Feeling ripped off every time you buy a new ink cartridge from your printer manufacturer? Well you should be.

The price of manufacturer branded cartridges can be almost three times that of a generic one, and sometimes more. The manufacturers of course sell you a printer at a discount in order to get you to buy into their lucrative ink cartridge business. With the advent of cheaper generic cartridges made by third-parties, they are seeing that business erode. They have fought back with claims that the generic is not as good as the branded ones.

While that may be true if you need the absolute best print from your machine, it?s not if you just want to print out a regular text document or other standard files. Testing by UK consumer group Which? has found that some generic ink cartridges are almost as good as printer manufacturers? own and are much cheaper.

By choosing one of the best performing generic cartridges, an average user could save about $175 over three years. Using Epson ink cartridges would cost a user about $246 over the period while a supply of generic ink from Print-Rite would cost $74 .Heavy users would save about $307 under the same scenario.

Average use is estimated as the cost of printing one photo and four text pages a week for three years. Heavier use is estimated as the cost of printing two photos and four text pages a week for three years. With the rise of home photo printing I bet many people beat both those estimates and are in another class as ?really heavy users?.

The printer manufacturers? own cartridges do produce excellent results on text, graphs and photos, making them all best buys, but they?re very expensive, Which? said. Generics such as Print-Rite and Ink Again also gain best buy status for a fraction of the cost. At the other end of the scale, some of the Jet Tec cartridges used on a Lexmark printer failed during the test, produced disappointing results and were given ?Don?t Buy? status.

The worst cartridges, however,were Cartridge Save for the Lexmark Z515 printer, which were so unreliable Which? couldn?t even complete tests on them. By the way the Z515 printer costs under $70 but will cost you about $1,200 in own mark cartridges over three years. Which? recommends that customers ditch the Lexmark and get a printer with lower running costs, such as an Epson or a Canon.

Watch yourself or you may be the victim of a drive-by spyware attack. On average, one in 62 Internet domains performed drive-by download attacks ? a method for forcing spyware on users who simply visit a website, according to a study by University of Washington computer scientists.They sampled about 20 million Internet addresses, revealing that spyware intrusion is much more common than thought before. Spyware or malware are programs that covertly enter the computers of surfers.

They are put there to perform tasks such as placing advertising on free software, sending personal information, redirecting Web browsers, or redirecting a modem to call expensive toll numbers. In the past I have faced the worse case scenario. Because I occasionally test a lot of software for this column, I regularly download free programs.

Last year my computer was completely disabled due to spyware that snuck past all my defences. I was forced to hook my computer up to another one to save my files. I then had to completely reformat my hard drive.

The University of Washington study found that more than one in 20 executable files contained spyware. Game and celebrity websites pose the greatest risk for spyware. Sites that offer pirated software topped the list. While most spyware were ?adware? programs, about 14 percent carried potentially malicious functions.

What to do? First, install one or more anti-spyware programs. There are lots of available anti-software that?s for free. You can pay for more functionality. If you have Microsoft XP then you have free access to one of the best anti-spyware programs in the company?s Windows Anti Spyware 2005 Beta. Next in top ratings are Lavasoft?s Ad-Aware SE, Personal Edition and Spybot Search & Destroy.Take your pick and stay away from dodgy downloads.