Recently my sister-in-law called me with the following problem: her daughter had a Word Document that she needed to work on for homework, but she could not get Microsoft Office to run because the version that came with her Dell PC was asking for a product key and she was having trouble locating it. I told her to try OpenOffice.org instead of rummaging through the house looking for the missing product key.

Your computer is constantly at risk from malware such as Viruses, Trojans, Spyware and more. Anti-Virus software keeps Viruses and many Trojans at bay, but there are a slew of other baddies out there.

Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware specializes in finding and eradicating malware. The program scans your computer for malware and if found, gives you the option to remove it.

Microsoft recently released Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 for public download. I'm currently using it and must say that I'm very impressed. Aside from numerous security improvements and increased performance there are also a slew of cool features that have been implemented in the new browser.

After much fanfare, Firefox 3 was released June 16th and was downloaded more than 8 million times during the first 24 hours alone. I was one of those who installed it within hours of it's release and I'm having a great experience so far. The most notable improvement for me is the increased speed and performance. The previous version was slow to start up and there was a slight hesitation when opening pages, but the new version is very smooth, with no lag. The decreased memory usage is also…

It seems that lately there have been a lot of security vulnerabilities found in many of the most commonly used software. Unfortunately, many of us don't have the time (or desire) to go through all our installed software looking for updates just to stay safe online. Here's one solution; instead of having to subscribe to vulnerability reports and sift through security advisories (many which have nothing to do with your installed programs), you can…

To kick-off the PC security category, I'm going to talk about a freeware gem called Spywareblaster. It is one of the first programs that I install on all my PCs. Spywareblaster helps prevent spyware from getting installed on your PC and is a set it and forget it program which means it doesn't need to be running in the background to do it's job.