If you share a PC, then it's hard to maintain any level of privacy on your hard drive. However, from hiding personal files to covering your internet tracks, there are various tools out there that can effectively render your PC use 'invisible'.

Invisible Secrets is an excellent solution for those that want to disguise private files in another format or make them disappear completely. Alternatively, you can apply encryption methods to your most precious files that intruders will find hard to break. If you're having problems with a pesky hacker whilst connected to a network, try Kaspersky Anti-Hacker which can make your PC invisible to potential invaders. If you're a home user, then ZoneAlarm Anti-Spyware does exactly the same thing - particularly useful if you've found your Firewall either ineffective or inefficient.

If you want to surf the PC without leaving evidence of your IP address, then Hide IP Platinum ensures that it remains invisible by using a proxy near to you. Finally, if you're looking for the real thing, then Magic Academy claims to be able to give you psychic powers that allow you to see invisible objects (but don't take our word for it).

Sharing is what the web is all about these days. Innumerable web sites have popped up that allow you to connect with other people and share photos, videos or just daily chatter. Yet you can also find a number of "traditional" applications that let you engage with other users from the comforts of your desktop that can provide real value.

If you're a music lover, the Last.fm player is an excellent way of discovering new musical genres and artists. You can also make new friends based on similar tastes and create groups based on artists and the tunes that get you going. All of this leads to a steady stream of music that becomes more refined to your personal taste, the more you participate.

Chat clients were probably one of the first tools developed to connect users. While most people will stick to their preferred client and close group of friends, there are some compelling alternatives to engage with new people. Meetro is a bit diffferent from typical IMs because it connects people close to each other geographically. Great to hook up on a date or clinch business deals, Meetro is fastly building a dedicated community. imeem is another alternative messenger that caters to the social crowd. Like MySpace, this chat client can become an effective tool for aspiring artists. You can share tracks and videos, find new blogs and chat with your fans and friends.

But at the end of the day, your trusty browser will always unlock the most social content that the Internet has to offer. Flock is built on the same engine as Firefox and it allows you to quickly post to your blog, send photos to your Flickr account and tag favorite sites for you to share with friends. If you're feeling slightly anti-social, you can stick with plain old Firefox and install the excellent del.icio.us Bookmarks extension. If you haven't heard of it yet, del.icio.us, is a social bookmarking site where you can share links with the community and organize them by tags, which is great way to keep track of where you've been and discover new corners of the Net. You should also add the Firefox StumbleUpon extension, an original way of sharing your bookmarks with the community and browsing what other users have uncovered on the web.

If things continue the way they have been recently then we’ll soon have more celebrities in rehab than in the outside world. It’s not just hedonistic pop stars that need to get themselves clean though. Chances are, your PC is currently bloated with loads of unnecessary files that are causing a major health risk, slowing down your machine and exposing it to security breaches. Rather like a digitized rehab clinic, Jitbit System Purifier helps speed up your PC, protect your privacy by getting rid of obsolete files and deleting traces of your online activity.

There are four main actions available in Jitbit System Purifier: File Shredder to quickly erase unwanted files, Privacy Erasers to delete traces of your Internet activity, Disk Cleaner to remove temporary files from your drive, and Startup Programs to clean up the launching process of your PC. Each tool fared well in our tests and performed their tasks fairly quickly. We appreciated being able to carry out all of these tasks simultaneously, considerably reducing the time you spend cleaning up your PC. There wasn’t any problem running other applications while Jitbit is doing its job either. The Startup Programs option was particularly useful to find programs that we didn’t want to launch automatically.

It seems these days that computer users fear spyware more than they do creepy crawlies or ghosts - perhaps with good reason. No one wants their system to be overrun my malicious code that detects and tracks your online activity. Of course, there are plenty of anti-spyware tools available that are designed to keep your machine free of intrusive spyware.

Although usually very effective, traditional anti-spyware software has a tendancy to slow down your system and leave you hanging around while it works its magic. However, the latest release from Max Secure Software, Max Spyware Detector 2.0 is designed to eliminate prying applications in seconds thanks to its built-in Smart Scan technology.

"Consumers have been asking for an anti-spyware product that can detect spyware and doesn't take all day to do it," explains Sanjay Pradham, CEO of Max Secure Software. "Before Max Spyware Detector was available, consumers were spending an average of 25 or more minutes waiting for their anti-spyware product to do its job, but now as a result of Max Spyware Detector, we've been able to cut consumers' scan time down to only a few minutes at the longest."

You would think that skipming on scanning time would allow certain spyware apps to go through undetected, but MaxSpyware seems to deliver a thorough scan and picked up virtually everything we could throw at it in terms of installing known spyware apps. While not as thorough as Ad-Aware, the application is great for those who want to ensure they're not being watched while at the same time saving on scanning times.