Articles about Free Software

Finding a particular torrent isn't always easy, and you might have to visit several search engines before you spot the one you need.

Bit Che is a free PC program which offers an interesting alternative, quickly running searches on 50-plus torrent sites in a single operation.

Continue reading →

Trying out a new video player might get you a better interface, wider format support, more tools and extras. But the core video quality will be essentially the same, just a faithful rendering of your source footage.

SmoothVideo Project (SVP) goes a step further by using frame interpolation to perhaps double your video frame rate, delivering noticeably smoother, crisper pictures.

Continue reading →

WordPress.org has launched WordPress 4.0, named “Benny” in honor of the “King of Swing” Benny Goodman.

The new release doesn’t stand out in quite the way that Goodman did -- WordPress.org plays it down, in fact, saying “4.0 is just another number for us after 3.9 and before 4.1″ -- but there are still some worthwhile new features here.

Continue reading →

Finding a new file hosting site sounds easy in theory -- there’s certainly no shortage of options -- but it  can take some thought. Just tracking down key details like the maximum file size or how long files are kept often takes longer than you expect.

All this research is important if you're hosting mission-critical work documents, of course, or anything similarly important: you need to be sure you’re making the right choices.

Continue reading →

If your network isn’t running smoothly then Windows provides a lengthy list of tools which might be able to help. Unfortunately you’ll need to find them, first, and they’re so scattered around -- a console application here, a deeply nested Control Panel dialog there -- that even experts might find that takes a while.

NetAdapter Repair All in One tries to simplify this by providing easy access to a stack of network details and functions from a single straightforward interface.

Continue reading →

Popular PC tools developer Wise Cleaner has released a public beta of its latest utility, Wise System Monitor.

The new addition is a desktop gadget which tracks and displays CPU usage, upload and download speeds, RAM consumption, CPU temperature and more.

Continue reading →

Farstone Technology has released VirtualXP Free 1.0, a free-for-personal-use tool that simplifies the task of converting a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 physical PC into a virtual machine.

The idea is that users hesitating about switching to a newer version of Windows can take their old system with them, ensuring all data, settings and programs continue to work going forward.

Continue reading →

When you’re working at the Windows command line it might sometimes be useful to download a file, but the standard tools don’t make this particularly easy.

If you’re looking for something simpler then Curly could be ideal. It’s a console-based downloader, free, portable and amazingly small (under 28KB), yet somehow it still manages to squeeze in one or two surprising extras.

Continue reading →

Take a picture with a digital camera and it’ll normally be tagged with the date and time, often useful later when searching or organizing your images.

If the camera clock is wrong, though, all your photos will have the wrong EXIF time stamp, and they’ll stay that way until someone notices.

Continue reading →

Some music players are smart. Not only will they play your tracks, but they'll try to tell you more about them, perhaps downloading and displaying the lyrics.

Windows Media Player and iTunes aren't quite so clever, but that's where Song Buddy comes in. This free app for Windows, iPhone, iPad and Mac detects the "now playing" artist and displays other releases, concerts, images, a biography, links and more.

Continue reading →

Mozilla has released Firefox 32.0 FINAL for desktop, with Firefox for Android 32.0 due to follow.

While there are a lot of changes to both desktop and mobile builds, Firefox 32 doesn’t throw up any standout new features, instead concentrating on tweaks and minor improvements.

Continue reading →

High resolution digital photos are great for most purposes, but can be a little cruel for portrait shots, where every skin imperfection is suddenly blown up in extreme detail.

Some photo editors have "beautifying" modules to help clean such problems, or you can often fix them yourself with a little painting or clone work. Free Photo Blemish Remover is another option, a specialist tool which can remove image imperfections with a click.

Continue reading →

If your PC has several user accounts then you might occasionally like to know when they're being accessed, perhaps to confirm that your children are only using the computer at particular times.

You could install some heavy duty system monitoring package, or maybe enable a few Family Safety restrictions for that account. But NirSoft's WinLogOnView is a much simpler option which could provide everything you need in a tiny, portable package.

Continue reading →

Earlier this year we looked at Voralent’s JPGMini and PNGMini, easy-to-use tools which reduced JPG and PNG file sizes without affecting image quality.

The developer has now released a replacement, Antelope, which handles JPG and PNG files, and supports both lossless and lossy compression.

Continue reading →

Google has updated its Chrome Beta channel with the release of Google Chrome 38.0 Beta. The new release, also available as Google Chrome 38.0 Beta (64-bit) for Windows and Linux, has two major highlights.

The first is an improved -- and more visible -- way of managing and switching between multiple Chrome user profiles, while the other sees 64-bit support extended to the OS X platform.

Continue reading →