Everybody has heard of open source and may have used popular ones such as Firefox, Thunderbird, Open office, Eclipse, Filezilla, GIMP and Audacity. Here are some gems that you may or may not heard of that do a good job for free.

Web browsers are probably the most used software in this day and age. We access the Internet, play on-line games, access bank accounts, use them to power web applications such as Google Docs and so much more. There are so many browsers to choose from but which one do we choose?

Welcome to Speed up Vista part 2.  This section is also relevant to those that have XP. Just a recap we have speeded up our system so far by turning off system services that are not needed. In this section we will look at other ways to speed up your computer covering cleaning the registry, temporary files, startup entries and defragmentation.

Web Developer allows you to view,add and delete cookies. Disable Java, JavaScript, images and CSS in websites so you can see what your page looks like without them. Validate your web pages, re-size your browser and many many more.

There are always going to be security exploits within browsers but to minimise the amount of unwanted rubbish such as adware, malware and Trojans you can use Mozilla Firefox and the following extensions. Firefox is stable and highly customisable and most importantly it is well known for being securer than IE.