If you've ever had to publish, send or receive particularly large files, you'll know that it can throw up all kinds of problems - crashed servers, blocked inboxes and transfers that suddenly just hang-up. Pando aims to take the pain out of this process and according to the developers, 3 million people agree that it does exactly that.

Pando is based on a P2P network that enables you to send files of up to 1GB in size by e-mail or by publishing it to the web. It supports all multimedia file types including video, audio and photos meaning it's great for people who deal with audiovisual files regularly.

For most users, the major benefit will be with e-mail attachments and the good news is, there's no need to change your existing e-mail client. Pando works by creating a torrent-like link file which you can then send in the body of your e-mail for the recipient to click on. There's no need to be online when the recipient downloads the file and there's no compression, FTP or dodgy web uploading applets to deal with. The reason you don't need to be online is because Pando sends files to its "super-node" servers, which means that there's always at least one "seeder" online at any given time. This seed is guaranteed for 14 days so even if you log off, your recipient can still view it. Obviously, the more people that share it too, the faster the download.

Mozilla have built their reputation mainly on the back of the excellent Firefox browser which has finally challenged the dominance of Internet Explorer. However, they also offer a whole host of other products, one of the most ambitious being SeaMonkey.

SeaMonkey is Mozilla's successor to Mozilla Suite - an all-in-one suite comprising browser, e-mail client, chat, calendar and much more. SeaMonkey has been the codename for the Mozilla Suite for some time although it was originally invented by Netscape as a codename for Netscape 6 (which was, incidentally, originally known by the less politically correct name of 'ButtMonkey').

Since security is a major issue with a suite where you invest so much personal information, the latest release has plugged various holes that left it vulnerable to attack. This means more visible security indicators in the browser and enhanced phishing detection for e-mail. Other changes include inline spell checking in the browser, an updated version of ChatZilla, and a significantly improved startup script on Linux.

One of the things most users praise in SeaMonkey is the e-mail client. The blind copy tool, as well as its intelligent organisation functions and address access, are much better implemented than equivalents in Outlook or Thunderbird. Those who like Firefox will also love the SeaMonkey browser, which features more advanced tabbing functions and customisable security functions. Many users also report that it performs quicker than Firefox even when the latter has been optimised for speed. Not only this but the whole suite takes up half the amount of disk space compared to running Firefox and Thunderbird simultaneously. However, with no automatic update manager, upgrading the suite is a pain in the neck, meaning you have to uninstall the whole thing, including any special profiles you've set up.

Its arguable too that the days of all-in-one suites such as SeaMonkey have had their day. With e-mail clients such as Gmail offering tons of storage space, organisers such as Google Calendar and hundreds of chat clients to choose from, who needs a suite? However, if Mozilla were to join forces with Google on a project like this, you never know - the monkey might finally have its banana and eat it.

Opinions in the game playing world seem to be deeply divided over this multiplayer war shoot-em-up. Whilst Softonic users have made it one of the most popular game downloads on the site, one game player says, “Its so bad that it's a crime against humanity that makes the holocaust seem like a stubbed toe in comparison.”

War Rock is yet another in a long line of Korean games such as Kal Online and Gunz Online that feature plenty of blood letting on the battlefield. Anyone who has played the Battlefield series will be familiar with the format of War Rock. Once connected to the server, you can choose one of the three game modes before being guided to the lobby where you team-up with team mates or chill-out before war. There’s also a random game generator where people join together in a massive free-for-all. This can result in some particularly violent sessions as many people log on just to release their frustrations rather than play the game properly.

If you spend most of your time in front of a computer with a sore wrist, then maybe reducing the amount of double clicking you do may help. Launchy is a free utility designed to do exactly this. It cuts out the middle man meaning no more searching the Start menu with the mouse or clicking on shortcuts - just type the name of the program you want to use into the launchy dialogue box and it launches automatically.

Launchy works by indexing your programs and file structures so that you can even use it as your default file explorer. Once running, it hides in the background until you press the 'ALT' and spacebar keys simultaneously. The dialogue bar that appears then searches as you type until the program, file or application you want to launch is found. Hitting the 'ENTER' key then executes the command.

The Launchy website also features some useful hints and tips on getting more out of the program such as Google searches, weather forecasts and even a scientific calculator function.

It’s increasingly hard to surf around the net without someone somewhere knowing who you are and where you’ve come from. For most of us, that’s no big deal – you’ve got nothing to hide after all have you? However, sometimes details such as your IP address and other traces you leave behind can be used by commercial entities to spam you with advertising or worse, compromise the security of your system.

Whatever reason you may have for wanting to hide your identity, there are a couple of options that can help preserve your privacy. On Windows, one of the best known applications to help achieve this end is Tor. Tor is an open source project that help you anonymize web browsing and publishing, instant messaging, IRC, SSH, and other applications that use the TCP protocol. Tor hushes up your communications by bouncing them around a distributed network of servers called “onion routers”. If you don’t want to use any software, then another method is to use a proxy. There are several websites out there that allow you to surf the net using public proxies that mask your real IP address.

Anonymous browsing is particularly useful if you’re using a public computer and don’t want your tracks revealed to strangers. However, the disadvantage is that sites that rely on your specific ID might not work as well. So for example, sites that normally save your personal preferences might not do so if every time you return as an “unknown” user. Still, if you’re increasingly worried about the prying eyes of Big Brother, anonymous surfing is one way to give him the slip.

If you’re not having much luck with job hunting in the real world, then why not try the world of fantasy? A story at CNNMoney.com tells how some Second Life gamers have been targeted by IT firms who are more than happy to conduct virtual interviews with them based on the impressive work they’ve done within the game. It seems that corporate America is finally catching onto the Second Life craze that already has around 2.6 million registered users. One IT recruiter who has employed several Second Lifers says:

People who have been in Second Life since its inception might not be professional content developers, but they have become experts.

So even if you're no Bill Gates, there's hope for you if your online creations inspire the imagination of employers. Another recruiter adds:

We hired people we had never met in the real world because we'd spent a year looking at the work they produced within Second Life, and the way that they approached the community…we knew that in Second Life, they were the best.

So the next time you log on, remember to put your best virtual suit on – you never know who could be watching.

Although Photoshop is the world's leading photo maniupulation tool, its not exactly cheap. If you are looking for a free alternative but don't want to lose all the things that make Photoshop so great, then The GIMP is worth a try.

It's not often that a program migrates from Linux to Windows but that's what happened with The GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Programme). The program is completely free, available on all platforms and best of all, it has most of the features that you'll find in Photoshop. You can save and open files in 34 different formats and its also useful for quick-converting image sizes. And what's more, if it's extensibility you're after, the GIMP can handle most Photoshop plugins.

A handy menu at the top of the program gives you access to all of The GIMP's key features and a navigation palette helps you steer your way through an image when you've zoomed-in to work on details.

Of course, The GIMP can't compete with Photoshop in every test (like certain image rendering tasks) but it's about as close as you will get to the real thing without spending the dollars.

Copying DVDs (for your own use, of course) is becoming increasingly difficult as manufacturers improve the security encoding on DVDs. AnyDVD however claims to be able to crack any DVD encryption code and judging by the number of downloads, Softonic users are certainly endorsing it too.

The beauty of AnyDVD is that it simply works in the background to automatically remove the copy protection of a DVD movie as soon as it's inserted into the drive. In this way, it can decrypt data without actually saving it to your hard-disk. You can watch the DVD at the same time or just insert a disk and let AnyDVD do its stuff. When you insert a disk, you are automatically prompted whether you want to decrypt it. When it has finished inspecting the disk, the program prompts you to backup the DVD using your preferred backup tool such as CloneDVD or Power DVD Copy.

If you’re a regular PC user and haven’t heard of DivX yet, then you’ve probably had your head in the sand for the past couple of years. It’s basically a highly compressed film format that turns the size of an average DVD from something like 5GB to just 700MB.

DivX for Windows is the official release from the DivX company, and offers everything you need to watch such films. The pack includes the all-important DivX Codec plus DivX Player, DivX Web Player and the Stage6 Content Uploader Utility for those who plan to rip and upload DVDs or other videos to the net. It also includes a 15-day trial of the DivX Converter and the DivX Pro Codec. All these components are free and include no adware although during the installation, you are offered the chance to install the Google toolbar.

If you're somewhat turned-off by both the cost and features of Microsoft Office then how about giving an open-source office suite a try? OpenOffice is a project by Sun Microsystems which offers an attractive and intuitive alternative to the big boys.

It operates on multiple platforms in its native format and offers 6 components - Writer, Impress, Math, Draw, Calc and Base. The equivalents with MS Office are pretty obvious except "Impress", which is a powerful presentation program like MS Powerpoint, and "Base" which is an added extra and enables you to compile and manage complex databases.

Many users report that, apart from the obvious advantage that its free, OpenOffice makes the creation and maintenance of highly formatted or long documents easier than Microsoft products, especially Word. There are complaints, however, that interfaces for the respective components are not as well laid out as in MS Office. This is something that Sun have promised to remedy in later editions.

None of OpenOffice's components are as fully developed as MS Office - the grammar checker, for example, is nowhere near as good - although it is on the whole richer in features and generally more stable. OpenOffice, particularly Writer, is a worthy challenger to MS Word although the dominance of MS Office in the home and business market mean that it won't be taking its place quite yet. However, we mentioned a while back that some European governments are already implementing open source software and Internet News reports that as far back as 2004, the Israeli government shunned Microsoft in favour of OpenOffice. Watch this space.

Have you ever been in a situation where you simply cannot delete a file from your computer? If so, you're probably familiar with error messages like Cannot delete file: Access is denied or The source or destination file may be in use.

Sometimes this is for good reason. Windows is constantly running various processes in the background and may need the file to operate properly. Killing such processes could make your system unstable or even crash it. However, if you're sure the file is not essential and its just being stubborn, Unlocker might be able to help you out. Unlocker adds an option to the drop-down menu when you right-click your mouse on a file. By selecting Unlocker, the program automatically overides locked file messages and allows you to get rid of all but the most stubborn files on your computer.

If you're worried that your favourite clips might be removed from You Tube and Google Video by the commercial big boys, why not download them onto your hard disk before its too late? VDownloader does exactly that by automatically detecting videos, and prompting you with a popup to download the file in either AVI or MPEG format. Whilst many other similar programs only download in flash FLV format, VDownloader allows you to choose the format you want. There's even an option to batch download if you're visiting a site with multiple clips that you'd like to save for future use or your own editing purposes.

There are now thousands of torrent sites out there but if you're tired of searching them one-by-one, why not harness the power of Google to do the job for you? In Google, just type filetype: "name of file" (e.g. filetype:torrent) to bring up a list of torrents corresponding to your search across the web.

So far example, if you're looking for football related torrents, simply enter football filetype:torrent. Of course, you'll need a torrent client such as uTorrent, BitTorrent or eMule to download it afterwards. This is a simple and effective way to search torrents without looking high and low for the one you want.

Wired reports that a sneak preview of the first version of Photoshop designed to work on Intel Macs - Abobe Photoshop Creative Studio Suite 3 - is available to download. The measley two day trial preceeds the final verison by a few months which is expected to be released in Spring 2007.

Windows users with more than 2Ghz processors can also try it out although its only available on Windows XP and Vista. Wired reports that in tests they conducted, the new version of photoshop is incredibly fast, starting in less than 6 seconds with image manipulation lightening fast.

However, many dedicated Mac users consider the release something of a hoax claiming that the only reason it has been released is to give MacTel owners a native Photoshop. However, since on Intel Macs there are no cursors available, many editing functions are impossible because all they see are crosshairs!

It's a mystery that has challenged man since the beginning of time - from Nostradamus to David Copperfield - how to predict the future. While we can't make any guarantees, we can offer a few crystal balls to help you through 2007.

If your moods are up and down like a yoyo, one way to monitor them is with Biorhythm Calculator. Your biorhythm is the cyclic evolution of your physiological state according to monthly, yearly and environmental changes. This program allows you to predict your emotional, physical and intellectual state based on your date of birth. You can even track celebrity biorhythms so you can see exactly how you compare to Britney Spears or even that Scientologist-du-jour, Tom Cruise.

If you look to the skies for inspiration, Asynx Planetarium might be your best bet. While offering no personal predictions, it can offer an insight into the night skies thousands of years into the future upon which you can predict your astrological destiny.

Finally, if stock market prediction is more your thing, check out SprinN Professional. SprinN monitors the latest stock market data to give you predictions on market indices, share prices and currency fluctuations.

Note that we can't guarantee the accuracy of any of these programs but if anyone finds remarkable similarities between their psychological state and Hugh Heffner's or makes a fortune on the stock market, please let us know.