1) Spotify – www.spotify.com

Every now and then, a new online phenomenon comes along that's so good you soon wonder how you ever lived without it. Daily Motion and the rest will never rub shoulders with Youtube, and likewise the Google empire is in a league of its own. Well, just as everyone craves video content and have to navigate the web somewhere, so too do they need music – and if it’s a free, instantly-streaming jukebox packed to the rafters with pretty much all your favourite tunes – then all the better!

Yes, Spotify could soon be forming a holy trinity with Youtube and Google as one of those sites or programs you use everyday. Download it for free and search for any song or album by any relatively-known artist from the past half-century and there's a good chance it'll be there, to listen to in its entirety. Fancy hearing the new U2 album? Franz Ferdinand’s latest offering? Beyonce’s b-sides? It’s all there and it won’t cost you a penny.

‘What’s the catch?’ we hear you cry. Well, to appease all the legal bods, you’ll hear the odd advert in between songs now and again, usually once every 25 minutes. This way, artists receive a bit of revenue and Spotify can continue to blow the minds of music fans with their superb offering….

2) CCleaner – www.ccleaner.com

Pretty much every time you click something, a little bit of useless information gets tucked away in your laptop’s deepest, darkest echelons. Like all waste – if you let it fester and accumulate, things could soon get unpleasant. So how do you remove all these useless titbits? Simple - download CCleaner - formerly titled Crap Cleaner – so, in the words of Brian Fantana, you know it’s good.

After the nippy download process, simply run the cleaner and hey presto - junk data, cookies, temporary files and generally useless stuff that would bog down a system simply disappears. An invaluable piece of software and easily one of the best freeware programs on the web.

3)Avast! Home Edition - http://www.avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

There are several free anti-virus programs available to choose from online but having checked out all of the frontrunners, it’s evidently clear that you can’t go wrong with the slick-looking Avast! Home Edition. With its media player looks and uncomplicated interface, it’s aesthetically pleasing as well being super-efficient, zapping any suspected malware, spyware, viral threats, trojans and worms in an instant.

One feature we particularly like is that unlike the other two free anti-virus bigwigs – AVG and Avira – there’s no scheduled scans that leave your system dragging its heels. No matter what scaremongers may say, there’s no need for those slow, automated scans unless you’re opening attachments in several pieces of junk mail each day offering penis enlargements…

4) Mozilla Firefox 3 – www.firefox.com

Firefox needs less of an introduction than it used to, but yet still only 30% of us use it to surf the net, with Internet Explorer still leading the way. However, each month Firefox bridges the gap a little more and it won’t be long until it becomes the most popular web browser out there, and I’ll tell you why. A couple of years ago when checking out this vividly-sounding innovation for the first time, it asked (incredibly) if I’d like to import all of my bookmarks from my abandoned IE… and so the love story began.

Now, after thousands of bug fixes, feature enhancements, a new page-rendering engine and multiple operating system integration, the work has paid off - Firefox 3 has established itself as the world’s finest web browser. It’s also the quickest and most inventive, featuring an address bar that predicts where you want to go when you start typing and, with over 5,000 add-ons, you can customize it to meet your specific needs.

5) IrfanView – www.irfanview.com

IrfanView simply excels at being…well, simple. Say you’ve got a steak and you need to cut it – you’d use your steak knife, right? Well, IrfanView is said steak knife – a tool that does exactly what you need to do, quickly with minimal fuss. Consider other image-editing software such as the powerful Adobe Photoshop which is more akin to a meat cleaver; why use that when you have your trusty steak knife? Oh, and the meat cleaver will cost you. I digress.

So what does it do? IrfanView lets you open and edit images, as well as multiple media formats. You can cut and crop, apply batch conversions, add, sharpen, or blur effects, create panoramas, and change color modes easily. The program also continues to add support for an array of file formats and has plug-in support for most image, video, and sound formats, including MP3, AVI and WMA. But arguably its finest attribute is speed, with imagery loaded in an instant and edits implemented lag-free.

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