Mac only A lot of people have heard about the negative impact using Adobe Flash can have on your notebook computer, such as the MacBook Air. Apple even went as far as not including Flash when shipping new MacBook Air computers, and it's likely because of the battery implications it can have.

I'm sure at some point or another we've all noticed our system slowing down due to a "runaway" application using up all your CPU or memory. Then we go scrolling through the task manager to find and kill whatever that application may be, and then continue on our merry way. If you've found yourself in a situation like that then you may want to take a peek at SystemMonitor.

I've been spending some time optimizing my Windows 7 Media Center installation, and in doing so I've found some good information that has helped me pinpoint why I don't always see perfectly smooth video when streaming to my Xbox 360.

A lot of great utilities have come out of Sysinternals, such as Process Explorer, and Autoruns is definitely among the top of the list. It's extremely useful for anyone that deals with bogged down systems on a regular basis. It will essentially lay out all of the items that start up with Windows, and goes way beyond the things you'll find in the built-in msconfig tool.

I've found a lot of great apps thanks to commenters on our site, and credit for this one goes to an anonymous visitor on our article about automatically restarting crashed apps. The program I'm talking about is called Kiwi, and it has some unique monitoring capabilities that aren't found in many other applications.

Time your breaks with Workrave (Windows/Linux) or AntiRSI (Mac) Workrave is a useful tool to keep track of how much time you spend on your computer.

The demand for parental controls on computers is rapidly growing as kids continue to get their own personal machines. That's why Microsoft started to include some of that functionality in Vista and Windows 7, but it is generally pretty basic when it comes down to limiting the amount of time a user can spend on the machine.