Turn your PC into a wifi hotspot with NirSoft’s HostedNetworkStarter
NirSoft has released HostedNetworkStarter, a free tool which turns your wifi-enabled PC or laptop into a wireless hotspot.
There's no installation required, no network drivers or anything else involved: the program is just a simple front-end for the standard Windows wifi hosted network feature.
Adjust PDF brightness, contrast and gamma with YACReader
Text-based PDFs are generally easy to read, with high contrast, crisp fonts, and a zoom tool if you need to check the small print.
PDFs of scanned images can be very different, especially if they’re old documents, maybe handwritten, and have faded over the years.
Investigate your PC’s RAM use with ATM
ATM is a portable tool which gives an in-depth, low-level look at your PC's system memory use.
Forget the usual Task Manager clones, this is more about memory standby lists, the system file cache, Superfetch performance, page file effectiveness, even (on Windows 10) memory compression.
Find, install and update popular PC software with RuckZuck
Migrating to a new PC can be a lengthy and tedious business, especially if you have to manually find, download and install all the programs you had on your old system. RuckZuck is an open source package manager which helps you manage the process in a few clicks.
The program is portable, and surprisingly small -- a single 176KB executable -- although that’s partly because it uses PowerShell 4 to do most of the work.
A closer look at Bitdefender's new free ransomware security tool
Bitdefender Labs has released BDAntiRansomware, a free tool which keeps your PC safe from some of the most common ransomware threats.
The program "protects against known and possible future versions of the CTB-Locker, Locky and TeslaCrypt crypto ransomware families", the company explains.
A closer look at the Never 10 automatic upgrades disabler for Windows 7, Windows 8.x
Never 10 is a new freeware tool which aims to prevent Windows 7 and Windows 8.x systems from automatically updating to Windows 10. Sounds like a host of other recent update-blockers, we thought -- but no. It’s more interesting than that.
First up, it’s written by veteran developer Steve Gibson, the man behind SpinRite, ShieldsUp! and assorted early Windows freeware, and someone who knows what he’s doing. If you need more reassurance, the 81KB download size tells you there’s no adware here, no extra payload.
View, measure and convert DWG/DXF files with Autodesk DWG TrueView 2017
We've talked about simple DWG/DXF viewers before -- de-caff,Mini CAD -- but while they're compact and easy to use, they won't open everything: CAD formats are just too complex.
If accuracy and reliability are key, then you might prefer Autodesk DWG TrueView 2017 -- it's from the people who developed the DWG format, so you can be sure it'll open just about anything.
Game Fire 5 gets Windows 10 support, new optimization engine
Smart PC Utilities has shipped Game Fire 5, the latest edition of its PC gaming performance booster.
This release brings official support for Windows 10 -- both 32 and 64-bit editions -- but finally sees Windows XP support dropped.
A new optimization engine can examine and tweak even more components, including services, processes, scheduled tasks and Registry settings (only some of these are available in the free build).
Reclaim lost disk space on a USB key with imageUSB
There are many tools to help you customize a USB flash drive. You could make it bootable, run one or more LiveCDs, lock it to prevent unauthorized access, create encrypted storage areas, and more.
This will often work just as you expect, but sometimes, when you try to use the flash drive to store files again, you might find that some of its capacity has disappeared.
Freeware screen recorder oCam adds mouse click effects
Freeware desktop capture and recorder tool oCam has been updated to version 254 with new mouse effects. It’s now possible to highlight left and right mouse clicks with various animations, making your actions much clearer to the viewer.
This is all very configurable, with five animation styles, your choice of color, size and duration, and a preview window to simulate the results.
Can malware detect that it's running in your sandbox?
If you think an application is suspicious, then you might run it in a sandbox, a virtual machine, maybe use a debugger, and watch what it does. And if nothing happens then that means it’s safe. Right?
Well, maybe not. Malware will often try to detect this kind of trickery, and if it thinks it’s being watched, won’t do anything to raise an alarm.
ShareByLink is a signup-free file sharing service
ShareByLinkShareByLink is an open-source file sharing service and application for Windows, Linux and Mac.
The package is all about simplicity. There’s no registration, no account to create, nothing to set up: just install the program, then right-click a file and select "Share file(s) online...".
Create stylish video slideshows with ScatterShow
ScatterShow is a video slideshow creator from Smith Micro Software. Formerly a $29.99 commercial product, it’s now free to anyone willing to provide their email address to the developer.
Is it worth a few minutes of your time? We grabbed a copy to find out.
Manage, move and resize your desktop windows with WinDock
Windows snapping can be a convenient way to reorganize your desktop: just drag and drop a window to the left of the screen, for instance, and it automatically resizes to fill the left half of the display.
Not everyone is a fan. There are only a few snapping features. Some people find they’re easily launched by accident. And apart from turning them off, there’s no real configuration available at all.
Make image PDFs searchable with ORPALIS PDF OCR Free
ORPALIS PDF OCR Free is a Windows tool which converts image-based PDFs into fully searchable documents.
There's none of the complexity you can get with full OCR tools. Instead, ORPALIS PDF OCR Free provides a simple front end for its core OCR engine -- the excellent Tesseract -- and manages all the low-level settings itself.
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