They say charity begins at home. With our personal computers not always being used to their fullest capacity, charity can actually happen at your house. Or at the office, or anywhere really – without you having to do anything at all. Distributed computing models have opened up a whole new way for you to contribute to worthy causes – and it’s as simple as downloading and installing a small software package.

The idea is that your PC spends a lot of its time idling to one side and has oodles of spare capacity that could be used by someone else while you don’t need it. Even when you’re working on your PC, you usually aren’t fully utilising its processing capacity, unless you’re rendering or compiling things all day.