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Creating a modern, professional website can be a complex business, requiring a host of skills: design, HTML, scripting, Flash, graphics optimisation -- the list goes on. Which, if you've yet to master any of these, may seem just a little intimidating.

Fortunately Xara Web Designer 7 offers a much simpler alternative. It's a WYSIWYG web editor that includes a host of attractive web templates to get you started, and makes it easy to customize them with all kinds of content, even if you've no web development experience at all.

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Sign me up, baby. Today, Amazon started offering my music (yours, too) from the cloud -- in a web browser or through an Android app. Sorry iPhone users. There is no app for you. The service chokes in Mobile Safari on iPhone, so that's no option.

The concept is simple: Amazon stores your music on its servers -- and you can listen anytime, anywhere and on anything. There are two conjoined services -- Cloud Drive for storage, which also can be used for documents and other files, and Cloud Player for listening to music. Setup is seamless. Amazon customers click links while signed into their accounts, and that's it (Ease of use stops there; see next couple of paragraphs). Amazon offers 5GB storage for free. Additional storage ranges from 20GB to 1TB and from $20 to $1,000 a year, respectively. However, Amazon is running a promotion through the end of the year. Buy one album and get upgraded to 20GB of storage for free.

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There's little doubt that solid-state drives (SSDs) are the future for hard disk-based storage. They're quicker, quieter and cooler than the drives we've come to rely on over the past few decades. But with SSDs now entering the mainstream as prices fall within the reach of consumers, there's one potential performance hurdle to overcome.

TRIM is a command designed to fix a problem whereby over time the write performance of a SSD starts to degrade to as little as 50 per cent of its original speed. Unfortunately, TRIM isn't supported on a lot of operating systems, and while newer drives boast their own technologies to combat this problem with relying on the OS, older drives rely on TRIM being supported. Apple plans to rectify this with the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion (and possibly in the next update for Snow Leopard too), but there's still no guarantee it'll support TRIM on non-Apple SSDs. But now there's a possible solution that's small, free and quick. It's called TRIM Support Enabler.

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Copying files in Windows can be slow and inflexible, so it makes sense to look for a little third-party help. And as we found out recently, it can make a real difference: FastCopy was able to copy files up to 30 percent faster than Windows, in some situations.

There are plenty of similar tools around, though, and one of the oldest, Copy Handler, recently saw its first release of 2011. Could the experience behind this nine-year-old open source project improve on FastCopy's excellent performance? We went back to the benchmarks in an effort to find out.

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When it comes to disc burning tools, you could be forgiven for believing that there is little more to think about than simply copying files from your hard drive to a CD, DVD or Blu-Ray disc. While this may be the case when creating the most basic of backups, Roxio Toast goes to show that there is so much more that can be achieved with the humble recordable disc. The program is a suite of tools all related to the task of burning data onto recordable discs, and includes a number of individual components that can be used to create audio discs, video discs, slideshows, data backups and much more.

With basic disc burning and the option of working with image files built directly into Mac OS X, any third party disc burning tool has to have plenty to offer in order to justify the cost. From the offset, Roxio Toast does not disappoint; a huge set of features means that the application has great scope, and a neatly redesigned interface ensures that any project you are working on can be carried out entirely intuitively, and clearer labelling means that there is little chance of confusion when looking at various buttons and screen elements. The interface overhaul is not a major change from previous versions of the suite, but the minor changes that have been made make all the difference to usability.

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The ability to print documents from iOS is something that huge numbers of iPhone and iPad owners have been waiting for -- it was a feature implemented by Apple when AirPrint was added, but this proved to be less than ideal for many users. Using Printopia for Mac, it is possible to share the printer that you have connected to your Mac so it can be used by your iPad or iPhone.

Unlike AirPrint, which has been found to be very fussy about which printers it will work with, Printopia for Mac can be used with virtually any printer regardless of make or model.

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This week, I unexpectedly started using Google's Cr-48 notebook running Chrome OS as my production system. On Monday, my 11.6-inch MacBook Air fatally crashed, leaving no real alternative since a friend has my Windows laptop. So I fired up the Cr-48, which I reviewed in December in seven parts. It has been a great week that got better after installing yesterday's Chrome OS update -- "0.10.156.46 (Official Build caa798a8)."

I started using the Cr-48 full time a second time with sense of urgency. I couldn't fall back to MacBook Air. It was sink or swim. Treading water wouldn't be good enough. Swim I did: As a work replacement PC, the Cr-48 has proved its worthiness, with Chrome OS obviously being major reason; Google synchronization is another. This second week's use also has me reconsidering the merits of the browser as a user-interface motif.

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Updates to stand-alone antivirus tools generally aren't anything to get excited about. The interface might have changed color, or maybe relocated a few buttons, and of course you'll get the standard promises about improved accuracy, or better performance, but otherwise it's often business as usual.

Avast! Free Antivirus 6.0 is an exception, though, thanks to a host of interesting and highly visible new features: automatic sandboxing, website reputation reporting, improved real-time protection, and many more. And so the end result is a package that looks rather more like a security suite than a simple antivirus engine. But is the new functionality really as effective as it looks? We put the program through some real-life tests in an effort to find out.

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When Microsoft was developing Windows Vista, the company decided to work on the file copy engine, to optimize it for performance. This wasn't exactly the most successful of moves, though -- soon many users were complaining that file copies were taking longer than ever before. And while Windows 7 has addressed many of these issues, there still seems to be plenty of people who feel that copying is still slower than it ought to be.

If you're also tired of staring at the copy dialog, then there are alternatives. Fast Copy, in particular, claims to be the fastest copying software on Windows. It supports UNICODE and long file pathnames (more than 260 bytes), and, the author says, can achieve read/write performance that's close to the limit of your hardware.

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You know I'm an iPad freak. I was first in line to buy one and I've used it so much my screen is cracked. It is the device that's changed my life more than any other in the past year, which, in a year that Microsoft Kinect shipped, is totally impressive. For the past few days I've had a Motorola XOOM. I accepted a loaner because I wanted to prove that it would suck next to an iPad.

One problem: I'm falling in love with it. With a couple of caveats. First, the caveats:

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Do you need an email client? These days, many people see the advantage of accessing their email through the web -- not only does this enable you to check it on any internet-enabled computer, it saves you having to open a separate program each time you want to check your email.

Having said that, you'll need to consider a dedicated email client if you want to access your email offline, or your web-based host's interface leaves something to be desired. You should also consider an upgrade if you're still using Windows Mail (Vista) or Outlook Express (Windows XP or earlier). In this roundup we've sourced five alternative email programs, some free, others not so, and put them through their paces to see which one is best suited for your needs.

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Wiping confidential files from your PC can be a difficult task. Just deleting them leaves the data available to any passer-by with a suitable undelete tool. Overwriting the files can help: but only if you do it properly. And even then it's possible for some data to survive for days, weeks, months, maybe even years -- unless you take advantage of a specialist secure deletion tool like O&O SafeErase 5.

The program is straightforward to use, integrating with Explorer so you can start wiping personal files right away. Just right-click the file or folder you no longer need, choose the SafeErase option and decide just how securely you'd like this deletion to be.

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How safe are you online? These days the biggest prize for any hacker or thief is access to your online accounts -- financial or otherwise, and with many people choosing to protect all their online details with a single, easily crackable password, there's never been a better time to practice safe browsing.

The problem with staying safe is that ideally you should use complicated, unique passwords for every single account you have. That's brilliant in theory, but in practice it's almost impossible to remember that "fjdSkjAh43q2" is the password for your online bank while "rh13um93ba" protects your Paypal account. The answer lies in utilizing a password manager like one of the five we've plucked out from a lineup for this quick-fire comparison.

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Figuring out how to speed up your PC can be a complex process, requiring plenty of time and expertise. Are your system's performance problems down to dated drivers, unnecessary software, hard drive clutter, Registry issues, or something else entirely? It'll probably take considerable effort before you find out.

But maybe there's a simpler solution. Run Uniblue PowerSuite 2011 and it'll scan your system for hundreds of speed-sapping problems, then fix them all at a click, helping you to maintain your PCs performance with the absolute minimum of hassle.

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The concept of taking remote control of one computer from another is nothing new -- NetMeeting predates Windows 98 -- but the goalposts keep changing and one version of Windows won't necessarily play nice with another, never mind non-Windows platforms.

TeamViewer eliminates all these problems in one sweep, offering a single solution for sharing presentations, offering remote support or simply dialling home to retrieve a forgotten file or set the DVR. It works across Windows, Macintosh and Linux systens, and can even be accessed via a web browser or mobile device. Best of all, it's free for personal use.

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