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For open-source Web servers, the most popular stack of software is the Apache server, MySQL database, and PHP scripting language. Drawing from their initials, implementations of this on Windows and Linux are known respectively as WAMP and LAMP. XAMPP (free) extends these acronyms, and provides a one-click installation of this stack on Linux, Windows, Mac, or Solaris, along with a handful of other helpful applications and services.

The XAMPP admin site makes it easy to check if all the components of your server are working.XAMPP is designed to be a development server in a box. There are many other WAMP packages, but XAMPP for Windows is among the most complete and easiest to install. This does however come at the expense of security, so XAMPP is not meant to be used as a production server. The authors at Apache Friends specifically warn against doing so, although if you insist on making your server Web accessible they do provide a nice guide and utility for partially locking it down.

PhpMyAdmin is the one of the most popular tools for MySQL database administration. A major reason for this is its portability--phpMyAdmin runs in a Web browser, so you can access it from almost any computer. The program is also robust; phpMyAdmin has enough functionality that you can probably create and run a Web site without knowing any SQL. Being free and open-source never hurt anybody, either. For these reasons, most hosting sites include phpMyAdmin in their control panel as the default MySQL administration tool.

PhpMyAdmin provides a visual interface for viewing and editing a table’s structure.Installation of phpMyAdmin on a server is simple, assuming you already have PHP and MySQL running. Full instructions can be found in the official wiki, but the process is little more than extracting files and running a setup script. phpMyAdmin has visual interfaces for most MySQL tasks, including creating, browsing, and editing tables. There's a relation view for linking tables using foreign key relationships (make sure you're using the InnoDB storage engine-MyISAM doesn't support foreign keys). phpMyAdmin will also execute custom SQL queries, so it's just as powerful as the standard command line utility. In fact, phpMyAdmin does more. Besides the convenience of a more interactive, visual interface, phpMyAdmin has some nice extras, such as importing and exporting Excel, OpenDocument, and XML files, and a tool that generates a PDF image of your database schema.

Web development is often a scrambled task, requiring abrupt switches between different Web sites, different programming languages, and different frameworks. An integrated development tool like phpDesigner 7 is necessary if you want to keep your head from spinning. PhpDesigner (29€ for non-commercial use, 69€ for commercial use) is a full-fledged PHP, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript editor, with code completion and syntax highlighting for all four languages. Like any proper IDE, phpDesigner also allows you to debug and test code on your local machine.

Context-sensitive syntax highlighting makes it easy to switch between editing different languages in php Designer 7.PhpDesigner's syntax highlighting is context sensitive; when you're editing code in one language, all code in other languages is grayed out. This is great in situations such as editing PHP code which is interspersed between HTML. The code completion system is robust enough to include any extra frameworks and libraries you're using. To get it working with the rapid development framework CakePHP, and the essential JavaScript library jQuery, all I had to do was include their files in my project.

Is your computer fast enough to handle HD video? Does it have the hardware to multitask without slowdown? Although most benchmarking programs focus on extreme graphics performance, PCMark Vantage ($7 for Basic version; free, feature-limited demo) instead rates everyday productivity performance. This makes it a useful tool for users trying to tune their personal computer's speed, and for IT supervisors evaluating hardware purchases.

PCMark Vantage rates your system with an overall “PCMarks” score, as well as with raw results for individual tests.Despite its complicated underworkings, PCMark Vantage presents a clean, simple UI. The Basic version is limited to running the default PCMark Suite, which contains a sampling of tests in the categories "Memories," "TV and Movies," "Gaming," "Music," "Communications," and "Productivity." The tests are intended to measure performance for everyday tasks, and simulate things such as rendering Web pages, transcoding audio files, and playing HD videos.

Is your computer fast enough to handle HD video? Does it have the hardware to multitask without slowdown? Although most benchmarking programs focus on extreme graphics performance, PCMark Vantage instead rates everyday productivity performance. This makes it a useful tool for both users trying to tune their personal computer's speed, and IT supervisors evaluating hardware purchases.

Despite its complicated underworkings, PCMark Vantage presents a clean, simple UI. The Basic version is limited to running the default PCMark Suite, which contains a sampling of tests in the categories "Memories," "TV and Movies," "Gaming," "Music," "Communications," and "Productivity." The tests are intended to measure performance for everyday tasks, and simulate things such as rendering Web pages, transcoding audio files, and playing HD videos.

Google Storage is one of the newest and most promising entrants into the cloud storage market. Its integration with other Google services such as Google App Engine makes it a viable threat to the current leader, Amazon S3. The service is currently in closed beta, but if you're lucky enough to snag an invite, you'll probably want a more advanced manager than Google's bare-bones Web app, which supports little more than bucket creating and file uploading. For accessing advanced features of Google Storage such as setting HTTP headers or access control levels (ACLs), Google offers the command line utility GSUtil. But unless you're a console guru, a graphical manager such as CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage is highly preferable.

CloudBerry Explorer allows you to modify HTTP headers, unlike Google’s simple Web-based manager. In function and appearance, CloudBerry Explorer for Google Storage is almost identical to its counterpart for S3. The program looks like a standard FTP program, allowing file transfers between a local hard drive and Google Storage, or even from one Google Storage source to another. CloudBerry Explorer supports tabs, making it easy to manage multiple folders at once. Folder syncing is another key feature, automating the often tedious process of keeping files up-to-date. CloudBerry Explorer handily allows modifiable default values for HTTP headers and ACLs, so you won't have to tweak the settings of every file uploaded. But if you do need to change the settings of individual or groups of files, they're just a right-click away. In general, CloudBerry Explorer is very full-featured, supporting all of Google Storage's capabilities, along with nice touches such as in-depth logging.

Gmail is a great webmail service, with features rivaling standalone clients. But since it runs in a browser, if you're not on the site, you won't be notified of new mail. Spiffy fills this gap. It runs in the system tray, and periodically checks up to five Gmail accounts, displaying alert boxes for new messages.

Spiffy is lightweight and free, and allows detailed customization of the behavior and appearance of the alert boxes. This is a welcome improvement over Google Labs' barely customizable Gmail Notifier. One particularly useful option stops Spiffy from redisplaying messages, so spam that you don't want to bother to mark as read won't continue to plague you. The alert box contains the title, subject, sender, date, and first few words of the message, and you can position and color each of these parts. All the basic options you'd expect are there too, such as how frequently Spiffy checks for new mail. On the more advanced side, Spiffy also supports proxies.

For Web site developers and administrators, cloud storage is an increasingly popular alternative to dedicated servers. In most cases, cloud storage is both cheaper and more reliable. Amazon offers the leading solution with their Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 has a robust set of features, but Amazon only offers a Web interface, which can be quite clunky. This is where CloudBerry Explorer (free) comes in: it replicates and improves on the functionality of Amazon's Web interface in a slick standalone program.

CloudBerry Explorer offers many options for tweaking file properties.

For Web site developers and administrators, cloud storage is an increasingly popular alternative to dedicated servers. In most cases, cloud storage is both cheaper and more reliable. Amazon offers the leading solution with their Simple Storage Service (S3). S3 has a robust set of features, but Amazon only offers a Web interface, which can be quite clunky. This is where CloudBerry Explorer comes in: it replicates and improves on the functionality of Amazon's Web interface in a slick standalone program.

At its most basic level, CloudBerry Explorer acts like a FTP client, with side-by-side file navigation panes so that you can upload local files to S3 buckets (which is what Amazon calls top-level folders) . Of course, you can also download files from S3 to your local machine, or transfer them between two S3 accounts. Another way to upload files is through sync folders; CloudBerry can automatically upload new files to an S3 bucket, and also automatically download new files in a bucket to your local machine. This latter feature is especially useful if multiple developers on different machines need up-to-date local copies of cloud hosted files.

Gmail is a great webmail service, with features rivaling standalone clients. But since it runs in a browser, if you're not on the site, you won't be notified of new mail. Spiffy (free) fills this gap. It runs in the system tray and periodically checks up to five Gmail accounts, displaying alert boxes for new messages.

Spiffy's alert boxes pop up right above the system tray.

InfoTag Magic is a simple shell extension that makes it easier to browse for files--especially music files--on your PC. It enhances the often useless file tooltips (the white box which pops up when you hover your cursor over a file) with extra information, so you can learn more about a file without wasting time opening it. Improved music file tooltips are the main feature: InfoTag Magic displays MP3, WMA, and OGG tag information, including title, artist, album, genre, duration, bit rate, and sample rate, all in a quickly viewed tooltip. Windows by default already displays some of this information, but it is very unreliable, and will show nothing for OGG files. InfoTag Magic offers modest improvement in this area, but lacks some features which would make it a lot more useful, such as a way to customize the displayed information, and support for iTunes AAC files.

InfoTag Magic offers enhancements for other file types too. The most useful is for plain text files, including .txt, .ini, .log, and .bat. Where Windows would usually display only size and date for the file, InfoTag Magic shows the first few lines of text. It's not even any slower. If you don't already waste a lot of time finding the right files in Windows Explorer, InfoTag Magic may not do much for you. But if you work with music files extensively, or have lots of scattered text files, this is a very useful program.

A digital music collection isn't complete without accurate tag information. I know I'm not the only one who can't stand separate listings for "The Beatles," "Beatles," and "The Beetles" on my iPod. But for any sizable collection, hand-tagging is simply out of the question. Tag&Rename ($30, 30-day free trial) is a comprehensive solution for organizing your music collection. It automates the entire process, and makes an otherwise impossible task manageable.

Tag&Rename can move files too, allowing you to create an organized folder structure based on tags.