When it comes to keeping your PC clean and clutter-free, millions of people choose the excellent freeware utility CCleaner from Piriform Software to do the job, thanks to its one-click user-friendly interface. Now CCleaner has just got even better thanks to the release of version 3.0.

CCleaner 3.0 features many new and improved features, alongside the usual slew of bug fixes. It’s available as a native 64-bit application for the first time – the program will automatically launch the right version for your Windows setup after installing. You’ll see the user interface has been tweaked with new graphics and icons, but retains its familiar look for those who don’t like change.

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It’s taken a while, but Microsoft has finally unleashed the power of Windows 7′s search, releasing new files that allow you to search YouTube, Flicker, Wikipedia, Yahoo!, Bing and more, all from the comfort of your own desktop.

Windows 7 has been able to do this since it was first released, at least in theory. But first you had to track down an appropriate search connector, a file that told Windows how to communicate with the site of your choice. These haven’t always been easy to find, which makes the whole process much harder than it should be.

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Although the vast majority of people now carry mobile phones, PDAs, laptops or netbooks that can be used to store a contact list that can be synchronised between computers, physical business cards are still is common usage. Manually inputting the contact details from these cards into your address book can be chore, but ABBYY Business Card Reader for iPhone can help to automate the process.

Taking advantage of the iPhone’s built in camera, and ABBYY’s proven track record in OCR (optical character recognition), the app enables you to take a photograph of a business card and automatically create a contact based on the text that has been detected.

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Evernote’s Windows client has always been a useful way to make notes, clip information from emails or web pages, and generally organise all your most important data.

Performance? That’s not always been so great. Until now, that is.

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Lotus Symphony 3 has been officially released, nine months after it first emerged in beta format back in February. This is IBM’s free answer to Microsoft Office for both individuals and businesses, featuring word processor, spreadsheet and presentations tool.

The code is based on OpenOffice 3.x, although the two suites bear little resemblance otherwise. The interface still resembles the earlier release – a single program window where all open documents are displayed as tabs (making it easy to switch between them, regardless of type). Lotus Symphony can also display web pages in separate tabs too, primarily to access online content such as the paid-for LotusLive cloud-based collaboration tool and plug-ins repository, where additional features can be quickly and easily added to Symphony.

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While most Mac users are still soaking up the news that FaceTime is available for the Mac as well as the iPhone 4, Microsoft has released a Mac compatible version of its own instant messaging tool. Messenger for Mac 8 has now been officially released after coming out of beta. It will be available as part of Office for Mac 2011, but it can also be downloaded as a standalone application.

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Adobe has launched a public preview of its new cloud-based content-management tool, Project ROME. It’s aimed at inexperienced amateurs, professionals and educators, who want to create content-rich publications for print, desktop and the web without having to first master a disparate set of potentially expensive tools such as desktop publishing applications, web-building software and other design programs – in other words, programs like those that make up Adobe’s own Creative Suite range.

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Lacie’s online backup service, Wuala, has recently added a major new feature to its arsenal: the ability to synchronise folders between multiple computers using your online backup storage space as an intermediary device. This basically enables you to keep up-to-date and identical files and folders across your collection of PCs and Macs without having to have them all switched on and connected at the same time – files are simply uploaded in the background as part of your normal backup routine, and – if the folder is designated as a sync folder – it’ll automatically update the same folder on all other computers when they’re next switched on and connected to the internet.

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It’s amazing – and disappointing – how quickly PCs can become sluggish, unresponsive and unstable beasts. An entire industry has grown up around this, offering miracle cures in the guise of all-in-one programs that will restore your PC’s speed and stability with just a handful of clicks. PC Tools Performance Toolkit is one such tool or – more precisely – collection of tools, and the question is: is it more charlatan than magician? We installed the program on a sluggish PC to find out what it could do, whether it made any difference and asked ourselves if it was worth the money.

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With digital cameras continuing to improve in quality, just as they fall in price, it’s never been easier to shoot High Definition movies – even on your mobile phone.

To get the most out of your movies you’ll need software that’s up to the HD challenge, though. And that’s where Nero Video Premium HD comes in.

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Opera has released the first public build of Opera 11, the latest version of their web browser.

Top of the new features list this time around is support for extensions, free applets that add new functionality to Opera.

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