There's nothing more annoying than going to your favourites and realising that some of the links are out of date or dead.

If you're an Internet Explorer user, then help is at hand with Faves Analyser. The program simply requires that you direct it to your favourites folder if you've moved it for any reason. However, if it's still in it's default location, you need do little more than run the program and it will automatically detect the favourites you've already got stored on your hard drive.

The program works by pinging all of the addresses in your favourites but this can take longer than expected because sometimes it may not receive a response immediately. The other thing is that the program would be much more useful if it updated dead links automatically rather than simply reporting them as dead.

That said, it's still probably one of the fastest ways of cleaning up your favourites collection and keeping it updated in IE. It's a shame it doesn't work for Firefox too.