Mike Williams

As email notifiers go, PopTrayU might seem a little old-fashioned. There’s no flashy interface, no specific support for webmail accounts, and the project’s SourceForge page takes care to highlight its "Vista/Win 7 compatibility fixes", maybe not something to boast about in 2015.

But if you forget the first impressions, look a little deeper, you’ll find it’s a great way to see alerts about new emails in your POP3 and IMAP4 accounts.

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Squirrels has announced Reflector 2.0 with new support for mirroring connections from Google Cast-enabled Chromebooks and Android devices.

As before, the program can mirror iPads and iPhones to Windows or Mac, and users are able to connect both iOS and Android devices simultaneously.

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We’ve always liked tiny single-executable utilities, the type you’ll find at NirSoft and Sysinternals. The developers don’t waste time with gimmicks, massive icons or interface themes: they just concentrate on the core functions you need to get the job done.

So it is with EasyNetMonitor, a free tool for monitoring the availability of network and web hosts. While not up to NirSoft standards, it crams a lot of functionality into its very compact file.

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CyberLink has launched CyberLink PowerDVD 15, a worthwhile update of its do-everything media player for Windows Vista and later.

CyberLink’s playback-improving TrueTheater technologies are smarter than ever. TrueTheater Color enhances hue and vibrancy but leaves skin tones alone, while TrueTheater Sound amplifies vocal range audio for crisper, clearer speech.

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Reason Software, developer of herdProtect and Should I remove it?, has acquired RaMMicHaeL’s smart adware-blocking Unchecky.

The program is an innovative free tool which monitors software installations, looks out for bundled adware, and automatically clears their checkboxes to ensure they’re not installed by default.

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2Printer is a free (for personal use) Windows tool for batch printing PDFs, Office documents, photos, drawings and a whole lot more.

If you only print the occasional document then this isn’t the program for you. But if you run a business and need to print a folder of documents at the end of the month, say, it could save you some time.

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Kaspersky Labs has released CoinVault Decryptor, is a free tool which may help victims of the CoinVault ransomware to decrypt their files.

The program works by using a set of decryption keys recovered by the Danish police. Unfortunately it isn’t a full set, and so the Decryptor won’t work for everyone.

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They're old, horribly inefficient, seriously dumb, but let’s be realistic: there are times in every online conversation when only an animated GIF will do.

If you already have a big collection of face palms and laughing dogs then that’s not a problem, but if you’re more of an occasional GIFer then you might need a little help.

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Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) is a versatile image format with many possibilities, but its XML-based files aren’t exactly efficient, and they can include a vast amount of redundant data.

SVGO is an open source tool for Windows and Mac which optimises SVGs, stripping out surplus tags, and cutting file size by up to 80 percent without affecting the image itself.

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NetToolset is a free-for-personal-use network toolkit for Windows XP+ which supports eight common functions: Ping, Traceroute+, DNS Lookup, Reverse DNS, Blacklist Lookup, IP Whois, Domain Whois and Port Scan.

The program is more about simplicity than power. Typically you’ll click a tab, enter a domain or IP address and click a button. The Ping function has the most configuration options, including Rounds, Reply Timeout, Time between rounds, Bytes and Reverse DNS.

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Logipole has announced that its Windows 7+ media file manager Konvertor FM is now freeware.

There are so many media managers around that you might be wondering why you should care, but this one is a little different. It doesn’t just view JPGs, PNGs and GIFs: there’s support for 2,034 image file types, 795 audio, 230 video, 102 3D, as well as Office documents and other more general types, even if they’re stored in any of 165 archive formats.

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If you've a Flash applet you'd like to share then there are a few options available. You might host it online, package it for offline use with an HTML file, maybe just email it to someone anyway and hope they've a player installed.

Alternatively, you could just use Flash Builder to convert it into a stand-alone Windows executable, ready to run on just about anyone's desktop.

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Uninstalling one Windows program is easy, but stripping out several can get a little tedious, as you sit around and wait for each uninstaller to finish.

Bulk Crap Uninstaller is a smart alternative to Windows’ own "Programs and Features" applet, a simpler and quicker way to remove multiple programs with their own uninstaller.

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If your PC won’t boot properly then running Startup Repair from the Windows DVD will fix many common problems.

But if you can’t find your disc, or you never had one, or you run Startup Repair and it just doesn’t work, then you should take a look at Boot Repair Disk.

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Back in January we wrote about the malware "Easy Disk Drive Repair", and how we first realized that something was wrong when it blatantly turned off UAC on launch.

It seems it isn’t only malware which weakens system security in this way, unfortunately. Blogger Christopher Bachner has reported that LG’s "Split Screen" software (a split screen display manager) appears to do the very same thing.

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