A steady stream of preview releases have kept our typing fingers especially busy covering the beta beat the last several weeks. From Mac virtualization software to Microsoft Office add-ons to iTunes sharing apps, there are lots of new features for eager testers to preview and try out. Beyond the most obvious best public preview out there right now—Firefox 3—which beta has your heart? Cast your vote, after the jump. Photo by arriba.

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Earlier today we mentioned the Quick Launch toolbar in our best ways to make Windows more productive. But Windows comes bundled with several toolbars that offer search, web site launching, and media player controls—and at least one reader can't live without his toolbar setup. What toolbars do you have on your Windows desktop, and which is the most useful? Vote in the battle of the Windows toolbars after the jump.

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A few weeks ago Facebook promised to start slowly rolling out chat, and it just hit my account today. (If it's enabled for you, check it out in the lower right hand corner when you're logged into Facebook.) It reminds me of Gmail's built-in chat—it's on by default, your contacts populate your chat buddy list, and you can use it without downloading a separate client. (You can also "pop-out" the chat window to save a tab.) Facebook is much more about social networking than Gmail, which makes it ripe for chatting, but in the short time it's been in existence, Gmail chat's earned lots of loyal followers. When it comes to web-based chat, which do you prefer?

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If you've done any more than cursory text editing using Windows' built-in Notepad application, you know that Notepad is at best sorely lacking in the features department and at worst downright buggy. Several free, simple Notepad alternatives are available for download, but which one has your heart? After the jump, vote for your favourite powered-up Notepad replacement.

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For the past two weeks, we've given out over a dozen autographed copies of our new book, Upgrade Your Life, to readers who submitted their best life hacks to us and saw them featured here on Lifehacker. Now we want to know which one of the winning hacks you thought was the coolest and most useful.

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Yesterday when we asked you what your favourite Windows firewall software is, we got back tons of responses, from ZoneAlarm to Sygate from free to commercial. Now we want to narrow down the choices to the best. All those who take your Windows PC out onto open networks and protect it from network baddies on the cheap, vote for your favourite free Windows firewall software after the jump.

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Those of us who ran out to buy the newest version of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard this weekend had a choice: piggyback the upgrade on top of your current installation of Tiger and keep all your data and applications, or wipe the hard drive and start sparkly clean and fresh (but without any apps or data). As a Windows user, I tend towards a clean install, but Mac commentator John Gruber says:

Arguments that there is something mysteriously dangerous or deficient about the default upgrade procedure—and that you should do a clean install instead, followed by tedious hours manually migrating software and data and preferences from your old installation—are voodoo.

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Slowly you've been moving the work you used to do in desktop applications online, and you've got two major choices to do that: Google Apps or Zoho's Office Suite. Both the big G and the little Z offer completely browser-based office applications like a word processor and spreadsheet, as well as communication tools like chat and email, as well as collaboration tools like project managers and wiki's. But the business-oriented Zoho and the consumer-oriented Google applications differ a little bit in offerings, and probably a whole lot when it comes to active users. After the jump, we compare Zoho and Google's current webapp offerings and you get the chance to pick your poison.

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If you want to chat on several networks—like AIM, Yahoo Messenger and MSN—using one instant messenger client, on the Mac side you've got Adium and on Windows side you've got Trillian (and the open source Pidgin.) However, Macworld reports that the makers of Trillian are putting together an OS X version of Trillian's upcoming version 4 release. Cross-platform users, which multi-protocol IM client do you think is better?

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