I have been trialling some new PC performance monitoring software that I stumbled across - Soluto Beta
It's free at present, and may stay that way.

But wow! I am truly impressed by Soluto. Nice job.           
As a one-time software programmer and developer, I am always on the lookout for new/specialised software, and enjoy trialling/testing it. I have become skeptical about it though, as the majority is kinda mediocre.
I started using Soluto on 2010-06-07. On my first re-boot, the savings on boot-up were a little over 2 minutes off my 6-minute boot-up time. After some more tweaking after that, and then a huge Windows Update today,  the time has gone back up to 6:03 minutes, so there's still more tweaking required, methinks. Soluto lets you make decisions as to whether to postpone startup of components until after boot ("Delay") or temporarily suspend them from startup ("Pause") or leave them "IN Boot". "No brainers" are recommended for your special attention to do something about. The concept is rather clever, using crowdsourcing feedback for data on the components and providing a rather nifty dynamically interactive timeline which shows the system changes you made before and after using Soluto, so you can see how your boot-up time has varied over time and what the possible causes of variation were. There is also a rather nifty dynamically interactive component chart, with components arranged in startup time order.

Because of this relatively scientific approach, there's no more guesswork in identifying the boot-up criminals, and because Soluto times your boot-up by component I now know that (for example):

• ZoneAlarm's True Vector Internet Monitor takes a whopping 46 seconds in boot-up.
• Windows' System takes 62 seconds.
• MS Anti-malware takes 53 seconds.
• Clipboard Help and Spell takes 9 seconds.
• FARR takes 7 seconds

I am not sure whether I shall keep Soluto longer term - it depends on how useful it is after a longer period of use - but the omens for keeping it are pretty positive so far.

Hoping this this might be of use/help to somebody.

FFBookmarkUnpacker

http://nod5.dcmember...ookmarkunpacker.html

Intended for use on a ramdisk that clears on each boot. For non-ramdisk use, avoid duplicates by deleting the old unpack root folder before running.

This is an easy way to have FF3 bookmarks show up in FARR and Everything.

Edit: a limitation: the script only unpacks one level of bookmark folders. It doesn't unpack recursively.

There have been mentions of similar services on DC before, but this seemed a useful up-to-date summary.  The current edition of New Scientist magazine, dated 5 June 2010, No. 2763, has an article entitled Me and my Avatar: Upload your mind and you could live forever, by Linda Geddes.  The complete article is currently (2010-06-08) online as Immortal avatars: Back up your brain, never die.

The third and final page has a box entitled Death and the net: How the web can help you log off gracefully for the very last time... listing the following services:

• My Last Email
  Enables you to leave letters, photos or video messages for friends and family, as well as write your own obituary
• Deathswitch
  Imagine you die with a secret that you longed to reveal. Deathswitch is an automated system that prompts you for your password on a regular basis. If you repeatedly fail to respond, it assumes you have died and emails pre-scripted messages to nominated addresses
• Legacy Locker
  You create a master list of usernames and passwords for all your online accounts and social networking sites. Once your death has been verified by Legacy Locker, the list will be emailed to a named beneficiary
• Seppukoo
  Samurai warriors preferred to commit ritual suicide rather than allow themselves to be captured by enemies. Seppukoo.com enables you to commit "virtual suicide" by deleting your Facebook account - or at least it did until a legal wrangle with Facebook, though the service hopes to be up and running again soon
• Slightly Morbid
  If something terrible happened to you, who would tell your online friends? This service enables users to consolidate all their online contacts, allowing a trusted third party to contact them in the event of your demise

Cybernetnews wrote about a neat typing tutor/game for kids (and adults) called Rapid Typing:

http://cybernetnews....rn-to-type-for-kids/

Here's a few of our future and our steady march towards free products sponsored by advertisements. Google's new advertising-subsidized phone coming soon:

http://www.theonion....geted-ads-dir,17470/

http://secunia.com/advisories/40026

http://secunia.com/advisories/40034

Impact   System access
Where    From remote

NOTE: The vulnerability is currently being actively exploited.

Doesn't sound too good.