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Working on your PC isn’t generally a great way to wind down, but if you’re stressed out after a hard day then Sound Valley might be able to help. It’s a small and simple tool which plays the sounds of nature -- birdsong, wind in the trees, rain, streams and more -- gently in the background, while you just relax.

The program looks like a simple but stylish media player. Click "Play" and Sound Valley plays its first scene, "Forest -- Day". You’ll hear a stream gurgling nearby, various birds singing, perhaps the rustle of the undergrowth in the background. It’s nicely done, and very restful.

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Budapest-based FinalWire Ltd has launched AIDA64 Extreme Edition 4.00 and AIDA64 Business Edition 4.00, major new builds of its diagnostic and benchmarking tools for Windows PCs.

The new release updates support for the latest CPU, GPU and SSD models, adds a new OpenCL GPGPU  benchmark suite and expands its business offering to provide a new dedicated Network Audit tool (users should complete this form to test-drive this new product).

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While products are typically produced by corporations and businesses, the brands themselves are often adopted by societies and become icons. Some examples are Coca-Cola (USA), BlackBerry (Canada) and Nokia (Finland). Sadly, for the latter country, the associated company has been in talks to become acquired by Microsoft (USA).

Some citizens of Finland may have hoped for the acquisition to fail in the eleventh-hour, but unfortunately for them, the sale has been approved. According to Nokia, at a meeting that took place today, it "decided to confirm and approve the sale of substantially all of Nokia's Devices & Services business to Microsoft in line with the proposal and recommendation of the Nokia Board of Directors. More than 99-percent of the votes cast at the EGM were in favor of this proposal".

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Deleting files on a PC is normally very easy. If they’re locked, though -- being accessed by another program -- then Windows won’t allow you to touch them. Tools like Unlocker try to help out by unlocking the files themselves, but this is a dangerous approach which risks crashing your PC. Reboot Delete File Ex offers a marginally alternative: point the program at the offending file and it’ll have Windows to delete it when your system next restarts.

There’s nothing complicated to this process at all, but the program still requires installation, most probably because it wants to equip your PC with a toolbar. If you’re not interested then watch carefully during setup, and click "Decline" as appropriate.

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Much has been made of Google's little Chromecast device  -- the dongle that allows you to send media from computers and mobile devices to your TV. The $35 device has received a fair amount of attention and also a bit of mimicry, with services like Cheapcast popping up.

Now, TV streaming service PlayOn is teaming with set-top box maker Roku to bring similar functionality to customers of the two services. "PlayCast gives users the ability to stream virtually any online video from a PC browser to a Roku-connected TV. It is like Chromecast casting for the Roku", PlayOn says in a brief statement received by BetaNews.

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Every year in the United States, on the fourth Thursday of November, we gather with our families for Thanksgiving -- a holiday for, of course, giving thanks. Typically, we share a meal of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes and various other side dishes. The men watch Football while the women and children watch the parade. It is surely a wonderful day that evokes positive emotion.

Then, at midnight, Black Friday begins and we throw all of that out the window. Consumers, still woozy from tryptophan, line up at stores to buy mass-produced products. Only hours removed from giving thanks, they trample their fellow man in a mad-dash to save a few dollars. Sadly, people actually die as a result. With that said, here are the top 10 most wanted Black Friday products.

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Google is renowned for its lack of Windows Phone 8 support. The search giant currently has a single app in Store -- which, surprisingly, just received a nice update, its first big one since March 2012 -- with no plans on the horizon to bring popular apps like Drive, Gmail, Google+, Maps or YouTube to the tiled smartphone operating system.

Being a user myself, I can see why some folks would give up on waiting for the real deal and start to embrace a third-party app or switch to a rival service instead. Fortunately, developers have released competent clients for Google services, like MetroMail that provides a solid Gmail experience in the absence of an official Windows Phone 8 app.

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It’s taken almost five years to get there, but disk cleanup and shredding tool BleachBit has finally reached version 1.0 with some welcome new features.

The Windows installer and executable are now digitally signed, so users shouldn’t be hassled with "unknown publisher" alerts any more.

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Android's success, in the smartphone and tablet markets, makes the operating system's users a popular target for malware writers. Some of the concerns which researchers and security firms frequently expose translate into real threats, while others will likely never see the light of day as they're squashed in their infancy.

Luckily, Google is taking a proactive stance to improving Android's security as the search giant has expanded the patch reward program that was introduced in early October, to also include its Android Open Source Project.

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Reinstalling Windows and your applications is a hassle for many reasons, but the greatest is probably the time it takes to find your various license keys. Are they on a CD box, a sleeve, in an email, online, somewhere else? You’ll have hours of fun finding out.

Windows License Key Dump can help by finding the product key for Windows, along with many other applications (Acrobat, Creative Suite, Photoshop, Norton Internet Security, TuneUp Utilities, VMWare Workstation and so on), and displaying them all in a single report.

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Email is often cited as being the killer application that made the internet take off, and there's no denying it has changed the way the world does business. But using email for business means keeping an archive so that you have a record of conversations. Over time that archive can become substantial and take up a lot of expensive disk space so storing it in the cloud begins to look like an attractive solution.

To help with moving mail to the cloud Metalogix is launching its Total Email Management and Migration product for Amazon Web Services. It delivers a complete service for mail archiving, backup, security, migration and continuity in the cloud.

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If you’ve tried more than your share of source code editors, then Brackets probably won’t make much of a first impression. It may have been launched by Adobe in 2012, but this open-source tool still looks a little basic, not something you’d want to use for serious work.

Actually try the program, though, and you’ll soon feel very differently. It’s very much a work-in-progress (the project is still only at version 0.34), but already Brackets is proving to be a capable editor with some very interesting features.

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Microsoft Research's latest app makes it easier than ever to give a presentation without having to hunch over your laptop. Like the idea of wandering the stage gesticulating wildly as you skip between PowerPoint slides? Fancy being able to scroll through Word and Excel documents without the need to find your mouse? This is what Office Remote has been designed for. This is a simple app for Windows Phone, but one that will be welcomed with open arms by anyone who has to give presentations as part of their job.

The app is described by Microsoft as transforming a cell phone into a "magic wand" and it untethers presenters so they are free to walk the stage and interact with their audience. While the most obvious app to use Office Remote with may be PowerPoint, it can be used with Word and Excel too -- the 2013 and 365 versions of the office suite are supported (although not the RT version of Office).

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Hot on the heels of the recently released Uninstaller 3, IObit has launched the first public pre-release version of its forthcoming commercial system and security suite, IObit Advanced SystemCare Ultimate 7 Beta 1. The new build adds official support for Windows 8, 8.1 and Internet Explorer 11, but also bundles a new anti-virus engine with real-time protection.

The update also debuts a revamped user interface similar to found in IObit Uninstaller (and in Advanced SystemCare 7 Free), and throws in some potentially useful new tools along with performance improvements.

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Successful sales strategy is dependent on understanding the customer. But for small and medium businesses building up the kind of intelligence database needed can be time consuming and take staff away from the task of actually selling. It can be many months before the implementation of a traditional sales intelligence platform bears fruit.

Software company InsightSquared has used the Dreamforce 2013 conference to launch the latest version of its analytics tool aimed at helping smaller enterprises stay competitive. Designed to work with the Salesforce CRM application, InsightSquared 3.0 has been put together based on feedback from experienced CEOs, along with sales and marketing professionals, in order to provide best practice reports and drive effective sales management.

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