Mike Williams

McAfee has released the first public beta of McAfee Free Antivirus.

The package is very basic, and just includes real-time protection, and -- optionally -- McAfee WebAdvisor to keep you safe online. There’s not even on-demand scanning, although a grayed-out "Scan Now" button suggests it’s on the way.

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It’s easy enough to customize your Windows 10 taskbar and Start Menu colors -- right-click the desktop, click Personalise > Colors -- but the official route only offers a small set of predefined shades, and the taskbar is always dark.

Fortunately Unchecky developer RaMMicHaeL has released Windows 10 Color Control, a free tool which gives you more choice of colors and -- optionally -- a brighter end result.

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Berlin-based developer O&O Software has released O&O ShutUp10, a tiny portable tool for controlling Windows 10′s many privacy-related settings.

Amongst its near 50 tweaks are options to disable telemetry, Wi-Fi Sense, key app permissions, peer-to-peer updates, automatic Windows updates and more.

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Easy Watermark Studio Lite is a well-designed Windows application for applying text and image watermarks to your digital pictures.

Point the program at your source images and it’s ready to go. Well, probably -- the Lite version only imports JPGs, BMPs and TIFFs, and it’ll process a maximum of 30 images in one batch -- but if the restrictions aren’t an issue then it works very well.

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Popular malware investigator PeStudio has been updated to version 8.51 with extended VirusTotal support.

Drag and drop an executable onto the new build, and after checking the file with VirusTotal to see if it’s a known threat, a new Network Watchdog will update the VirusTotal score automatically.

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Acronis has unveiled its 2016 consumer range, with Acronis True Image 2016 handling all your local backup needs, and the new Acronis True Image Cloud 2016 adding much-improved cloud tools.

Strong mobile supports means the Cloud edition can back up pictures, videos, contacts and events from iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones and tablets, and Windows tablets, and transfer them to other devices.

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You’ve been emailed a strange attachment, downloaded something dubious, or maybe just found a file that’s lost its extension. You need to find out more, and Detect It Easy is the ideal tool to help.

It’s portable, cross-platform, and -- initially, at least -- very easy to use. Just drag and drop your target file onto the program and it’ll tell you more about it.

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Popular adware hunter AdwCleaner has hit version 5 with the addition of a new and improved generic detections engine.

The program can optionally reset a range of Windows settings -- proxies, winsock, TCP/IP, firewall, IPsec, the BITS queue -- as well as IE and Chrome policies.

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Modern hard drives are generally very reliable, and may survive the entire lifetime of your PC without any problems at all. There are no guarantees, though, so it’s wise to have one or two diagnostic programs to hand, and DHE Drive Info makes a feature-packed first choice.

The program is portable, just unzip and run, and a list of drives and partitions covers all the basics: drive model, type, temperature, health score, capacity, free space, read/ write indicators and more.

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Panda Security has unveiled its 2016 consumer range, including Panda Free Antivirus 2016, Panda Antivirus Pro 2016 ($43.99),Panda Internet Security 2016 ($54.99), Panda Global Protection 2016 ($76.99) and Panda Gold Security 2016 ($98.99)

All editions come with a new engine and make better use of Panda’s Collective Intelligence, which the company says now provides greater protection with less impact on performance.

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Portable game manager LaunchBox has been updated to version 5.0 with Big Box Mode, a home theater-style view which allows you to browse your massive game database in all its full-screen glory (there’s a video here).

Big Box Mode is only available in the $20 LaunchBox Premium, sadly, but the free build also gets new features, including the power to automatically find images, videos, music and manuals and associate them with your games.

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Windows Notepad is an easy way to create scripts, lists and other small files, but it’s not optimized for larger files. Open anything really big and many operations are reduced to a crawl.

PilotEdit ($30) is a Windows editor with a free edition which is designed for larger files, both text and binary. It has no file size limits, loads them at speed, and won’t leave you staring at an hourglass cursor just because you dared to turn on Word Wrap.

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The Tor Browser Team has announced the first stable release of Tor Browser 5.0.

The new release features a host of updates, including Firefox 38.2.0esr (which gives you much-improved support for HTML5 video on YouTube, as well as the privacy benefits), OpenSSL 1.0.1p, HTTPS-Everywhere 5.0.7 and NoScript 2.6.9.34.

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IObit has shipped IObit Uninstaller 5 with a pile of new PC cleanup and maintenance tools.

A "Win Manager" module allows you to control your Windows startup programs, close running processes, and view or batch uninstall Windows updates, as well as uninstalling Windows 8/10 apps.

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Online translation services are quick, capable and easy to use, but many people think there’s still a place for desktop equivalents.

Free Language Translator is an open source tool which uses Google Translate to process text and documents on Windows XP and later.

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