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Ah yes, sex. Where would we be without it? Certainly, it'd be easier to find parking spaces, but much tougher to find a date to the movies (or perhaps a reason to go on a date in the first place).

Yet despite the fact that most would agree that a good horizontal rumba is rather better than, say, a good session of genocide, the number of real PC games that have dared take on more sexual subjects can practically be counted on the fingers of one hand and… oh, behave.

See, your smirk is the problem. Games have always had an uneasy relationship with sex. From the outside, many seem to be pandering to the egos and fantasies of little boys – developers falling over themselves to create bouncy barbarian maidens in chainmail bikinis, glistened oily hunks with ridiculously large swords, gangsters doing deals in strip clubs, and lithe athletic heroines with chronic back-ache.

Female characters get it the worst, whether it's trying to fight in high-heels or freezing to death in arctic tundra, or suddenly finding that heavy all-covering platemail suddenly morphs into something low-cut that shows off lots of belly, no matter how it looked on the dead orc it was taken from.

For the most part this is as far is anyone dares go. Actual nudity, graphic sex scenes, or even characters commenting on the fact that the team's new Paladin looks like she funds her adventures down the local docks are never actually mentioned, leading to the most incredible coyness.

Take Grand Theft Auto, whose gangsters happily murder, swear, drink and make up whole new laws to break… but where do they hang out? A seedy bar where they can ogle girls in bikinis that could easily go in a PG-rated movie, if not for the naughty language.

When the player romances one of the possible girlfriends in the game, do we see any action? Nope, just a few sound effects played over an external view of the city.

Too hot for screen

It's no surprise that developers are scared. Putting sex into a game not only makes it harder to sell (at least in the US, where the dreaded Adults Only rating keeps titles out of the bigger stores), it paints a bright red target right on its face for the pundits and talking heads.

Two games in particular have faced this in recent years, Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and – more bizarrely – the brilliant Bioware RPG Mass Effect.

GTA is easy to understand – it's a game the moral majority has always hated, so finding out there was a sex-based rhythm game called Hot Coffee buried in the code was like Christmas.

Never mind that it was as objectively erotic as banging Barbie dolls together, and consisted of nothing more than two fully clothed, entirely consenting adults dry humping for a few seconds, the scandal was enough that when GTA4 came round, the worst Rockstar did was the tongue-in-cheek 'Warm Coffee' achievement during romances. Although the first DLC, The Lost And Damned, did slip in a naked politician's dangling penis.

Interestingly enough, a very similar mini-game also appeared in the adventure game Fahrenheit - a quick-time-event involving moving the mouse forward and backwards in time with the main character's thrusts. Silly as it sounds, it worked OK – although the scene was removed for the American release.

Mass Effect's controversy on the other hand was just mindblowing. Its most graphic sex scene consisted of a couple of flashes of a blue woman's bottom and a little obscured side-boob.

It took place almost at the end of the game, between characters who had come to know and care about each other, on the cusp of a mission that was almost guaranteed suicide. It was clean, classy, and so inoffensive that even psychologist Cooper Lawrence described the controversy over it as "kind of a joke".

Who is Cooper Lawrence, you ask? She's the psychologist who didn't actually bother watching the scenes in question before going on Fox News to publicly condemn the game's sexism and objectification of women. Nice one, Cooper. Thanks.

Even worse was one conservative blogger, Kevin McCullogh, who described the action like this: "It allows its players – universally male no doubt – to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to 'engage' and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54-inch screen, HD clarity as the video game 'persons' hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of."

To clarify: No. Just… no. On every level, no. Still, all this did apparently have one effect. Bioware's most recent game, Dragon Age, also has sex scenes. In style, they're very similar to Mass Effect's, with one key difference. This time, the characters keep their knickers on at all times. So far, no controversy.

Of course, none of this means that there haven't been sex-focused games. They've just typically been in their own cordoned-off part of the industry, rather than on the shelves of your local store.

The first to be treated like a proper game was Sierra Online's Softporn Adventure, an awful text adventure game about a man trying to get laid in a sleazy gambling town. This was later remade as Leisure Suit Larry, although what most people don't realise is that this was more a parody of the original than anything else, and that its designer, Al Lowe was far more entertained by humiliating his new creation than interested in arousing the player at the keyboard.

These early games suffered from the fact that text adventures simply aren't sexy, the graphics of the time weren't up to much, and games themselves were still at a Donkey Kong level of complexity.

Most were less games as interactive versions of a horny, somewhat disturbed 14-year-old's notebook, ranging from Atari games like Custer's Revenge (a naked, erect Custer crosses a screen to rape an Indian maid) and Bachelor Party (a Breakout game with ladies instead of bricks), to PC titles whose names really say it all: Strip Poker (served up in sizzling, sexy… er… greyscale), Astrotit (an interactive discussion of Wittgenstein and how his philosophy relates to the quintessential existential crisis), Drive-In (get to third base at the movies) and Granny's Place (not remotely what you think, but we'd hate to spoil that mental image…)

All these games were from the 1980s, before the PC gaming market really started. After that, developers realised that with the growth of graphics, and the increasing scale of the market, this was the perfect time to establish sexuality as a core part of what mature games could handle, and move the market onto a whole new level of advanced characterisation and social worth.

No, just kidding. They made Sex Vixens From Outer Space, Leather Goddessses of Phobos, Girlfriend Construction Set and Butt-Slam, the PC's only dedicated multiplayer board game about sodomy. Makes ya proud, doesn't it?

CONVENIENT STRAPS: Nice of the mad scientist to put the restraining bands right there. Wouldn't want the poor girl getting embarrassed or anything

Then, as now, anyone hoping for any real excitement from any of these games would have been sadly disappointed. The coyness was already in place as early as Leisure Suit Larry in 1987, where the sex scenes were obscured by a giant bouncing CENSORED box. Others, like Coktel Vision's Emmanuelle, hid the 'good' stuff under incredibly tedious adventure games that bordered on abuse for self-abusers.

Love games

One thing that hasn't changed over the years is that sex-heavy games are typically awful. Fortunately, there are exceptions to that rule: for instance, 2005's Playboy: The Mansion is a perfectly solid tycoon game, and Leisure Suit Larry: Love For Sail a fine adventure game, but they're few and far between.

One of the worst ever is the most recent Larry game, Box Office Bust, which features some of the worst platforming action you're ever likely to play, characters who look like they've escaped from your worst nightmares, and hysterically for a game which opens on the line "I'd fuck a cliff", a cowardly lack of even nudity.

It's even worse than the previous low watermark: Lula 3D, because while still unbelievably terrible on every level, at least that one offered some entertainment value by being headfizzlingly insane. Not many games feature random shoot-outs with the police, catapulting dogs at Mount Rushmore, or end with a drugged up pornstar shooting imaginary skeletons with a handgun in the middle of a psychedelic New Orleans.

TRUE MADNESS: We'd show a sex scene from Lula 3D, but they're just too rubbish

Non sex-focused games can still have a little fun, but it's usually more restrained; restricted to the occasional set-piece here and there. Sometimes, it's just to try and set the mood, or when seen early in a game, to try and hint that if it's offering nudity so easily, imagine what might be coming up later fellas if you stick with it.

The random naked ladies at the start of 1992's Rex Nebular and the Cosmic Gender Bender (yes, really) and Les Manley: Lost In LA both pulled this trick. Lost In LA promptly followed it up exactly once, with a truly hysterical 'mud wrestling' scene that barely bothered with the wrestling bit, never mind the mud.

Most never even go that far, if only because games that have to rely on this kind of method for keeping players around rarely have anything else capable of keeping their target audience playing. These aren't great games.

For the most part, we like to think of sex as a positive thing: fun, romantic, often a bit silly. If that side gets little real attention in games, it's hardly surprising that the darker elements are almost unheard of, outside of the occasional character background story in an RPG, or as another threat for the hero to step in and prevent, such as the classic damsel in distress routine, whatever the specifics or maturity level of the situation.

Dragon Age is one of the few to take it further. The City Elf origin story, taking place on the day of the player character's arranged marriage, is all about a local lord showing up and kidnapping the women from the ceremony (including the player, potentially) for a very specific kind of party.

Your job involves saving the day, as usual, and the player is never in the position of being a rape victim themselves, but it's still a very dark opening, even for a game that's not afraid of being nasty. As long as everyone keeps their pants on.

There have been others however, to various degrees, that have taken the next step. Most famously, Phantasmagoria features a scene of husband-on-wife assault, in a game where the player controls the wife. It's actually very tame by any non-gaming standard, lovemaking turned violent rather than an outright rape (not that we're defending him!), and like most games end up resorting to, clothed dry-humping rather than actual sex.

THE DARK SIDE: Japanese eroge games bounce bizarrely from sexy slapstick to incredibly horrible scenes of rape

The fact that it was one of the earliest mainstream full motion video games added much of the impact, especially as the player character, Adrienne, slumps to the ground in tears afterwards, but it's still very tame compared to any TV show or movie covering the same kind of subject matter.

Cyberdreams' I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, based on the short story by Harlan Ellison, featured a more psychological example. With the world turned into a radioactive hellhole, an evil supercomputer called AM is passing the centuries by torturing the last five members of the human race.

The only woman of the group, Ellen, is a rape victim whose experience has left her traumatised by enclosed spaces and the colour yellow, so, of course, her challenge in the game is to explore a cramped yellow pyramid, with AM adding insult to injury by bringing her rapist back from the dead.

As with the other stages of the game, the way to win is to make each character in turn defeat their personal demons and fatal flaws, and it's saying something that Ellen's isn't the darkest of the set; that prize goes to Nimdok, the former Nazi concentration camp scientist who AM feels an unsurprising kinship with. Oddly, he wasn't in the German release of the game…

Do it yourself

But back to lighter stuff! If developers are often petrified of nudity, modders aren't. The humble 'nude skin' has been a regular fixture in games ever since they went 3D. A switched texture here, a new body mesh there and ding! Instant fan-service!

Obviously, this is pretty tragic stuff, but it's an almost inevitable part of popular games now with vaguely attractive female characters. The first Dragon Age mod was a transparent bra to try and get round the main game's prudishness.

There are patches for everything from Quake 3 Arena to Half-Life 2, with players even now gawking at World of Warcraft Night Elves who have no idea they're now dancing au naturel, and in a zombie apocalypse not far away, a Zoey trying to work out why Francis' clothes never seem to get ripped to shreds by Left 4 Dead's zombies.

The nude skinning gets especially strange with story-based games. By now, you'd think Valve would have prepared for it enough to slip in a "Sweetie, you forget something?" from Eli when Alyx Vance shows up wearing nothing but a belt, but no.

In other games, it really gets ridiculous: such as in Oblivion, where there aren't just competing groups of anatomically correct figures, but people modding them with new outfits to wear. Just occasionally though, it can make sense, like the Fallout 3 Sin City mod, which adds back some of the seediness that old-school Fallout players missed in Bethesda's largely innocuous wasteland, or giving the Grand Theft Auto gangsters an actual strip club to visit.

Mostly though, it's as grown-up as Power Rangers. Nude mods have largely taken over from the classic practical joke, claiming that a particular game has a nude code in it. Unsurprisingly, Tomb Raider was the most commonly cited one, with one cheating device actually using a picture of her clothes flying off along with the words 'GET THE CODE' in an advert.

HIDE AND SEEK: Even games that are comfortable with sex scenes like a bit of the old peek-a-boo

The traditional gag was to see just how much people would do for a glimpse of polygon flesh, like finishing a level on the hardest difficulty in under 30 seconds, or some ludicrous 'turn around 30 times counter-clockwise, then fifteen clockwise and press all buttons' nonsense that would make the victim merely think they'd just done it wrong.

In practice, one of the few games that let you do anything even close was Max Payne 2, which offered a code that let you replace Max with any character in the game, including the naked version of Mona Sax that was only used for a cut-scene where he sees her in the shower.

Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude also offered an 'Everybody Naked' option for finishing the game, which, again, got taken out of the original US release (but got put back in again for a separate Uncut version later). Not really a cheat though, even if many did just download a savegame to access it without finishing the game.

The next generation

Can we expect games of the near future to cast off their childish roots and embrace sexuality in a smarter, more mature way? No.

As nice as that thought might be, right now the games industry, as a whole, remains petrified of the idea, ensuring the same split between the companies desperate to avoid potential controversy and those actively courting it for promotion's sake.

There are individual titles trying new and interesting ideas, including Heavy Rain on the PS3 (one scene involves a player character having to do a striptease for a criminal, with the idea being more to pass the feelings of degradation over to the player rather than arouse them) and Dragon Age, which offers everything from a genuinely tender romance to a casual off-screen foursome, but for the most part, this is going to be terra controversial for as long as the mass-media continues to have gaming in its crosshairs.

This will, of course, change in time. Just as the breaking of the Hays Code let films enter a world where couples didn't have to be married to enjoy a Scene Of Passion, and comics escaped the dreaded Comics Code Authority, games will reach a point where any arguments can be with individual titles, and a Grand Theft Auto or Call Of Duty isn't treated as a representative of all games.

For the moment though, expect more the same naughty bikinis and peek-a-boo immaturity, because they're certainly not going anywhere.

Ex-DICE boss and hardcore game designer Fredrik Liliegrin has labelled the Nintendo Wii a "virus" and says that it is "not a video games machine".

Liliegrin is CEO of Antic Entertainment, a developer that claims to produce 'casual games for the hardcore'.

The ex-DICE boss told GamingUnion: "Wii, to me, I would describe it as a virus, that doesn't stick. Everyone comes home, it's a toy, people have got to realise the Wii is a toy, not an entertainment-focused product.

Anti-Wii rant

"People come home, someone, they play Wii for a bit, feel it's really cool, blah blah blah, they go out and buy one. Ask people how often they play the Wii, that are not the core game consumer that buys one because they have an Xbox 360 and a Wii or a PlayStation 3 and a Wii.

"The people that only own the Wii, ask that consumer how often they use their machine. They just don't use it, it was cool, but they're not gamers, so they put it away.

"Other than the Wii Fit phenomenon that helped a lot of people get a nice cutie voice telling that they're fat and need to go work out, they need to find other alternatives. Nintendo is smart in that way in that they realize this is not a video game machine, this is not a games game machine."

Microsoft has been demonstrating the first official hardware prototype of an LG-manufactured Windows Phone 7 Series handset which is due for commercial release later in 2010.

Windows Phone 7 Series was the big news to come out of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona earlier this month, and a Microsoft rep pulled out this first concept handset when filming the Engadget podcast in New York this week.

Keyboard and touch

As you can see from the above picture, courtesy of Engadget, Microsoft's new mobile handset will feature a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a touchscreen.

Engadget mention that the new Windows phone is slightly thicker than an Apple iPhone, which one would expect from a handset featuring a slide-out keyboard.

The phone also features a 5 megapixel handset. However, with September looking like the earliest possible date this handset might be available to the great unwashed, there is still plenty of time for Microsoft to up the specs and add in new features to the first Windows Phone Series 7 mobile.

Via Engadget

Sir Clive Sinclair released the ZX80 thirty years ago this week. A small plastic home computer that cost a mere £79.95 in kit form (and £99.95 assembled) that was to fundamentally change the ways in which we interacted with our TVs for ever.

In a recent interview to celebrate the thirty year anniversary, Sir Clive made the remarkable admission that he doesn't use a computer these days and that he despises the distractions of email.

ZX profits and email nightmares

Sir Clive also recalls how the ZX80 and its successor the slim black ZX81 made Sinclair and amazing £14m profit in a year, which he admits would still "be a lot today."

"The sad thing is that today's computers totally abuse their memory – totally wasteful, you have to wait for the damn things to boot up, just appalling designs," Sir Clive told The Guardian. "Absolute mess! So dreadful it's heartbreaking."

Rather shockingly, Sir Clive adds that he doesn't use a computer or email at all, but that "the company does."

He continues: "Well I find them annoying. I'd much prefer someone would telephone me if they want to communicate. No, it's not sheer laziness – I just don't want to be distracted by the whole process. Nightmare."

The Digital Economy Bill in the UK could well wipe out free public Wi-Fi access in universities, libraries and independent cafes across Britain, if new reports are to be believed.

Some British legal experts think that the penalties associated with failure to comply with the new requirements of the Bill might well mean that independent caffs, universities and local libraries may face huge liabilities – and thus that it would be safer for them to simply switch off un-password protected free Wi-Fi access for their students, visitors and customers instead.

Outlaws open Wi-Fi

Lilian Edwards, professor of internet law at Sheffield University, told ZDNet that the Bill will effectively "outlaw open Wi-Fi for small businesses."

She continued: "This is going to be a very unfortunate measure for small businesses, particularly in a recession, many of whom are using open free Wi-Fi very effectively as a way to get the punters in.

"Even if they password protect, they then have two options -- to pay someone like The Cloud to manage it for them, or take responsibility themselves for becoming an ISP effectively, and keep records for everyone they assign connections to, which is an impossible burden for a small café."

You can see more on the scenario described by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in this explanatory document.

Universities in a muddle

Lord Young, a minister at BIS, says libraries can not be exempted because "this would send entirely the wrong signal and could lead to 'fake' organisations being set up, claiming an exemption and becoming a hub for copyright infringement".

And as for universities, Lord Young adds: "it does not seem sensible to force those universities who already have a system providing very effective action against copyright infringement to abandon it and replace it with an alternative".

However, "[Universities] don't know if they're subscribers, ISPs or neither," argues legal expert Lillian Edwards. "If the government is not clear, how on earth are the universities supposed to respond? This seems almost unprecedented to me, for a government document."

Stop, relax and take deep breaths. If shutting down your PC, and bringing a halt to its grinding whirrs, hisses and juddering clicks, ever gives you the same sense of relief as finishing a gym session, then it's time to drag your PC to the sound doctor.

As with fast cars, there's a conventional expectation that powerful computers have to sound like they're trying to break the land-speed record, but with a bit of understanding about airflow theory, and a few bits of specialist kit, you can transform any PC from a furious elephant into a sleeping kitten.

Whether you're attempting to quash the intrusive drone of a top-end gaming PC, or stop your media centre PC from distracting you during intense, quiet moments in movies, there are loads of ways in which you can calm the noise from your PC's mechanical guts.

In fact, the raucous racket that's associated with PCs has become such a common complaint, that there's now a huge industry dedicated to making components specifically to sort it out.

There's plenty to consider here, from alternative CPU and GPU coolers, through to dampening the rattling clicks that come from your hard drive. Of course, some methods are much more effective than others, so over the next few pages we'll show you which remedies we recommend for curing your PC's sonic ailments, and why.

We'll tell you all the basics that you need to know about airflow, which kit is best for the job and what sorts of factors you need to consider when you're installing your new kit.

But doesn't making your PC quiet mean you'll have to make sacrifices? Well, yes it does. You may not be able to overclock your CPU to the edge of hell and back, but you'll be able to get close to the first lava pool.

It's surprising how much quieter you can make your PC with just a few tweaks, and without sacrificing too much in terms of performance. You can still build a high-end powerhouse PC that doesn't sound like it's harbouring a Lancaster Bomber within its whining insides, and you can easily dampen the din from a slim line media centre PC too.

Foam matting

One slightly different approach to reducing your PC's noise is to use foam matting to create a sound absorbent barrier between your PC's insides and the outside world.

Kits such as the AcoustiPack Lite (£23) enable you to line your case with an acoustic barrier, but be warned that these kits are really just one gun in your arsenal when it comes to silencing your PC, and they're not the all-silencing panacea that some people expect.

Your case's airflow system will have been designed to draw in air from very specific places, and there will often be carefully positioned vents on your case's side panels, as well as the back. These are unfortunately where a great deal of the noise in your PC escapes, and it would also be thermal-suicide to cover them up with foam matting.

If you block a crucial part of the intake or exhaust system then your airflow system stops functioning properly, meaning you have to increase your fan speed to make up the difference, which will negate the whole point of the matting in the first place.

If you get the balance right, however, then kits such as these can still make a difference. If you cut the matting to avoid any vents, and stick it to your case's front and side panels, then you may not block out all the noise from your PC, but you will block a fair chunk of it.

Bear in mind that this kind of matting doesn't actually produce a sound-proof barrier, either, but rather absorbs certain frequencies. You may find that a kit such as this won't make your PC quieter, but it will certainly block some of the annoying trebly frequencies that come from your fans.

Airflow principles

The first factor to consider is airflow. Most PC cases draw in air with an intake fan at the front (usually at the bottom), and then expel the air via an exhaust fan at the back. The idea is that air flows in one direction over the components, before it's then pushed out.

Basically, your case will have an intricately engineered airflow system with which you don't want to interfere. Even passively cooled components, such as motherboard chipsets, still rely on airflow. After all, the heat needs to go somewhere once it's been spread out by a heatsink.

Some specially-designed chassis enable you to use the chassis as a heat-dump via heatpipes, but these have been specifically engineered for this purpose. You'll need to stick with the principle of airflow in a standard PC case, but you'll be surprised how quietly an air-cooled system can run with the right components.

Noise measurements

There's a common misconception that installing larger fans will make your system noisier than using smaller ones, but the opposite is generally true. The bigger the fan, the more airflow it can push out at a lower speed. Not only does a fan's noise level increase as you increase the speed, but so does its frequency – and it's that high-pitched trebly drone that's the most grating to human ears.

The most common noise measurement you'll see on fan specifications is the decibel (dB), which defines the sound pressure level in relation to the limits of the human ear. A quiet office has a decibel level of around 30dB, and a standard human conversation with someone a foot away measures around 60dB. At the other end of the scale, a loud rock gig will hit around 110dB.

This is only a measurement of sound pressure, though, which is why some fan manufacturers, such as Arctic Cooling, also quote fan noise using a psychoacoustic measurement such as 'sone'. Although human hearing has a frequency range of 20Hz to 22kHz, the 1kHz to 5kHz bracket is the most sensitive.

A sone is made up of 40 phons, where a phon represents a 1KHz tone at 1dB. This means that one sone is a 1KHz tone at 40dB, and two sone represents double the loudness of one.

Some manufacturers, such as Zalman, also quote decibels using the A-weighting (dBA), which weighs the curve in favour of the 1KHz to 6KHz frequency. Even so, both irritating and tolerable fan noise can still fall into this frequency bracket, so dBA isn't a foolproof measurement. Use these ratings as a yardstick for comparison, but always check reviews of fans to get an idea of their noise level too.

A noise level under 20dBA or 1 sone is a general area to aim for here.

One of the main culprits when it comes to causing fan noise is the CPU cooler. Both Intel and AMD's stock coolers may be fine at keeping fiery temperatures under control, but they also make quite a superfluous din.

Fortunately, this can solved quite easily by buying a third-party cooler. An affordable, and extremely popular, example cooler is Arctic Cooling's Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 (£23), which is compatible with both Intel and AMD's recent socket designs.

With its 92mm fan, aluminium heatsink tower and copper heatpipes, Arctic Cooling claims that this cooler is capable of cooling a Core 2 Quad Q9950 to 52.6°C, while revving the fan at just 2,500rpm and generating a noise level of just 0.8 sone.

Meanwhile, the Intel stock cooler had to spin its smaller fan at 2,850rpm to cool the CPU to 64.3°C, which resulted in over double the loudness at 1.75 sone.

With any tower-shaped CPU cooler such as this, make sure that the fan is positioned facing the front of the case, so that it's drawing air from the intake fan through the heatsink's fans, where it can then be expelled by the exhaust fan.

However, while the Freezer 7 Pro Rev 2 is great for dual-core and low-end quad-core systems, the fan noise can get particularly annoying when it spins up to a high level, which it will need to do on high-end, quad-core processors, especially if they're overclocked or based on an older, hotter core.

There are plenty of higher-end alternative coolers out there to choose from, but a great affordable example is the Scythe Kama Angle Rev B (£33). This mastodon of a cooler positions its huge 120mm fan at a 45° angle, so it draws in air from your intake fan over the heatsink before it goes out of the back.

The heatsink's L-shape will also make it effective in cases that have a blowhole at the top, such as Antec's P180. At its lowest speed, the fan is quoted as having a noise level of just 6.4dBA, and goes up to 24dBA at its highest speed. Be warned, though, that it's a monster, so measure the room around your CPU socket before you order one.

Chill the pixel

Next comes the graphics card, which is where you'll often find those hissing little 40mm and 60mm fans. Thankfully, most new graphics cards only spin up the fan when a 3D game is running, but this isn't always the case, and that spinning fan noise can still really get on your nerves when gaming, assuming it's not being masked by all the explosions.

Thankfully, there are alternatives, and a fine example is Zalman's VF1000-LED (£33), which makes just 18dBA at its slowest speed of 1,400rpm. This cooler has the standard mounts for many of ATI and Nvidia's GPUs. Plus, if you have a Radeon HD 4870 or 4890, you can add Zalman ZM-RHS-90 heatsink (£5) to thoroughly cool the graphics card's MOSFETs.

Meanwhile, if you have a dual-GPU card, such as a Radeon HD 4870X2, or a more powerful single-GPU card, such as a GeForce GTX 285, then it's worth taking a look at Arctic Cooling's Accelero Xtreme range (£50).

With three 92mm fans, Arctic Cooling claims that its Accelero Xtreme 4870X2 cooled a Radeon HD 4870 X2's two GPUs down to 46°C while only emitting 0.5 sone. Compare this with the 96°C and 4.5 sone of the stock cooler, and you can see what a massive difference we're talking about here.

Bear in mind that you'll need space for these coolers, though. With an Accelero Xtreme, your card will require three motherboard slots, rather than the usual one or two.

Passive cooling

Couldn't you just remove the fans altogether? Well, yes, but this isn't a decision that you should take lightly. Passive coolers such as Arctic Cooling's Accelero S2, as well as Zalman's VNF100, can be attached to many different GPUs, and the latter also enables you to mount the heatsink on the back of your graphics card, so that it doesn't take up any more slots than is completely necessary.

However, you won't be able to cool your whole PC passively. The idea behind passive processor and GPU coolers is that they take advantage of the airfl ow already passing through your case. This isn't necessarily a bad idea, but you'll want to keep an eye on your CPU and GPU temperatures (more on this later) if you're only using passive heatsinks.

Basically, you'll need to make sure that you have plenty of airflow coming from your case fans passing over the coolers.

We now come to case fans, and you may not even need to replace the ones that are currently in your case. One of the main issues with fan noise isn't the fan, but the fact that it's screwed directly into a metal case, causing unneeded vibrations. A simple way around this is to isolate it from your case using rubber mounts, or a sleeve such as the Fansis rubber gasket (£3.39).

Alternatively, there are plenty of quiet fans available that will enable you to push plenty of air through your case without making it end up sounding like a helicopter. The bigger the better here, so if your case contains 80mm fans, but has mounts for 120mm fans, then replace your existing fans with the latter.

Good examples of quiet fans include the Noctua NF-P14 FLX (£20) and the quirky-looking Coolink Ultra fans (£11).

Finally, we have the PSU. If your computer has a standard, unbranded PSU, then this is more than likely to be the noisiest player in your PC. There are plenty of quiet PSUs available that cut out this kind of noise dramatically, such as the Fractal Design Newton models (from £109).

Spinning down

Your next job is to slow down those fans, as even a quiet fan will make a noise like a wind tunnel at full speed. Most current motherboards make this an easy job, as their power connectors can accommodate PWM control. This enables your motherboard to adjust the voltage applied to each fan on the fly, depending on the temperature.

However, many people prefer to have a PC that's consistently quiet all the time, and not every fan can be controlled by PWM either. Your solution here is to venture into fan controllers.

In the early days of modding, plucky enthusiasts found that you could place a resistor in the middle of a fan's 12V power cable to step down the voltage applied to a fan. These days, however, you can spare yourself any soldering work by ordering a ready-made Zalman RC100 (£2.50), which is available in both 5V and 7V versions.

A similar effect can also be achieved using a Molex splitter cable. A Molex cable gets power from your PSU's 5V and 12V rails, and a Zalman ZM-MC1 cable (£2.60) enables you to connect a case fan to just the 5V portion and keep the noise right down.

Plus, if you want to achieve this effect with several fans, then the Fractal Design Fan Power Splitter (£13) will split the voltage from a Molex cable into a number of different voltages and power up to 16 fans, and it will also sit neatly in a slot backplate.

Bear in mind, however, that fans require a minimum voltage to spin up, and not all fans can run on 5V. Your fans' minimum voltage is usually listed in the specifications, so check this out first.

If you want a bit more control over the speed of your fans, then it's also worth investing in a fan controller, which introduces a variable resistor to the circuit to vary the speed. One classic example is the insanely cheap Zalman FanMate (£4), which will control one fan.

However, if you want to control several fans, it's also worth investing in a multiple fan controller that slots into a drive bay. The Scythe Kaze Master (£30), for example, allows you to control four fans while also providing temperature and fan-speed read-outs.

Alternatively, there are also ways in which you can take advantage of PWM control via software. One example is SpeedFan, which tells you the speed at which your fans are spinning, and enables you to adjust the speed with fine-grained digital controls.

Usefully, it also probes the thermal diodes of some of your components, so you can see the exact effect that your tweaks are having on system temperature. When you've reached the level of fan noise with which you're happy, head to SpeedFan's Charts tab, tick the boxes for the temperatures you wish to monitor (CPU cores are key) and then run a CPU-intensive application.

A good example is the CPU torture test in Prime95, which will comprehensively hammer the CPU. Leave this running for an hour or so and keep an eye on the temperature, and then look at the log chart in SpeedFan. If your CPU is going into dangerous temperature-territory (the temperature threshold varies between CPUs, but as a general rule you want to keep the core temperature under 70°C), then you'll need to increase the fan speeds.

You can perform a similar job with your graphics card. AMD's latest Catalyst drivers feature a fan speed control in the Overdrive section, but your best friend when it comes to GPU temperatures and fan speeds is the venerable RivaTuner, which does a fine job of probing both AMD and NVIDIA GPUs.

In the app, click on the triangle next to 'Customize' below your graphics card's name, then click on the picture of the graphics card, go to the Fan tab and tick the box that says 'Enable low-level fan control'.

Another useful feature to found in RivaTuner is GPU temperature monitoring. Again, click on the triangle next to 'Customize' and select the icon with a magnifying glass over a chip. You'll then be given a series of graphs. Hit the 'Record' button at the bottom and run a GPU-intensive 3D game for a while. You can then quit out of the game and check the temperature read-outs.

Check the sorts of temperatures you should be looking for on your GPU online, and make sure that nothing is going into the danger zone. This is particularly useful if you're using a third-party GPU cooler hooked up to a fan controller.

Hard drive noise

Once you've tamed all your fans into submission, your final port of call is to deal with the grinding clicks from your hard drive. As with case fans, hard drive noise can be dampened by isolating the hard drive from the rattly, metal cage it sits in with rubber mounts, such as the Scythe Hard Disk Stabiliser II (£6.84).

If you want to go one stage further, then you could also considering investing in a complete enclosure, such as the Smart Drive 2002C HDD Silencer (£70), which will muffle those mechanical grumbles even further.

Bear in mind, however, that hard drives get very hot when they're running at full whack, so make sure you have plenty of airflow going over an enclosure such as this. You can also monitor the temperature of your hard drives via SpeedFan.

Tired? Sluggish? Lost your get-up-and-go? Yes, Mac, we're talking to you! You used to be so fresh and sprightly. But you've been working long hours and not looking after yourself, and now you can't seem to do things as quickly as you used to.

Like the journalist's liver, one organ in the Apple corpus is particularly susceptible to deterioration: the hard disk. While just about everything else inside a computer is an immobile slab of semiconductors, the hard disk is a big box of spinning plates with the mechanical sophistication of a 1985 Austin Maestro.

And it has, like Peter Mandelson, more jobs than it probably ought to. Most of its time is spent picking up after RAM, catching whatever falls out as apps are flicked between and documents are worked on. Exhausting as it is, this is a mere hobby.

Its primary function is to store all your stuff. At this it excels, providing the kind of wide open digital spaces that, however many images you shot with your camera, would happily… hang on, it says here it's full!

What's filling up your hard disk and RAM, and distracting the attention of your CPU? How do you find the culprits, and is it safe to remove them? Can you make more room?

Step this way for solutions to all these problems, and a lot more besides.

Seek out excess baggage and slim down your OS X installation

Your Mac's hard disk has a hard life. Not only is it the permanent repository for all your applications, documents, music and movies, it also houses the operating system that makes everything work, while serving as temporary storage space for whatever you're busy with.

Little wonder, then, that when the drive gets clogged, your whole system suffers. The smaller your disk, the more likely you are to have problems – but even big ones can fill up. The amount of free space available on the current disk is shown by default at the foot of each Finder window.

As a rule of thumb, you should keep at least 10% of your main hard disk (the 'startup disk') empty so that it can run efficiently. Bear in mind that some of your hard disk is taken up by Mac OS X's virtual memory swap file, where it stores data needed by the currently running apps that won't fit into your Mac's actual memory (RAM).

These days, that typically runs to tens of megabytes. So on a Mac with a 250GB drive, say, you can expect to store well under 200GB of your own data before hitting the buffers.

A full hard disk has a number of consequences. If it's really, really full, you'll start seeing messages such as 'Your startup disk is almost full', or warnings that something can't continue until you make some space.

In other cases you may not get an alert, but things you're expecting to happen just don't. This is because apps are trying and failing to store temporary data on the hard disk – which is generally the only place they can put it.

A nearly full hard disk also makes it harder to read and write files, and since your Mac is constantly swapping data between RAM and 'virtual memory' on the disk, that inefficiency can make everything a little bit slower and less responsive.

Space invaders

Clearing out your hard disk begins with working out which files you don't need. It's largely pointless opening each folder in turn and flicking through it for anything that looks unnecessary; you could delete hundreds of files without making any significant impact.

The trick is to focus on big files. Chucking out one video clip could save more space than sifting through all the text files you've ever saved.

Use Spotlight to find large files wherever they may be lurking. In the Finder, press Command+F for a search window. At the top-left, set the first drop-down menu to Size (you may have to go via Other) and the second to is greater than, then set the size to, say, 50MB. Let Spotlight do its work for a minute or two and you'll know which files are taking up substantial space.

Click a file within the search window to reveal its location in the status bar below, and press Command+Delete if you want to trash it.

Unfortunately, Spotlight isn't as helpful as it could be. File sizes aren't listed in the search window, and you can't sort by size; you have to use Command+I (Get Info) on each file to see its details. Annoyingly, searching by size only finds files, not folders, so you may spot a 60MB Photoshop file but miss a folder of 60 1MB images that are equally redundant.

For a more complete picture, there are third-party utilities. GrandPerspective, free to download, uses colour coding to reveal what kinds of files are hogging your hard disk, as does Disk Inventory X.

More informative is WhatSize, which costs $12.99 (just under £8) but has a free demo version to try on folders up to 20GB. DaisyDisk is pricier at $19.95 (about £12) but free to try for 15 days.

Need to know

When hunting for deletable files, watch out for large anonymous-looking files that you may not recognise but do, in fact, need.

A classic example is if you use the Entourage email client that comes with Microsoft Office. And, as if to illustrate the proverb about eggs and baskets, it stores all your messages in a single file, called Database.

This lives in ~Documents/ Microsoft User Data/Office 2008 Identities/Main Identity, and can get rather unwieldy: one of ours currently stands at 14GB. Obviously you can't just delete this, but you can hold the Option key while starting Entourage and take the option to compress your database.

Among the more expendable data likely to be lurking are the disk images (DMGs) that you download to install new applications. Once you've installed the app, you don't need the disk image any more. It's only your registration details that you really need to keep. So you might want to do a Spotlight search for .dmg and bin what you find.

Mac OS X itself comes with various files that may not be relevant to you, and as long as you're careful you can get rid of some of these. For example, in /Library/Printers you'll find folders full of printer drivers and help files for all the major manufacturers. You can always get the software for a new printer from the manufacturer's website or the driver CD.

Another sizeable chunk is taken up by files for the many different languages that the Mac OS supports. You can safely delete the ones you don't use with Monolingual. Similar options are available within utilities such as WhatSize.

Cut out what you don't need, consolidate what you do

The first rule of deleting unwanted files is not to delete them until you're quite sure they're unwanted. It's all too easy to get carried away and bin everything that takes up more than 5K and doesn't immediately strike you as essential. This is a recipe for calamity.

Of course, the Mac has its own way of saving you from yourself, known as the Trash. Remember that trashing a file – whether by dragging it to the Trash, right-clicking it and choosing Move to Trash, or selecting it and pressing Command+Delete – doesn't actually erase it: open the Trash and it's still there, until you hold the mouse button down on the Trash icon and choose Empty Trash, at which point everything within it is erased from the disk forever.

It's only then that, having binned a number of unwanted files, you'll see an increase in available disk space. This makes it tempting to empty the Trash immediately after dragging a file to it to check the effect on your disk usage, but resist this if you can: the longer you leave deleted files in limbo, the better the chance of realising before it's too late if you still need them.

But maybe your hard disk is full of files that you do still need. In that case, rather than erasing them you just need to move them. The best place for them to go is usually an external hard disk. These are quite affordable, starting at around £75 for 500GB, and work at pretty much the same speed as your main hard disk, so there's no disadvantage in using them even to store files you use regularly.

Simply plug the drive in, drag all the files across that you want to store on it, wait for the copy to complete, then delete them from your main hard disk – and remember to empty the Trash.

Just don't try moving applications or system files across, as these need to live on your startup disk.

To move your iTunes Library, follow the instructions here. If you use the Time Machine backup system (included with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and higher), it's best to avoid storing other files on the drive you use for Time Machine, partly because they won't get backed up and partly because there's no way to tell Time Machine how much of the drive to leave free, so you'll end up fighting with it for space.

But Time Machine will coexist quite happily with another external drive and keep its contents backed up, as long as your Time Machine drive isn't significantly smaller than the total of your other drives.

Alternative storage

With a MacBook, keeping an external hard disk attached isn't so practical, although some neat portable models are available. But you might still be able to identify sets of files that you don't need every day, such as a collection of your previous work, and move these to a desktop drive – or to another Mac with a roomier hard disk – from which you can access them when needed.

Files that you only rarely need, or are keeping because you're obliged to but will probably never use, could be moved to DVD instead; spending a few minutes burning 4.5GB of data is worth it to free up 4.5GB of disk space.

Another option is online storage. The easiest way is to use your iDisk, if you subscribe to Apple's MobileMe; since this is constantly accessible in the Finder, you can copy files to and from it at will – though watch out not only for the 20GB storage limit, but also, if you'll use these files a lot, the 200GB/month data transfer cap; you can double these for an extra £30 a year.

Alternatively, if you have some server space, perhaps from your broadband ISP or as part of a web hosting plan, you should be able to access it via FTP, either by pressing Command+K in the Finder and typing an address beginning ftp:// or using an FTP utility such as Transmit 3 ($29.95, about £18, or free to try).

You'll need the appropriate username and password from your service provider. On most broadband connections, uploading your files will be fairly slow work, but you can then download them when needed at the full speed of your connection, so it can be reasonably convenient – and of course you can access this data from different Macs and locations too.

When archiving files – that is, copying them to other media and then deleting them from your Mac – always remember you're not 'making a backup'. A backup is a second copy. If that data is really important to you, make two copies, in different places, before you choose to trash the original files.

Invisible enemies

Aside from the files that you can see are taking up space on your hard disk, you might wonder about files that you can't see. There certainly are plenty of these around on your Mac, including system caches, which automatically store regularly used data to help make Mac OS X and your applications run more efficiently.

Various utility programs offer to 'clean' your caches, including OnyX and Cocktail ($14.95, or £9). This may help to avoid caches becoming bloated over time.

Don't assume, however, that deleting caches will necessarily serve the purpose of freeing up disk space and streamlining your Mac. Caches aren't a bad thing; the system uses them to improve performance, and in any case, if you delete them, they'll simply be recreated next time you restart your Mac or switch user accounts.

So cache cleaning isn't a panacea, and it's generally fair to say that if Mac OS X is hiding something from you, you should probably take the hint and leave it alone, unless you have reason to believe it's causing a problem.

Reclaim disk space, one application at a time

Removing applications from your Mac won't usually have any direct effect on its performance or reliability, because apps don't do anything until you run them. But there are a few exceptions, and deleting large applications can certainly free up some disk space.

In most cases, it's easy to get rid of an app you don't need any more. Just drag its icon from the Applications folder to the Trash. Goodbye, app. (Dragging the icon off the Dock, on the other hand, doesn't delete anything; it just means the icon won't appear here in future, except while the app is running.)

There are a couple of reasons for us to look at uninstalling in a bit more detail, though. One is for the benefit of anyone who's switched to the Mac from Windows.

There's a good reason why Windows comes with an uninstall utility in its control panel. When you install a Windows app, not only does it add several kinds of files in different places, it also updates the Windows Registry – essentially a big list of all the stuff that's installed on your PC. The Registry is notoriously prone to getting so messed up that your system grinds to a halt.

Even when you correctly use Add/Remove Programs to manage your apps, rather than trying to install or erase them manually, things can still go wrong – and over time they almost invariably do. Mac OS X has no Registry to worry about, and handles apps with a lot less hassle. Even so, deleting an app's main file (which, as we'll see, isn't exactly a file at all) doesn't always remove it and its effects from your Mac.

Package deal

When you open the Applications folder and find the icon that you'd double-click to run a particular app, what you're seeing is a 'package' (also known as a 'bundle') that looks like one file but in fact contains several. Its Kind is listed as Application, and if you hit Command+I to Get info you'll see its file extension app.

In many cases, everything the app needs can be stored within this package, which is nice and neat. All the Apple iLife apps work this way. To see what's inside the bundle, right-click it (or Ctrl-click with a single-button mouse) and choose Show Package Contents.

You'll first see, tautologically, a folder labelled Contents. Within this are various subfolders, such as Frameworks and MacOS. Open these in turn, and you'll see a whole load of stuff that probably means absolutely nothing to you. But you get the idea.

It's fun to have a look in Resources, because it houses a lot of the icons and user interface graphics used within the app. You can open these in Preview or Photoshop, and you could even customise the app by editing them, but this isn't quite as straightforward as it looks (icons are accompanied by masks, for example, that need editing to match).

As far as uninstalling is concerned, dragging the application to the Trash will delete all of these bits and pieces. Some apps, however, come with additional resources – such as plug-in folders and PDF user guides – that won't go inside a package. These are generally contained in an ordinary folder along with the .app.

For example, Adobe Photoshop CS4 lives in a folder called Adobe Photoshop CS4. To delete such apps, you need to drag the whole folder to the Trash. Check first that it doesn't contain anything you might want to keep.

If you're removing the app because you've installed a new version, you may be able to transfer plug-ins, custom settings and so on. This is usually just a matter of copying them to the same-named subfolder within the new app's folder.

It's worth checking on the maker's website whether existing plug-ins will be compatible with the new version, and for obvious reasons you should take care not to replace new plug-ins with older ones. Always run your new app 'clean' before transferring any existing plug-ins or settings, so you'll know what's to blame if it crashes or behaves oddly after you add them.

If it does, remove them all, perhaps to a new folder somewhere else on your Mac, and add them back one at a time, quitting and relaunching the app, to identify what's causing the problem. Similarly, if you're deleting a game from an old Mac because you're now using it on a new one, you may want to copy across your saved games.

In any event, it's wise to leave the Trash unemptied for a little while after binning an app, so that if you discover you're missing something you can rescue it. (Regular Time Machine users will have this ability regardless, of course.)

Bits and bobs

Beyond the files in their packages and folders, most apps also store a couple of other data files on your Mac. Preference files, with the extension .plist, live in /Library/Preferences, or the equivalent inside your home folder (check both), and contain user settings.

It's usually pretty obvious which preference files belong to which app, but if that's too fiddly for your liking, AppTrap is a free utility that automatically offers to remove the appropriate preference files whenever you trash an app. Then again, these files are usually tiny and carry practically no risk of causing errors, so arguably you might as well leave them alone.

Some apps have additional support files that may be much heftier. These generally live in /Library/Application Support, or the equivalent inside your home folder, and may be named after either the app or its maker.

Think twice before deleting items that may be used by more than one app. Finding all the related files for a given app may take a bit of lateral thinking: GarageBand, for example, keeps around 250MB of audio samples in /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/Apple Loops – so they're well worth removing if music-making isn't your thing.

Kill memory leeches, discover hidden processes and more

You've chucked out the excess baggage from your Mac, but to get it moving as fast as possible you may also need to scrape off some barnacles. While it's good to prevent unnecessary files filling up your hard disk, the contents of your Mac's memory will have a more direct impact on performance and reliability.

Mac OS X comes with a tool to reveal what's going on in your system memory moment by moment. It's called Activity Monitor, and is found in Utilities within your Applications folder.

Run it and, in the drop-down menu at the top, choose All Processes. This way you'll see everything that's running, as opposed to My Processes, which only covers what belongs to your user account. In the listing below, under Process Name, you'll see all the applications that are currently running, with their familiar icons.

Along with these will be lots of other stuff you don't recognise at all. Much of it will be integral to the operating system, but you may be able to spot non-essential OS X and third-party processes that you can do without.

The first column to look at is CPU: this shows how much of your Mac's processor time is being taken up, right now, by each process. (Click the CPU tab at the bottom to see the total that remains 'idle' – in effect, the processing capacity available for the next thing you try to do.) Anything above zero is worth looking at.

For example, you're quite likely to find that your favourite web browser is merrily eating up processor cycles, to the tune of 10% or more, even when you're not using it. You can free up this processing power just by closing the browser windows you've left open. When an app is running but not currently doing anything, it should normally use no processing power; it's the exceptions you're looking for.

Besides the apps you've deliberately launched, CPU time may also be taken up by programs that load by default whenever you start your Mac: check your Login Items (in System Preferences > Accounts, as mentioned earlier) and compare the names against the active processes. Some items won't show a Dock icon or any other visible indication that they exist, which is why Activity Monitor is so useful for spotting them.

Identity parade

How can you tell what the more obscure processes are and whether they're essential? If you don't recognise an item's name, do a Google search for it – you'll very often find out what it is. Some processes belong to apps: for example, Adobe Creative Suite apps use something called FNPLicensingServ to manage their licensing.

It's easier to identify these processes if you set Activity Monitor's listing to All Processes, Hierarchically, so each process appears below its parent. Don't interfere with a process that belongs to an app, or you'll probably crash the app.

Having identified a process you want to kill, just click it and click the Quit Process icon at the top-left, then choose Quit, and if that fails, Force Quit.

It makes sense to force quit any process that's highlighted in red, because it's stopped responding – crashed, in plain English – and is using memory and processor time to no purpose.

First, though, go to View > Send Signal to Process and try Interrupt – this just might jolt an app out of its stupor.

When any process fails to quit on request, send a Hangup or Kill signal in the same way to make it stop. If that still doesn't work, note its PID (on the left), then run Terminal (found in /Applications/ Utilities) and type kill followed by the PID. Press Return.

Remember, these are last resorts: try quitting apps normally first to avoid losing any work. Note that you can click any of the headings in Activity Monitor's table to sort by that criterion. Sorting by CPU usage may not work because the figures change too fast; it may help to select View > Update Frequency > Less often.

Sorting by process ID can be useful because higher numbers are allocated to more recently started processes, so if your Mac has just begun to crawl you know which are the likely suspects. Also note the Kind heading at the far right.

If you have an Intel Mac, any app that shows anything but 'Intel' in this column is an old PowerPC program relying on Mac OS X's Rosetta emulation technology. That will tend to use more memory and CPU time. If there's a native Intel version available, consider upgrading.

At the foot of the Activity Monitor window, the System Memory tab is worth a look. As we saw earlier, VM size is the amount of hard disk space currently reserved for virtual memory, which may be gulp-inducingly large.

Active plus Inactive represents the data that your Mac is juggling between RAM and virtual memory to keep everything running, while Wired is the core data that has to be stored in RAM to keep the current apps running.

The pie chart on the right represents your RAM; ideally, there should be plenty of blue and green as well as red and yellow. If it's very red, think about installing more RAM (or running fewer apps at once).

Keeping fit

Activity Monitor is a bit unwieldy as an at-a-glance indicator of performance, but a very good third-party tool for that purpose is iStat Menus, which is free. This shows CPU, disk and memory indicators in your main menu bar that reveal more detail with one click, letting you keep an eye on your system at all times.

Finally, utilities such as OnyX and Cocktail promise performance improvements by de-cluttering various aspects of your system. They're worth a try, as long as you note the possible consequences of each action.

Many users swear by them, and they can come in handy to troubleshoot niggles or spring-clean your system when it feels sluggish, but we're not convinced you need to use them regularly. After all, Macs are designed to run smoothly by themselves, and most of the time that's exactly what they do.

Nintendo has released a new 3D game for the DSi in Japan which uses the devices in-built cameras to track the position of your eyes in relation to the two screens, and then delivers a 3D game world in line with the position of your head.

It sounds a little bit confusing at first, but if you watch the YouTube demo of Rittai Kakushi e Attakoreda, you quickly see that the depth illusion works. Really well.

Inside the looking glass

So it looks like you are actually able to find the shapes required in the game's puzzle's inside or somewhere behind the DSi's 2D screen.

How does it do this? Simply by using the front camera of the DSi to track your eyes' position in relation to the angle the two screens.

The game then changes the perspective of the 3D camera in sync with your eyes, to create this fantastic 3D illusion.

US troops are now allowed to use Twitter and Facebook following a recent review of internet use by the US Defence department.

A number of sites blocked by the Pentagon in 2007 - including YouTube – will all now be unblocked and accessible to soldiers in war zones, allowing them to stay in touch with their loved ones back home far easier than ever before.

US Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has a Twitter feed with over 16,000 followers.

This Web 2.0 phenomena...

"We need to take advantage of these capabilities that are out there - this Web 2.0 phenomena," said David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defence for information technology.

"And what we had were inconsistent approaches. Some websites were blocked and some commands were blocking things.

"The idea is be responsible and use these tools to help get the job done," he added.

"There are two imperatives. One is the ability to share information. The other is about security - we need to be good at both."

US troops are now allowed to use Twitter and Facebook following a recent review of internet use by the US Defence department.

A number of sites blocked by the Pentagon in 2007 - including YouTube – will all now be unblocked and accessible to soldiers in war zones, allowing them to stay in touch with their loved ones back home far easier than ever before.

US Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has a Twitter feed with over 16,000 followers.

This Web 2.0 phenomena...

"We need to take advantage of these capabilities that are out there - this Web 2.0 phenomena," said David Wennergren, deputy assistant secretary of defence for information technology.

"And what we had were inconsistent approaches. Some websites were blocked and some commands were blocking things.

"The idea is be responsible and use these tools to help get the job done," he added.

"There are two imperatives. One is the ability to share information. The other is about security - we need to be good at both."

Google is looking to refresh the images in Google Street View every year, in order to keep the service up to date with our ever-changing cityscapes.

The news comes as European regulators fix their regulatory eyes on Google's attempts to bring digitised versions of the world's cities online.

The Associated Press received this letter from EU regulators to Google – with the EU reps wanting to know more about the company's retention policy for Street View image.

Refreshing Street View

It turns out that Googlehas decided that the ideal retention time for Street View images is a year.

But the EU still thinks that is too long and now wants the retention period reduced from a year to six months.

The EU also wants to see Google publish notifications in local newspapers, to alert local people as to when and where its Street View cameras and vehicles

Sony is set to bring motion control to some of its major existing PlayStation 3 franchises, according to the company's VP of worldwide studios.

Last year gamers were already treated to demos of major titles including Resident Evil 5 and LittleBigPlanet, shown at the Tokyo Games Show working with motion control.

Sony pushes innovation

Speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine, Michael Denny said it was "important to us as the first party studio, as the flagship for PlayStation, that we're always pushing innovation".

Denny added that Sony was "both working on new games and looking at applications to our existing franchises."

So we may well see motion control aspects to the next outing of Resistance, God Of War, Motorstorm and Uncharted.

Sony is sure to reveal more on Arc games at the Games Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco this month. Meanwhile, Microsoft were showing off Natal to select groups of press this month, including TechRadar.

You can see our fully detailed hands on review of Project Natal right here.

Apple has admitted that child labour was used at some of the Chinese factories the company uses to manufacture computers, iPods and iPhones.

Eleven 15-year-old children were found to be working in 2009 at three factories that supply Apple directly.

Most of Apple's computers, phones and digital music players are assembled in China. The company has not revealed the names or locations of the three factories in question that were using child labour to assemble Apple devices.

Dodgy suppliers sacked

Apple said this week that the child workers in question are no longer being used, or that they are now not underage.

"In each of the three facilities, we required a review of all employment records for the year as well as a complete analysis of the hiring process to clarify how underage people had been able to gain employment," said Apple in an annual suppliers report.

Either way, the fact that it happened at all is yet another PR nightmare for Steve Jobs, with the news hot on the heels of a story earlier this month that 62 workers at a factory run by Wintek, in the Chinese city of Suzhou that manufactures products for Apple and Nokia were poisoned by n-hexane.

In the latest report, Apple detailed sweatshop conditions inside some of the factories it uses, with 55 of the 102 factories that supply the company ignoring Apple's rule that staff cannot work more than 60 hours a week.

"When we investigated, we uncovered records and conducted worker interviews that revealed excessive working hours and seven days of continuous work," Apple said, noting it had now terminated its contracts with the factory in question.

We've got to that point where most people have more computers in their home than TVs. Who can blame us? TVs are dumb devices, while computers will do everything a TV can and so much more.

It's not a typical case, but it wouldn't be far from the truth to describe editor Alan's house as a laptop graveyard. Turn over a cushion here or a sofa there and scores of the damn things come tumbling out, we're not making this up.

That's the problem, while once we used to have a single desktop, now we've got a host of devices: a gaming desktop, a living room PC, multiple laptops, netbooks and Wi-Fi-enabled mobile devices, such as the ubiquitous iPhone.

The principle of convenience is great but where do you start to store all of your documents, files, music and other media? Leaving files dotted around on different machines or USB drives is hardly a good idea.

There's always 'the cloud' but that's not going to work very well for your huge music collection or library of HD movies. There is a better solution… The home server.

Possibly, three of the dullest words you've recently read but stick with us, we're going to show you how one can revolutionise your home. Based around the FreeNAS server operating system we're going to show you how this can be linked with inexpensive hardware to create a perfect centralised storage and media server system.

Wrapped up as a 74MB download this all-in-one OS, NAS and server packs a serious amount of versatility into a tiny package. Just to start its software RAID can span a bunch of hard drives together, so you can pack epic levels of storage into a single shared network drive.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg, as part of the distribution it comes with a host of handy features: it's a UPnP Media server, iTunes server, Bittorrent client and can function as an FTP and webserver.

The base minimum hardware is as simple as a 486-class processor with just 512MB of memory. So any old system or laptop can do the trick, but the best way to learn about FreeNAS is to get on and install it.

Just what is FreeNAS then? You've probably taken a glance at the screen grabs on these very pages and the carnival of BIOS shots mixed with grey, grey browser administration pages must be filling your heart with utter glee right now. While these screen shots might be about as exciting as saying FreeNAS is based on the FreeBSD operating system, it is the brilliant features that beat in its binary heart we love, not the colour scheme.

As a distribution FreeNAS is available from www.freenas.org, go to the download page and grab it with the generic 32-bit i386 version or the 64-bit AMD64 build. Get the LiveCD version as that's what we're going to be employing in this feature.

There are a host of other options such as installing FreeNas onto a flash drive or virtual box, but we're going to keep things as straightforward as possible for this, your first install.

Once you've got the 74MB ISO image you'll need to burn it to a CD. As with other LiveCDs, once you've burnt it, you can technically run the operating system directly from the disc. However, we want to create a permanent installation on a hard drive. We'd recommend that you first sort out the BIOS boot options for your new server hardware and make sure the first boot device is the optical drive.

Once done start up the server with the CD in its drive, if you've run BSD for Linux before the stream of screen nonsense will seem pretty familiar to you.

Ooh a rabbit hole

Eventually the initial run will rest at a text menu with nine options, choose '9' which is 'Install/Upgrade to hard drive/ flash device, etc'. This will present you with the marginally friendlier blue screen with another six install options.

This time select option '3' as this will create a full installation and automatically set up both the data and swap partitions.

First, we must make sure FreeNAS knows some important system settings. You need to select the CD drive for the 'cd0' device, the current optical drive should be the only one listed, unless you installed multiple optical drives, but why would you do that?

The next option is to install the hard drive, this will be listed as 'adx', where the 'x' will be the SATA controller number. You should be able to recognise the drive from its name, if you have more than one installed at this point.

Next, we need to specify how large the install partition and swap partition should be. The installation default is just 128MB and that's actually fine, we also want a swap partition and again the default swap size seems quite low at around 1,600MB, but that's fine.

At this point FreeBSD is installed onto the hard drive; it's a rapid process and once complete a page of important information is displayed. Make a note of the data disk device and the partition number, which will be along the lines of 'ad0, 2'. Also make a note of the swap partition device name, again this should be similar to '/dev/ad0s3'. Exit and choose to reboot.

At this point you can discard the LiveCD and, indeed, the optical drive if you can't see yourself using it again. Allow the operating system to boot and you'll be confronted by a similar text menu as before, but this time there's now no option nine!

We are in fact all but done, we just need to check the network configuration of FreeNAS. Hopefully, if it has automatically picked up the network adaptor, you should see towards the top of the screen 'LAN IPv4 address:' and a sensible looking IP address to go with it.

It won't hurt to check your IP. Select option '1' and a list of available network adaptors will be displayed, the device name is on the left and the MAC address on the right, using the MAC is probably the easiest way of correctly identifying the right adaptor.

With a working adaptor selected the all important setting of the IP address can be done. Our personal preference is to allow the home router to dole out the IPs. If you select option '2' the first choice is to get the IP from the DCHP server, which is your router.

The issue here is if your router at some point assigns that IP to another device, as you're not going to be able to remotely connect to the server and that will involve all kinds of merry hell.

So there are two options, many routers enable you to lock an IP to a single device, you may have to delve around but it'll be in there somewhere. The alternative is to set FreeNAS with its own fixed IP address, if you choose not to use the DCHP option you'll be stepped through the various required settings.

First, you will need to choose an available and valid IP address for your network, typically this will be either 192.168.0.x or 192.168.1.x where 'x' can be a number from 0 to 255. If possible check your router for a list of currently allocated numbers and simply pick out a free one. It's as easy as that.

You also need to know the IP address of your DNS and Gateway plus the subnet mask. The easiest way to find these details is to jump on a Windows PC and select 'Start' > 'Run' > Type 'cmd' > Click 'OK' then type 'ipconfig /all'.

Locate the main Ethernet adaptor and note these details down. Alternatively, you can right-click the active network icon in the Notification area, choose 'Open Network' and 'Sharing Center' > click the 'Local Area Connection' link next to Connections > click Details.

Punch these numbers into FreeNAS as it requests them, the only funny bit is how the subnet mask is specified but for most people this will be the default '24' to correspond to the standard 255.255.255.0 subnet. When asked about setting the IPv6 choose 'No'.

At this stage no matter which option you chose FreeNAS will initialise the Ethernet interface and attempt to secure an IP address. It'll display this IP and how to access its web based interface, so make a note of it.

Getting GUI

That's it. You've set up a FreeBSD operating system. It's criminally easy. Effectively you can now leave your server, disconnect the mouse, keyboard and display, as everything is remotely managed via a web browser. So break out your Ipod Touch, netbook or Wii browser and become your very own server administrator!

Into the browser's address bar you need to tap the IP address of the server, we hope you noted it down. Technically, this should also end with ':80' as this indicates you want to connect via port 80, but you can usually leave this off as by default HTTP request use port 80 anyway.

The default username and password are 'admin' and 'freenas', respectively, and with that you're in! Any connection problems at this point could be related to the router not accepting the specified IP address, it could be the IP has been altered by the DCHP. For both these check your router's list of connected devices.

It could also be the MAC is being blocked if you're going via a wireless router, or an overly aggressive firewall on your PC could be blocking either the IP or port 80 access.

Now we can get on with the good stuff. Welcome to the world of FreeNAS – it's a bit grey. An obvious point, but it is good practice to first change the username and password.

Hover the mouse over the System menu and click 'General'. You can alter the username here, click the 'Password' tab to change that. For the security conscious you can switch the protocol to HTTPS. Whatever you do make sure you don't miss-clicking the 'Save' button positioned by some usability genius out-of-sight at the bottom of the page.

Hard times

It's now time to add in the swap and data partition that you carefully made a note of earlier, right? It's actually a straightforward process, despite the scary names BSD insists on giving all of its devices. We'll go through adding the data partition, but this is a good example of how to add further drives and partitions at a later date.

Select the 'Disks' > 'Management' menu, click the '+' symbol on the right. Now check the details you noted about the Data partition, the top Disk pull-down menu should match this; and should read something like 'ad0' ,for example, followed by the hard drive's name.

Add a description, enable the hard disk standby, plus a suitable Advanced Power Management scheme, enable S.M.A.R.T. and select 'UFS' as the preformatted file system. Click the 'Add' button and on the next page click the 'Apply changes' button. We've now added a physical partition to the operating system, but to access it, we need to add a mount point.

Select the 'Disks' > 'Mount Point' menu and click the right-hand '+'. The type is 'Disk', then select the physical drive from the Disk menu, set the partition type to MBR and, importantly, the partition number is '2'. As '1' holds the operating system and '3' is the swap partition.

The file system is 'UFS', add a friendly mount point name such as 'Files' along with a description. Click the 'Add' button at the bottom and then the 'Apply' button to complete the process.

To add the all important Swap partition select the 'System' > 'Advanced' menu, click the 'Swap' tab, click the right-hand 'Enable' tick box, change the first pull-down menu to 'Device' and enter the device name that FreeNAS mentioned earlier.

It should be the same drive name, but use partition 3, which reads as '/dev/ad0s3', the ad0 number will change depending on which SATA controller the drive is connected to. Click the Save button and that's set.

Right, we've got an operating system, a network connection and we've got a web interface and storage. It's time to make this home server earn its keep.

The most obvious first step is to establish a Windows network share. Despite all of the cleverness that FreeNAS has to offer, a basic Windows shared folder will enable you to access all your media either directly or through your favourite media library, along with adding in sexy things such as scheduled backups and the like.

Click 'Services' > 'CIFS/SMB' and click the far-right 'Enable' check box. Other than altering the Workgroup name to match your home network and enabling the Large read/write option, you're safe to scroll to the bottom and click the 'Save' and 'Restart' button.

That's the basic service started and we'll be doing similar things for other services. Before you'll actually be able to see anything you'll need to share something, click the 'Shares' tab and the right-hand '+'. This should be pretty self-explanatory, choose a name, select the path, opt to have a recycle bin, click the 'Save' button and then click 'Apply'.

The three other most interesting services are the UPnP streaming, iTunes library and BitTorrent client. These are all activated in a similar way to Windows sharing. Beyond requiring you to configure a few directories for holding your music, video and photos the defaults for these will all have you up and running.

While the address to the web interface for each is listed at the bottom of each configuration page. Putting it together When it comes to the hardware the truth of the matter is that you won't need anything particularly staggering.

If anything the chassis is the most important part of a server, as potentially you might want to cram it full of old hard drives for vast storage. So make sure you check the number of free drive bays. But with most tower cases offering at least four up to seven 3.5-inch drive bays that should be enough to keep you happy.

For a processor anything really will be fine, if you hope to try out the transcoding then you'll want a dual-core processor. Personally we have a Windows server running on an ageing 2.4GHz Pentium 4 and that's perfect for file serving.

The same for memory; our test FreeNAS system running 512MB only showed 19 percent memory usage. For a complete list of compatible hardware take a gander at the huge list here.

It entirely up to you how much or little you utilise your server, at the very least it's a useful way to centralise all of your storage needs. It's also a great way to run a convenient download box that isn't your thundering gaming desktop and best of all it can help share your home media to all your family.

Apple's Mighty Mouse (now also called an Apple Mouse) has a dirty little secret. While the scroll ball performs its duties as intended when the mouse is new, it can become clogged with dirt and grime over time.

Its performance then deteriorates dramatically, with the ball sticking and failing to scroll. There are a number of things you can do to try and free the ball, and return it to its full 360-degree scrolling glory.

First of all, try turning it upside down and rolling the ball around. Roll it on a piece of paper, hoping the debris and dirt will rub off onto it. Give it a blast with a can of compressed air, or a rub with computer-cleaning solution or a wet wipe. But if all else fails, a drastic course of action may be required.

Removing and cleaning a Mighty Mouse's scroll ball isn't particularly easy. A considerable amount of disassembly is required before you can clean the ball and its housing.

In this tutorial, we show you how to get inside your Mighty Mouse without damaging it, and how to clean and reinvigorate your scroll ball to get everything up and running again. It should take approximately 20 minutes, but be prepared to invest a little more time if needed, especially the first time you clean your mouse in this way.

A word of warning

Caution! Disassembling your Mighty Mouse involves breaking off a component that's glued into place. It's not easy, and if you make a mistake, you're extremely likely to damage or even ruin the device.

We can't take responsibility if your Mighty Mouse is broken while following this tutorial, and as a result we can only recommend that you attempt it if your mouse is in such poor condition that you feel you've nothing to lose, if you give it a go.

It is recommended that you read the whole of this tutorial before you start, especially Steps 2 and 3.

Quick tip

Apple has posted a guide to cleaning your Mighty Mouse without disassembly on its support website. Try these tips first, before you go ahead and take your mouse apart. Follow them regularly and it might never even require disassembly.

Disassemble a Mighty Mouse for cleaning

01. Gather your equipment Make sure you have a scalpel, a steel ruler or something similar to remove the base ring, and a Phillips screwdriver to unscrew the ball housing. We recommend you get some tweezers, cotton buds and a computer cleaner - either wet wipes or a spray bottle.

02. Unfasten the collar Slide your scalpel under the plastic ring that circles the body (not the base) of the mouse. As shown in the picture, above, it's the collar that runs over the side buttons and the USB cable, not the ring around the outside of the base panel. Take care not to break it.

03. Remove the collar Here's a picture of the collar after it's been properly removed. It's important to note that, before removal, this collar is glued and not clipped into place. The glued spots are broken by sliding your scalpel or pocket knife under the collar and twisting.

04. Undo the mouse shell The front section of the mouse's body is now held in place by two easily visible clips. Gently prise them open and lift the body of the mouse. It hinges at the rear, as you can see here. Disconnect the hinges too, taking care not to damage the data cables.

05. Free the cables To remove the cables connecting the lid to the motherboard, lift the stays forming part of the sockets. With a fingernail either side of the plastic housing, raise it by a millimetre. The cables can then slip free from their housing, separating the mouse into two parts.

06. Unscrew ball assembly You now have easy access to the ball housing, which you should unscrew using your Phillips screwdriver. The cross-shaped white plastic housing that holds the ball in place comes free with a little lift, but be careful not to lose the ball or one of its magnetic rollers.

07. Clean ball and housing Now it's time to get the cleaning gear out. Using ordinary computer-cleaning fluid, tweezers, wet wipes and cotton buds, clean out all the grime and gunk that's accumulated around the ball. As the rollers are magnetic, use a pencil to push them into place after cleaning.

08. Reassemble the Mouse Follow the disassembly instructions in reverse. Make sure the stays are raised before you slot in the cables, then push them down again to hold them secure. Use an extra-strong glue or silicon sealant, to replace the collar. Use it sparingly – just a few spots are needed.

This week saw Virgin Media announce its plans to roll out 100Mbps broadband while Steve Jobs claimed that adding Flash to the iPad would lower its battery life from 10 hours to just 1.5.

We also looked at the pros and cons of 3D gaming, asked whether the iPod has killed music, and revealed our top 20 list of games we want to see on the iPad.

Hot reviews this week include the Samsung 40C7000 3D TV, the Canon IXUS 105 IS and the Panasonic TX-P42X10.

Read on for this week's most popular stories on TechRadar…

Top five news stories

Sex.com for sale again

Sex.com – one of the world's most desired web addresses – is once more up for sale, with owners Escom LLC in foreclosure. The sex.com address has managed to create huge amounts of controversy over the years, and was bought last time out for a whopping $14 million (£9.1m).

Virgin Media to roll out 100Mbps broadband

Virgin Media has announced that it plans to start the roll out of a 100Mbps broadband service before the end of 2010. Virgin, which currently offers its 4.1 million customers the choice of 10Mb, 20Mb, or 50Mb connections, claims the new, improved speed, which uses fibre optic cable, will mean that users would be able to download an hour long TV show in just 31 seconds.

Sky HD+ 1TB box actually has 1.5TB drive

Sky's brand new one terabyte HD set top box has a secret hidden under the hood, with the company confirming that the Sky+HD 1TB box actually has a whopping 1.5TB of memory, with 400GB of that given over to Sky Anytime.

Jobs: Flash on iPad would give it 1.5 hour battery life

Steve Jobs has been speaking behind closed doors to select journalists and explaining some of his reasoning behind exactly why Apple has not added Flash compatibility to the iPad. While on a trip round the Wall Street Journal offices he offered sound bite after sound bite regarding Flash, noting that the battery performance would be significantly reduced to just 1.5 hours if Flash was on-board – down from the 10 hours he promised in his iPad keynote in January.

iPhone 4G set to finally offer video chatting

Those of you fed up with having to only talk to your pals via the iPhone could be in for a treat - video chatting could be on its way. The 3.2 SDK for the iPhone and iPad has revealed new icons and commands relating to video chatting, meaning that Apple is clearly having a think about adding the functionality to its systems.

Top five in-depth articles

5 reasons why 3D gaming will totally suck...

The PC has been quietly at it for years, but it wasn't until Sony's recent reveal that it'll be building stereoscopic 3D support into the PlayStation 3 with an upcoming firmware update that the world really started squealing "ooh! Ooh! We want that!" It's a delightful idea – but given how divisive 3D cinema has proven to be, is all this techno-kerfuffle really worth it? Here's the case for the defence, and for the prosecution….

Complete guide to choosing a PC processor

Wouldn't it be great if money didn't matter? In that altogether salubrious scenario, picking a PC processor would be quick and painless. After all, Intel makes undeniably the best money-no-object chip known to man.

20 best iPad games we want to see ported from the iPhone

With the iPad's aforementioned larger screen, and the manner in which it's held and interacted with being very different to using an iPhone, the best games won't necessarily be those topping the App Store charts today. Taking into account the quality of existing titles and the technical and practical benefits and limitations of the iPad, here are TechRadar's top 20 iPad games we want to see.

10 quick and easy ways to boost your Wi-Fi

It might have taken the best part of a decade to ratify but the 802.11n wireless standard was worth the wait. But that's not to say we all get a perfect wireless experience even with the immense cleverness of MIMO. So no matter if you're running a wireless network new or old here are our top tips for tweaking more out of your signal.

Did the iPod kill music?

"The iPod has f***ed all of this, in a way. The decade we've just left will never be forgotten." So says Simon Drake, 24-year-old owner/producer of indie record company Naim Label, who is trying to explain to TechRadar what the last 10 years have done to the music business - a time in which music has seemingly been commoditised, debased and devalued by everything from the X-Factor to CD giveaways, digital downloads and ringtones.

Top five reviews

Samsung 40C7000

As the UK's first 3D TV this set has a lot to live up to. Luckily, it's a brilliant all-rounder even without the 3D features. It's also beautifully light and slim, and has a fancy remote control handset which will look good on your coffee table.

Canon IXUS 105 IS

No argument: the Ixus 105 is a great camera. It's capable of taking excellent pictures, but its price at release - £190 - strikes us as a little high. For just a little more you can bag the IXUS 120 which can shoot 720p video.

Olympus PEN E-P2

The new E-P2 is, in many ways, a simple update to the original E-P1. But the new black and silver affair is 10 times closer to allowing you to be a serious photographer, and less like a tourist, than the original.

Panasonic TX-P42X10

We believe the Panasonic TX-P42X10 is the cheapest 42in plasma TV ever, which means that if it can retain the technology's normal advantage over LCD, it could be a budget classic.

Icecrypt S4000

Not so long ago the idea of a fully fledged twin-tuner, hi-def PVR with a sub-£500 price tag would have been wishful thinking. Today it's a reality, courtesy of the S4000 from Turbosat's housebrand Icecrypt

Canon USA Inc. has released updated firmware for its EOS Rebel T1i digital SLR, known in some markets as the EOS 500D. Available immediately in the USA and globally, the new Canon T1i firmware is said to improve the reliability of live-view shooting. It also corrects some issues with incorrect indications in the English, Arabic and Swedish-language menu screens. Announced in March 2009, the Canon T1i offers fifteen megapixel resolution from a variant of the sensor used in the company's prosumer EOS 50D model...
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Canon USA Inc. has today issued a wide variety of software updates, both for its digital SLRs and for its compact digital cameras. The precise selection of updates varies by camera model and operating system, but includes the company's Digital Photo Professional, EOS Utility, WFT Utility, Picture Style Editor and Original Data Security Tools applications. Almost all of the company's EOS digital SLR models receive software updates, as do four of the company cameras. Updated software includes Digital Photo Professional...
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Sigma US has revamped its website with new interactive features. It now includes a Lens Finder section that is aimed at guiding users to select the right lens according to their camera system, price and skill level. Other features include a photo share gallery, blog and social media tools.

Google is a company that it's hard not to admire. In the last decade it's swept aside all rivals, becoming so powerful on the internet that it's almost synonymous with it.

And yet, for a company that prides itself on its 'don't be evil' slogan it has found itself under increasing amounts of scrutiny for the way it operates.

Why? Because this is a company that wants to know every single detail about you, from the contents of your email to your exact location at any given moment.

Information is power

Sharing that content can be massively useful – allowing each and every one of us to find the most relevant information. Be it an internet query or a frantic search for an after-work pub on a Friday night, a local movie screenings or what your friend got up to at the weekend.

But sharing that information is also incredibly valuable to the company that holds it – and at the moment it is Google that is collecting the world's data and storing it away in its massive banks of hard drives. Information is power and, as every superhero fan will tell you, with great power comes great responsibility.

So when Google finds itself under fire for choosing your followers for you on its newly launched Buzz, or because its CEO suggests that if you don't want to share your web habits it's probably because you are doing something you shouldn't, you can't really blame people for asking 'who decides what's evil?'.

It comes down to trust. Do you trust Google with your information and do you trust it to use it in the right way? Is Google a benign facilitator or a potential dictator? We'd love to know what you think.