standard directory tree

Olympus Studio 2 supports professional photographers and engaged amateurs to get perfect results out of the images within a minimum of time.

Windows Vista users may already know that it's possible to shrink and extend partitions without losing any data using the Disk Management Console. As such, it's possible to partition your hard drive without spending a penny. So why would you want to shell out for a commercial product like this?

Canopus's ProCoder has been unchallenged as a media encoder for a good few years. Despite competition from Compressor on the Mac platform and Sorenson Squeeze, ProCoder managed to do just about everything right and deliver phenomenal results to boot.

For many musicians who use computers, the preferred tool of their trade is a sequencing and DSP application such as Apple's Logic Pro. For those who prefer a printed score, there are score-writing applications such as Sibelius and Finale

The digital media landscape hasn't exactly plateaued in the past few years, as was once predicted. If anything, the ever-expanding proliferation of portable devices and media formats has made it rockier than ever before

Windows Movie Maker first saw light of day in 2000 when it was introduced along with Windows Me. Both the mother OS and the application itself were not well received, the former blighted by technical glitches and the latter by a woeful lack of features

During the course of its last two incarnations, Illustrator CS3 manages to hone these existing tool sets while introducing yet more trend-defining features, all held within a redesigned and much streamlined program interface

Easy Media Creator is a suite of programs aimed at those wanting to create various types of CD and DVD media. This includes videos and slideshows, as well as data, audio and back-up discs.

Yeah, yeah, we know: Mac OS X already provides screen-grab keystrokes and a standalone capture app (the simplistic Grab). But Snapz Pro X bills itself as the crème de la crème of such tools, and is aimed at professionals who've outgrown Apple's built-in freebies.

Compared to the recent mass-adoption of photo editing programs, spurred on by the digital camera revolution, vector-based drawing has become something of a lost art.

Been using Macs for a while? Then you’re likely to have a spare machine or two kicking around. Due to the durability of most Macs, chances are they’ll be in working order, too; just not powerful enough to meet the demands of modern apps. With ScreenRecycler, old Macs with a screen can once again prove useful.

Answer the following question: a hydra is (a) a Greek mythical monster with many heads, (b) an album by Toto, or (c) a clever piece of software for digital photographers? The answer, of course, is (c)... It's not as exciting as a Greek monster but it is infinitely more interesting than an album by Toto.

One of the few mainstream software markets with several applications of roughly equal weight is home-video editing. There's Adobe Premiere Elements and Corel's Ulead VideoStudio 10 Plus, as well as Pinnacle Studio Plus 11

The field of OCR, or Optical Character Recognition, has more than its fair share of acronyms floating around, but one of the most potentially exciting is ADRT

F-Secure does well to integrate its various elements into a single application, although a glance at the Task Manager revealed 14 separate processes using around 40MB of memory when idle, and installation requires a number of restarts.

Updated Desktop publishing allows you to create everything from a leaflet, a poster or even a brochure. The first thing to know about this latest package from Serif is that it has launched each product independently, but this is a cost-effective way of picking up three distinct tools: PagePlus 11, DrawPlus 8 and ImpactPlus 5 for a mere £50 (inc. VAT).

With the soaring popularity of digital cameras, image-editing software packages are now ten a penny, which is what many of them are worth. This one is great though...

Most folks these days regularly use more than one computer. However, no matter how hard we plan, there are always occasions when we're sat in front of the wrong one.

Although Photoshop is largely used by professionals, its influence has crept in elsewhere, and even consumer graphics applications often have interfaces based on that of Adobe's giant. Scribbles, in common with the likes of Acorn and Apple's iPhoto, offers a truly unique, innovative approach, this time for sketching and drawing.

Most people have a large, ever-growing collection of browser bookmarks, which is rarely tidied. If you use multiple browsers, bookmarks may be spread among them, causing you to waste time when finding fave sites. Bookdog is specially designed to deal with these problems.

There are a couple of ways you can use your mobile phone to connect to the internet. It can be a tricky process, though, particularly when you're travelling overseas and need to hop between carriers and root out configuration codes for Mac OS X's Bluetooth software.