Windows tip: Whether you use them or not, many applications install superfluous entries to your Windows right-click context menu resulting in a cluttered mess. The How-To Geek weblog details how to clean up your messy Windows context menu using a variety of methods, from manual registry hacks to using the simple, previously mentioned ShellExView. If you steer clear of the right-click because it's become such a cluttered mess, do yourself a favour by cleaning it and customising it to fit your needs.

Zune Insider reports that Microsoft has updated the Zune firmware to 3.1, adding three new free games (Checkers, Sudoku, and Space Battle) and improving the Zune Social feature with better looks and a "like minded listeners" feature that shows you how your taste compares to your friends. Aside from the fun stuff, the update also promises improved stability and performance. To update, just launch the Zune software and go to Settings -> Check for Updates. Zune importers, let's hear how you like it in the comments.

The new Xbox Live Dashboard for Xbox 360s—known simply as 'NXE' (the New Xbox Experience)—is live, so fire up your Xbox and get downloading. The update only took a few minutes on my system, is followed by a bombastic welcome video, and is full of all kinds of promise. If you've already updated, let's hear what you think of the NXE in the comments.

Windows Vista only: Ultimate Windows Tweaker makes no bones about its source of inspiration—the uber-specific, XP-customising Microsoft tool TweakUI—and does pretty well by it. There's more than 130 changes to make from this stand-alone, no-install utility, including some seriously helpful User Account Control hacks and sliding timers for application killing, along with all the other tweaks for menus, Explorer, and shortcuts TweakUI users will find familiar. Another great feature: A big, prominent "Create System Restore Point" button to hit before you get to tweaking, which is always a good idea. Ultimate Windows Tweaker is a free download for Windows Vista systems (32- and 64-bit) only. Thanks, How-To Geek!

I often watch video on my iPod Touch to wind down before sleeping, but there's always a big downside: having to hold onto the device while you're viewing. Reader Raphael wrote in with a nifty solution to the problem:

Take one desk lamp (around $25), one automotive phone holder ($10) and maybe a spare iPhone cable, in case you want to keep it charged. Remove the lamp head assembly and join together the remaining ingredients as you see fit -- I chose the ever-useful "many little cable-ties" method.

In an effort to improve user experience and secure more machines from becoming zombies on botnets, Microsoft's anti-malware project codenamed "Morro" will be free with every copy of the operating system. It's specifically designed to require few computing and connection resources to work with older machines and limited bandwidth in an effort to protect new users on inexpensive computers around the world. The company has also announced plans to end the Windows Live OneCare paid subscription security service. Want to protect yourself now? Check out downloads like Hitman Pro and our top five antivirus applications.

Windows only: Every time you save a Microsoft word doc, Word embeds gobs of potentially embarrassing metadata in your document, meaning that when you send a document off to someone else, you may be sending more than you intended. Free application Doc Scrubber analyses Microsoft Word documents for hidden data, scrubs the document of any metadata you tell it to, and then creates a new clean file. Doc Scrubber can scrub whole folders at a time and offers a lot of control over what it scrubs and how it does it. If you do a lot of work in Word—especially with sensitive material—Doc Scrubber could come in very handy.

As we mentioned yesterday, the normally $US40 firewall and antivirus solution ZoneAlarm Pro is available for free today only, so if you're interested in some free quality software, consider this your reminder to grab a copy.

If you'd like to use desktop apps or features that require a 3-D compositing manager but lack the hardware power (or patience) to enable Compiz effects, the Tombuntu blog points out that the standard Metacity window manager can fit the bill. As noted, enabling metacity's compositing gives you just a few effects—mostly window previews on Alt+Tab switching, drop shadows, and window movement smoothing—and relies only on the CPU for power, so nearly any graphics card can use apps like the OS X-style Avant Window Navigator. To enable Metacity's built-in composite manager on most any modern GNOME-based Linux distro, open the gconf-editor tool (by launching with Alt+F2 or through a terminal), head to apps->metacity->general, and enable the "compositing_manager" option. Hit the link below for a command line switch you can script or shortcut to turn compositing on and off.

With three real-world but anonymous examples of people who wanted identifiable and possibly perceived as negative information about themselves removed from web sites, ComputerWorld consulted experts but came up largely emptyhanded. In only one of the cases were the efforts successful, and the steps involved were complicated and time consuming. In the case of a journalist who shared a name with a reviewer on film review site Rotten Tomatoes who didn't want their name associated with the word "Rotten," more online activity and not less was recommended:

Apparently, the journalist's best course of action would be to do what reputation mavens recommended in the first place: Create enough positive, search-engine-friendly content to push the "rotten + journalist's name" search result to Google's second page of results.

Check out our guide to using web tools to manage your online reputation. Have you ever tried to chase down a negative personal reference online, and how did it work out? Photo by Joe Goldberg