Windows 7 includes a nice new feature which allows you to display your desktop wallpaper in a slideshow so that it automatically changes at a preset interval. To setup this slide show functionality go to the “Start” menu > “Control Panel” and click “Change desktop background”. Select a “Picture location” (or browse to a folder containing the pictures you would like to display) and then tick images you would like to use as the desktop background. Finally, set the “Change pictures every” interval to specify how often you would like the pictures to change, and you can also tick “Shuffle” to display them in a random order.

Users of Mac OS X Lion with trackpads (such as on a MacBook or users of the Magic Trackpad) will notice that by default Lion uses “natural scrolling”. This adopts the same scrolling paradigm as that found on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, whereby the content tracking follows the movement of your finger. However, this is exactly the opposite of the scrolling direction found in previous versions of Mac OS X and other operating systems. If you would like to disable natural scrolling, and put it back to the “classical” scrolling direction, then go into the “System Preferences” > “Trackpad” click the “Scroll & Zoom” page and untick “Scroll direction: natural”.

Mac OS X users will probably notice that Apple does not offer an out-of-the-box method to do a clean installation of Mac OS X Lion (the latest version of their operating system) on an existing computer, given the App Store only distribution method of this upgrade. While there are various ways floating around to create bootable DVDs and USBs with the Lion installer, these methods can only be used if you have not already installed Lion, as the original App Store download is removed once Lion is installed. To alleviate this issue, Apple has released the Lion Recovery Disk Assistant utility which allows you to create a bootable external drive for the Lion installer, if your computer is already running Lion (just in case you need to do a clean installation in the future). The utility can be downloaded from support.apple.com/kb/dl1433 .

It seems like it was only a few months since Firefox 5.0 was released, and you would be correct in this assumption. However, as part of Mozilla’s new rapid release plan Firefox 6.0 was released on 16 August 2011. This new release adds a few user interface improvements along with a new permissions manager allowing you to be more granular regarding the information that you are willing to share with websites. The latest version of Firefox can be downloaded from www.mozilla.com. You can also find information on the release history of Firefox, together with new features integrated into this latest version, at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Firefox#Version_6.0.

If you use Microsoft Outlook for email at home or work then you may be interested in the ability to add a reminder to reply to email messages. This is particularly handy if you receive a message but only need (or wish) to action the message later, but don’t want to forget. To set a reminder for an email message, in the listing of messages right-click on that particular email then select “Follow Up” and click “Add Reminder”. In the window that appears you can set how you would like the reminder flagged (e.g. Follow up, Reply, or even type your own) together with start date for the reminder along with the due date and reminder date.