These days owning more than one computer is the norm. They're just so cheap, so we often have one in the living room, one in our home office and the kids usually have their own machine too.

However, we don't all have the same operating system, but we do want to be sharing our music, files and network games around the house.

How many of us really know how to configure our machines so they can talk to each other, without having to spend hours attempting to get them to talk or spending money employing someone to do it for us?

Hamachi is a zero-configuration virtual private networking application that resides on all the computers you want to connect within your network.

It's based on peer-to-peer technology, which 'just works' out of the box. However, this is closed peer-to-peer, which means that only people within your network can connect to your machine(s).

If the computers you want to join your local network are situated outside your home, they can join too, which means you can have your own file sharing or game network between people within your local neighbourhood.

Note that Linux and Mac OS X versions are available to download on the Hamachi homepage.