Firstly, don’t be shy of removing all that crapware. Much as we all love to have our sparkly new laptops pre-filled with junk, it is worth going over the list of installed programs with a fine toothcomb to weed out the useless from the useful. Do you really need that Microsoft Office 60-day trial, or that 30-day demo of Norton AntiVirus? No, you don’t. And don’t forget to look through each icon in the system tray and ask yourself whether it’s ever going to come in useful. Trim the pointless items from your startup folder, or better still uninstall them completely, and your laptop will start faster than ever.

Now you’ve rid your laptop of all that awful rubbish, it’s time to put something far more useful on there instead. You don’t need to go splashing your cash about though, as there’s plenty of free software that does a sterling job.  

1.       Google Chrome – It’s not such a big issue with powerful laptops, but if you’re working with the more modest processing power of a netbook or ultraportable, we’d highly recommend installing Google Chrome. Whether it’s being run on a hulking desktop replacement or a lowly netbook, Google’s browser springs to life faster than any of its competitors. And, what’s more, its clutter-free display makes the absolute most of a netbook’s limited screen resolution.

2.       OpenOffice.org – Ok, so it’s not a patch on the refined beauty of Office 2007, that’s for sure, but it’s also quite a bit cheaper. With a price tag of exactly zero pence it’s difficult to argue with such a fully-featured, highly usable office suite. Download it now and do some work, you know you want to. 

3.       VLC Media Player  – Ready for the less dull, pedestrian moments in your laptop’s existence, there are few better media players than VLC. It’s the swiss-army-knife of media players, capable of playing pretty much any music or movie file you can feed it. You need never suffer Windows Media Player ever again. Hopefully.

4.       Live Mesh – If you’ve heard the Podcast in recent weeks, then chances are Tim, David or any number of the PC Pro team has wittered on about Microsoft’s latest wunderkind. What is it? Well, it’s online storage, essentially. Save all your documents and files to Live Mesh and then wherever you are, whether it’s at work, home or just at the local internet café, you can have access to the latest versions of your documents then and there via the power of the internet.

5.       Portable Apps – If you’ve got a big old hard disk in your notebook or netbook, then you probably don’t care about a few hundred megabytes here and there. But, if you’re struggling to get by on the handful of gigabytes offered by a tiny SSD then there is hope. Head on over to the Portable Apps website and you can download a range of free software which has been tweaked to run directly from a USB flash drive or memory card. Mozilla FireFox, Pidgin, VLC Media Player, 7-Zip, FileZilla and OpenOffice.org 3.0 are just a few amongst the many free software packages on offer.

6.       Avira AntiVir Personal  – When it comes to Anti-virus software, Avira’s AntiVir Personal is by far the best of the freebies. It does a good job of stopping all kinds of malware in its tracks, and isn’t too far off the protection of commercial products. The only niggle is the software’s insistence on nagging you to upgrade every time you download updated virus definitions – that’s just the price you’ll have to pay for being such a freeloading cheapskate. 

Having spent the past couple of days wilfully ignoring the Java update nagging away in my System Tray, I finally relented and installed the latest version, only to be confronted with the following screen:

Admittedly, Sun was only trying to force the OpenOffice installer on me, rather than automatically downloading the hundreds of megabytes that comprise the full suite. But after the furore caused when Apple automatically ticked the Safari installation with iTunes updates earlier this year, it’s amazing that companies are still resorting to such cheap tricks.