Stories by: Matthew Overington

FarStone VirtualDrive Network is designed to run on a server machine and offer virtual CD-ROM drives to an entire network. The software supports up to 1000 virtual drives, so you can store an enormous quantity of data - and make it available to network users.

Every day, office workers are forced to deal with a combination of paper and electronic documents, and managing the two can be tricky. Though it started life as a scanning utility, ScanSoft's PaperPort 10 Professional has grown into a full-blown document management application that comprises a collection of tools to help organise and keep track of data.

For years Voice Over IP (VoIP) has been hyped and heralded as the next big driver for broadband adoption, but solutions have been either difficult to implement or unreliable. The ability to make inexpensive telephone calls from your PC isn't new, but MyNetFone has simplified the process tremendously.

Protecting your PC from the endless barrage of viruses, worms, spyware applications, and phishing schemes is an unfortunate fact of life for anyone surfing the Internet. Though there are countless software applications designed to protect against each threat individually, the best way to cover your PC is to employ a unified suite to guard against the myriad of malware dangers online.

If you spend a good deal of your working day typing documents, reports, or emails, you've probably had concern about repetitive strain injury (RSI). It's no secret that excessive keyboard use wreaks havoc on hand tendons, but there are a couple of alternatives to manually entering screeds of text. Dragon Naturally speaking is a long-standing desktop speech-recognition application and the latest release boasts improved accuracy over previous versions.

Symantec is arguably one of the best-known names in security software, and its long-standing range of Norton Antivirus product has been a popular choice on the desktop for homes and businesses.

Though not as well known as the big brands like Norton and McAfee, Cloudmark is an award-winning anti-spam and anti-phishing application for Windows, and is currently at its ninth release. Spam and phishing emails plague the net, though a number of internet service providers are starting to take filtering seriously.

The Australian edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2006 is an impressive resource. Available as a single DVD or multiple CD set, it's actually three products rolled into one. Primarily, it includes the Encyclopaedia Brittanica (replete with over 75,000 articles), a Student Library with 15,000 articles aimed at school-age children, and Britannica Elementary Library, which is pitched at primary school students and designed to foster an early habit of looking up information.

Anyone that's ever lost data from a hardware failure knows how frustrating - and depressing - it can be to have to rebuild lost files, emails, tax information and contact lists from scratch. Though PC experts have banged on about it for years, backup is something that most users don't consider or perform regularly - until a hard disk crash.

It's no secret that software firewalls are less secure than hardware versions as they're prone to viruses, and can be disabled by malicious software. Danish software developer, Danware, has taken an interesting and unique approach to circumvent the problem by creating a firewall that runs as a software driver, and not a conventional application or service.

Symantec's flagship security product aimed at the desktop has undergone a substantial - upgrade for 2006. The application blends a firewall, spam filter, virus and worm protection, email and instant messenger scanning into a single application and is designed to simplify the ever-more-demanding task of securing PCs.