Maybe instead of awarding best drive imaging tool this week i will devote this saturday's entry to a guide to backing up your computer, and present a set of concrete policies for backing up..

I just got a nice email from the people who make Right Web Monitor, which was mentioned in the WSW review.
They pointed out to me that they are working on another program, CommunityMate, which is available for download on their site as an alpha build: http://www.right-soft.com/communitymate.

It's specifically designed to keep track of usenet (newsgroup) and web forums, and it looks to be a really neat project.

The web page says:
"CommunityMate is in alpha-version development stage. It's quite uncompleted version and needs to be tested in details. RightSoft invites testers for deep exploration of the program. Most active testers will gain a free registration for their work. If you're interested in it, just drop a note using Contact form. Anyway you can drop your suggestions - they would be greatly appreciated. "

Might be something people here want to try and send them suggestions about.

id consider an antivirus+firewall the bare minimum. and they should be running all the time in the background, imho.

process guard sounds intriguing though, and i'm going to give it a look.

as for antitrojan and antispyware, and others, i wouldnt waste my cpu running such programs in the background, though its nice to have these for on-demand scanning.

slightly off topic but invaluable for those of us who like to test software is a virtual machine like VmWare or VirtualPc; such a program is essential, and we will be doing an award on them in very near future.