In the next few days (but don’t hold your breath, they maybe not so few), I’m planning to publish a few posts dealing with computer security. There I will analyze the effectiveness of currently available security software and deal with reactive, proactive and behavioral defense from malware. But, since you may already be infected (and by saying that I mean: since you ARE already infected, very probably) here is a quick tip: trying to disinfect an heavily compromised system can prove an hard task, even if you use several removal tools (ranging from resident antivirus, online scanners, antispyware, locked files removal tools, registry monitor applications, etc) , since some malware exhibits rootkit behavior, effectively hiding itself from security softwares and resisting heavily to any removal attempt. In these situations, you could find the removal process less painful if you use a recovery boot CD packed with an antivirus. These boot CDs are usually made of a customized Linux distro plus a commercial Antivirus software (there are a few using only GPL software, but the detection rate of ClamAV is notably lower than the commercial solutions). Most of the commercial antivirus producers have their own solution (and if you google a bit, you’ll find their download locations), but here I will only suggest you three of them:

1. Kaspersky Rescue Disk (this one doesn’t feature auto update, so you should always download the latest one from Kaspersky Web site);
2. F-secure Rescue CD;
3. BitDefender Rescue CD.

If your PC is not infected beyond any hope, one of these recovery CDs could do the trick and let you have a disinfected system again, avoiding the painful process of complete reinstallation of Windows and all of your apps.

So you’re an update freak, aren’t you? Always checking you have the latest version of each single piece of software you installed on your Windows PC. Yes, Windows, since if you had Linux you just had to update your repositories to always get the latest updates (ok, it’s not always true: if you installed by hand something which wasn’t in the repositories you’d have to check by yourself, but it’s just a minority of software…).
Anyway, let’s go back to your Windows PC. To be sure you always have the latest versions of each installed software you have a few options:

1. rely on the integrated update checker (but some applications lack this feature);
2. periodically visit the producer’s Web site to check for updates;
3. use some update checker solution…

And here come to help you a host of free programs promising to do the hard work for you. These programs come in different flavors: some of them will try to keep a list of all of the software installed on your system and automatically check online for updates without any (or with little) user intervention. The idea is nice, but this approach leads to some problems: sometimes the program won’t be able to fully list the software installed in your system, sometimes you will get false positives (software erroneously reported as updated). Another approach looks less error prone, but asks for more work from the user: the latter kind of programs just looks for updates in a web page (or in a user defined part of it) and warns the user about every update it finds. So if you are willing to go through the tedious process of manually defining all the Web pages to check, you can be sure to be always notified when there is a change.
Below you’ll find an incomplete list of the two kinds of update checker applications:

Automatic updaters:

1. AppSnap;
2. Appupdater;
3. FileHippo Update Checker;
4. Secunia Personal Software Inspector (this one is mostly geared towards finding security related updates);
5. SUMo Software Updates Monitor;
6. UpdateStar;

Web page update checkers:

1. Ketarin;
2. WebMon.

I won’t go through the full process of testing  all of these applications, but if you google a little you’ll find some interesting reviews/comparisons of most of these applications.

I know, most of you will prefer to have a true GPS system in your car, since they cost so little right now.
But every rule has its exceptions and I'm one of those, since I use it una tantum and I don't want to have another gadget to take with me/forget in the wrong place.
So, for those of you who are lazy like me, here are some interesting solutions:

1. Google Maps Mobile;
2. amAze;
3. MapNav;
4. Nav4All.

Just remember that these applications download from the Internet all of the data necessary to view maps and plan routes, so it's better to use them really little if you don't have a flat data plan.