The commercial version of the open source Xen virtualisation product, XenServer is what's referred to as a hypervisor. That means it can be installed and run directly on bare hardware instead of being loaded as an ...

Rupert The Bear didn't really like our copy of Windows Vista. In spite of the box claims that Rupert The Bear: Nutwood Games would work happily on any version of Vista post-Windows 98, whenever we tried ...

The raging success of Nintendo's Wii Fit has seen a clamouring of companies quickly look to jump on the same gravy train, and mix the generally exercise-free activity of computing with software and games to persuade ...

Language learning isn't what it used to be. Interactive DVDs that were basically glorified school textbooks have now been replaced with ‘revolutionary' new systems that stop just short of promising to trick you into learning while ...

It's usually a good sign when our pint-sized test subject doesn't require us to sit on his shoulder when testing out educational software. And that was the case for much of The Backyardigans: Mission To Mars, ...

If you can forgive some restrictions brought about by the age of the product, then Winnie The Pooh Pre-School is a good, rounded package of activities that kept our four-year-old test subject happily entertained for a ...

What would your ideal home have in it? Ours would be equipped with built-in fridges in every room (for easy beverage access), self-vacuuming carpets and a quiet dishwashing machine (she does tend to go on a ...

Nuance is now the only major software house producing speech recognition software, so those interested in talking to their PCs must either go with it or resort to the engine included with Windows Vista. While the ...

When games consoles first came onto the market there was a clear distinction between them and PCs: all you did was slot in your cartridge, cassette or disk and you played your game. PCs were for ...

A scrapbook is a collection of notes, photos and memorabilia that focuses on a particular theme or topic, and makes for pleasant reminiscent browsing on some future rainy day. Either that or it's anything written by ...

Focus Multimedia has got this down to a fine art. In Dinosaur Activity Studio, the company has plucked a product that you'd ordinarily not bother with and pumped it out with an attractive, impulse-purchase, £4.99 price ...

We don't know if you've ever noticed, but the lottery - at the risk of stating the obvious - is a bit of a lottery, isn't it? The idea of a lottery number prediction program is ...

Modern day desktop publishing programs, and even word processing packages, have vastly simplified the job of designing business cards at home. So much so that it's not even the kind of feature that's talked about on ...

Downloading music off the Internet has become a bit of a minefield in recent years, with sites appearing and disappearing at a bewildering rate due to the often confusing laws governing copyright. With the huge surge ...

The continuing evolution of the media player shows little sign of slowdown, if Songbird is anything to go by. Granted, it seems impossible to go to a software download site in 2008 without having an assortment ...

Is your dance floor half empty... or is it half full? Either way, that's no good: as a DJ you want it to be jam-packed, with elbow-manoeuvring room only. That's mostly a matter of picking the ...

Specialist software to format the likes of a screenplay or theatre script has for a long time been the kind of luxury few can afford. Granted, there are some cut-down, low cost packages available, but movie ...

In the olden days (back when a bag of sweets was a penny and small boys rode bikes with baskets on the front down cobbled streets) we used to listen with mother. Now, we can get ...

Packed with a level of enthusiasm you hope for - and increasingly expect - from educational software, Science Genius: Solar System Explorer is designed to bring the discovery of outer space to an eight- to eleven-year-old ...

One of an increasing plethora of applications that promise to organise your music collection, MediaMonkey has one major factor in its corner: it's free (although there's also a Gold Edition, which we'll come to shortly). Oh, ...