There are many different ways and means of customising the Windows 7 desktop, both using tools built into the OS itself, and third-party apps. But they all seem to make one assumption: that the default location for the Start menu’s button – the left or top of the Taskbar depending on its position – is the right one.

In many cases, this might feel right or natural, but what if you disagree? What if you’d like the Start button to be placed to the right of – or below – the Taskbar’s Notification area? If the idea interests you, then take a look at Start Orb Mover 1.0.

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Launching your various remote network connections normally requires a host of different tools: Remote Desktop, a VNC Client, Citrix ISA, SSH, Telnet, Rlogin and RAW clients and a whole lot more.

But if you prefer a simpler life then installing mRemoteNG (a fork of the mRemote project) could make a lot of sense.

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There aren’t many things in life that you can say are completely free. In the case of free software, you often find that you are having to make some sort of compromise whether it be in putting up with a limited version of a commercial application, enduring advertisements, or simply having to work with something that is less than impressive in terms of standards. Almost every computer user has need for an office suite, or at least some component of it, at some point, if not every day of their lives. Microsoft Office may be the most widely installed suite, but for the average user it is expensive and unless a copy came pre-installed on your computer, you may not feel inclined to part with that amount of money. This explains the increased interest in free alternatives, and one such suite is LibreOffice Productivity Suite which has just hit the milestone release number of 3.5.0.

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If last week’s Outlook Configuration Analyzer hasn’t helped to sort out your Outlook problems then you’ll probably need to resort to the usual manual troubleshooting approach, which for instance might involve launching the program with one of its command line switches.

You’ll first need to figure out which switch is appropriate, though, and then manually apply it to your copy of Outlook, which isn’t exactly convenient. But fortunately the free and portable OutlookParameterGUI does a good job of simplifying the whole process.

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If you’re looking for an application which can locate driver updates for you then there’s plenty of competition around. Much of this is from commercial packages, but if you’d prefer a free option then DriverIdentifier could be a reasonable choice.

Installation only takes a moment, for instance. And while we’ve seen reports that DriverIdentifier has installed browser toolbars by default in the past, our version (3.9) did nothing of the kind, just launching the program when setup was complete.

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Microsoft Sysinternals has released a new version of its excellent system monitoring tool, Process Explorer 15.13, which this time gains a useful new Background priority setting.

As before, if you’re faced with a runaway program and would like to reduce its impact on your system, without closing it entirely, then you can right-click the process, browse to Set Priority, and choose something like Below Normal or Idle. Windows will then give the process a lower priority when it comes to allocating CPU time, which may help your other programs to run more normally.

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Microsoft Outlook is a large and complex application, so if your copy starts misbehaving then it may not always be obvious where to start looking for a solution. But don’t worry – help is finally at hand. Two Microsoft engineers with more than 30 years of combined experience in supporting Office, Outlook and Exchange Server have produced the Outlook Configuration Analyzer Tool (OCAT), a useful program which will scan your Outlook 2007/ 2010 profile for common issues and report on anything it finds.

OCAT isn’t portable, unfortunately, so you’ll need to install it first. But with that done, it’s easy enough to use: make sure Outlook is running, launch the program, click Start a scan > Start scanning, and around 20 seconds later (if our test PC is typical) you’ll be looking at a detailed report.

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Can’t wait for the summer release of Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X? If so, then you might be interested to learn that while developers are getting their hands on a preview version of Mountain Lion, humble users like you and me can get a glimpse into one of its new features right now.

That’s right, if you’re a Lion user who’s nicely updated to OS X 10.7.3, you can try out a beta of Apple Messages, Mountain Lion’s successor to the iChat application.

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If you’ve ever tried to figure out your PC’s NTFS folder permissions with the standard Explorer tools then you’ll know it can take a while. The basic details are a few clicks away, even the advanced tools don’t tell you everything you need to know, and if you need to check several folders then you’ll have to right-click each one of them individually: very tedious.

Fortunately there is now an interesting alternative, though, in the NTFS Permissions Reporter.

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Protecting yourself from web-borne malware can often be something of a hassle. Especially if the process involves browser toolbars, which can slow you down and make your system more unstable.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And the new Mirage Anti-Bot is a great example of a simpler, more lightweight approach.

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It has taken rather a long time, but the stalwart of file compression, WinZip, has finally released a version of their famous archive handling tool for iPhone and iPad. Available completely free of charge, the app can be used to open compressed files and preview their contents, and while the restrictions of iOS mean that this is not as complete a compression tool as many people would hope, WinZip for iOS is still a welcome addition to the App Store.

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