Like it or not, Norton Internet Security has had a large and loyal following. This could be attributed to the effect that the large marketing budget enables the company to keep such as presence online, within magazines and across retail shelves. Either way, it’s an effective security product.

Symantec recently announced the launch of their 2010 range of security products and the lastest Norton Internet Security is certainly faster than previous editions. Indeed, we recently moved away from Norton to a rival product and the rival causes our system to pause our streaming iTunes audio when accessing files on our computer, only to find that the other AV suite did exactly the same thing. We’ll be moving back soon.

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For the people that work with multiple files, Windows Explorer has been a bit of a let down. This isn’t Microsoft or even Apple’s fault. The Explorer or Finder has to be designed to be instantly accessible for the novice user. Most people barely use Explorer, using their photo manager to open and view their photos or iTunes to control their audio tracks.

There are other options. You can replace Windows Explorer with an alternative version and there are few better than Directory Opus. It’s a commercial application and has a relative high learning curve, but don’t let that put you off. We guarantee that, if you stick it out for six or so weeks, when you go back to Windows Explorer, it will seem rather basic in comparison. The Apple Finder will leave you infuriated.

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The PDF format excels due to the fact you can output just about any file as a PDF and it will retain the look-and-feel of the source document, retaining the fonts, images and layout, irrespective of the application used to create the file. Create a PDF and you can open the document on a Windows, Mac or Linux computer.

The downside is that most people tend to go for Adobe (PDF) Reader as their default PDF viewer. This takes ages to start up, uses a fair amount of system resources and can cause your system to take longer to boot as it insists on running as a startup process. The reason for this slowdown is that Adobe Reader is a cut-down version of the full Acrobat PDF creator. There are alternatives and there are few better than Foxit Reader.

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It’s far too easy to get behind on your company finances, particularly when there’s more than one person involved. Few companies are now located in the same office building and more and more are ‘virtual’, where the company is made up of a group of individuals situated across different areas of the globe. All these users want access to the finances so they can track company expenses and cash flow.

When people work outside your office, an element of trust is involved with their work. They submit their expenses and your accountant is responsible for making sure they get paid. Problem is that it’s wise to have a system that enables you to track income, expenses and current cashflow.

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Not content with sitting on their laurels, since the fantastic and very recent Opera 10 release, Opera have quickly followed this with a brand new public beta preview of their latest browser, Opera 10.10. Although this version is the first public preview, the technologies included have been around since the release of Opera Unite, a fair few months ago.

What’s new in Opera 10.10? Well, it has the new sharing and media features we saw in Opera Unite. These modules enable you to share files with other users (although we strongly suggest you make sure these are legal files), includes a media player so you can play audio/video files from within the browser and more.

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