The best things in life are free, as the song has it. In software terms, it’s also when they work faultlessly and with minimal labour. Here are two fine examples that came my way recently and which I recommend without hesitation.

Online OCR courtesy of OnlineOCR.net

Today I received a call from a guy who said he worked for a Microsoft subsidiary based in Liverpool. His pitch was that their computer systems were laden with emails that had come from my computer and, because his company was in the business of computer security, he could tell that my computer had been compromised and was bulging with viruses.

I asked him to forward me some example emails, but he declined, saying they weren’t allowed to do this.

Having suffered hard disk failures in the past and having been responsible for client data (software and websites) for around 17 years I admit to being paranoid about data loss. I try to operate as if all hard disks are bound to fail when you least expect them to and I therefore have in place backup strategies that try to minimise the impact of this when it happens.

Are there any software packages that I’d recommend to the general computer user (for Windows PCs)? Yes!