This application squeezes fun and value out of your webcam or iSight by capturing images in a variety of ways and publishing locally, by email or to the web

If you share your laptop with others, or are simply cautious and don't want to run the risk of anyone seeing the websites you've visited or the applications you've used recently, then Window Washer 6.5 (£30 inc. VAT) is just the tool

Total Security 2008 is the latest version of BitDefender's internet security solution and, in terms of look and style, it looks like it went back to the drawing board. The interface and new applications owe a great deal to Symantec's Norton 360

If you're the paranoid type, a program like Window Washer will appeal. It's designed to eliminate all traces of your activity, enabling you to wipe your Internet trail, reset program settings or clean free space on your hard drive.

Once there was a time when the idea of shelling out a yearly fee to keep PCs from being attacked by a malicious program seemed faintly ridiculous. Now, of course, it's a different story.

As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Over the course of the past few years, Spyware Doctor has been at the top of its game. The program's one of a handful of anti-spyware tools that has managed to not only keep up with these threats, but also beat back even the toughest of challengers.

O&O has made a name for itself with its disk-based tools, so it's no surprise that there's a drive-imaging utility among its rapidly expanding array of products. O&O DiskImage 2 has plenty of neat features bundled up in its uncluttered, pleasing interface.

While Windows Vista's built-in Easy Transfer Wizard handles files and settings with ease, it can't transfer entire programs from your old PC to your new one. Sure, you can set things up manually, but you may lose settings - and what happens if you've mislaid the program discs?

Rather than relying on a series of different security tools from a hotchpotch of vendors, home users are increasingly making the switch to a single, unified solution for their PC security needs.

FileGuardX4 creates virtual 'safes' on your Mac, which you can fill with files and folders. Drag items in and protect them behind passwords; once the 'safe' is locked, the contents don't even show up in Finder or Spotlight searches

The harder Apple tries to make us keep signing up for .Mac, the less inclined we feel to join them. Until now, though, alternatives were hard to come by. You could cobble something together from various services, but the main missing link was always iDisk.

MacFreelance is a new Mac invoicing application that works primarily with Address Book and Mail and just focuses on the banking and client-tracking side of freelance work. It caters for all aspects of quotation, invoicing and building a client database

Anyone working in a professional content-creation environment will know that keeping tabs on a project's assets can be one of the most time-consuming parts of the job

Once, text editors were clean, sleek tools, designed primarily for -shock! - writing. Anyone who once used Word 5.1 might now shed a tear upon its mention and then get slightly angry at the current state of writing tools for the Mac - many of which have become bloated.

AntiBot is as subtle, effective and automated as the pesky programs it aims to stop. During normal day-to-day usage it didn't flag up anything legitimate as suspect, and quarantined any malware we threw at it.

At first glance, DiskImage 2 seems like a simple and rapid imaging application. It takes just a few clicks to make an image and mount it virtually, and the PE CD is easier than creating a boot disk.

Photoshop Elements 5 benefits from an excellent photo organiser, smart enough to detect and remove red-eye as it imports your images. It's supremely easy to tag files, organise them into collections and find the shots you need.

Although most anti-virus and anti-spyware tools use heuristic techniques to try to block malware based on its behaviour, Norton's new product goes one step further in basing its diagnosis solely on what an app does, rather than what it is

Two of the most important tools for a hard drive are a decent back-up tool and a partitioning tool. Paragon's Hard Disk Manager is an amalgam of its Drive Backup and Partition Manager programs (available separately), so it offers all this functionality in spades.

Optimising hard disks and cleaning them up is an essential PC process. Why Windows' native products are so poor is anyone's guess, but a dedicated solution is always better.

For almost a year and a half, Parallels had the Mac virtualisation sector to itself. But now it has competition from the biggest name in the market: VMware

This is a duplicate file finder with a customisable range of ways to search out redundant duplicate files. It's especially good at handling the files once found. We put it to work on a heavily used PowerBook G4 with 64GB of files

Much as we love Photoshop, it's primarily a way to edit existing artwork rather than creating art from scratch. Traditionally, if you wanted to do a painting or drawing on your Mac, you turned to Corel Painter, but now there's a new kid on the block: ArtRage.

Webroot added Sophos anti-virus to its package in version 5.2 and now the version 5.5 update includes email scanning. You may well think that such a feature should have been included from the start but in some respects this seems to show Webroot's thinking about computer security.

We approached Norton 360 with some trepidation, as previous Symantec products have been large intrusive suites that take over your laptop without so much as a by-your-leave, but we were in for a pleasant surprise.