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If you use portable drives (such as portable hard drives or USB thumb drives) to move data between work and home, there is always a risk you may lose the drive and thus compromise any potentially sensitive data on the drive. Fortunately, there is an excellent utility called TrueCrypt (http://www.truecrypt.org). This is a free disk encryption utility which can encrypt the contents of both hard drives and portable drives (through a feature called ?Traveller? mode) using industry standard encryption. This means if you lose your portable drive your data should be in a safe encrypted format. Just make sure you use a secure encryption pass key (password) to protect your data!

The Windows Vista sidebar only comes with a few ?gadgets? by default, such as a clock, RSS reader and picture display. However, there are plenty more gadgets which can be added to the sidebar. These can be downloaded from the Windows Live Gallery at http://vista.gallery.microsoft.com .

In Office 2007 the developer tools within Word, Excel and PowerPoint are not displayed by default. This limits the ability of Office power users to write macros and insert other form elements (such as buttons and text boxes) into documents and spreadsheets. To enable the developer tools and ?Developer? tab, click the Office button > ?Word/Excel/PowerPoint Options?. In the window that appears, click ?Popular? and enable ?Show Developer tab in the Ribbon?. Click OK to save and close.

Firefox will save downloaded items to the Windows desktop by default. However, if you have an alternative location, such as a Downloads folder, where you would like to save downloaded items this can be set as the default download location. In Firefox, go to the ?Tools? menu > ?Options?. In the window that appears, click ?Main?. Under the ?Downloads? heading, enable ?Save files to? and click the ?Browse? button. Set the save location to your preferred save folder and click OK and then OK to save and close the Options. All downloaded items will now be saved to this newly defined location.

Word 2007 has a neat feature called Compare. This allows you to compare two documents and highlight any changes/differences between the documents. To access the Compare feature, click the ?Review? tab and the ?Compare? button. Select the two documents you wish to compare (the original document and revised document) then click OK.