Free Software

If Windows won’t start then there are plenty of standard options you can try: Safe Mode, system restore, "last known good", and now Windows 8′s refresh options.

These technologies have their limits, though, and so it’s wise to prepare a few other bootable environments of your own. An antivirus rescue disc, a partition manager, maybe a backup tool or system recovery suite.

At first glance, DAYU Disk Master Free looks like many other simple image backup tools. Select a target drive, a destination, choose a few options (compression, splitting, priority, speed) and you can run a backup at a click. Restoration is possible from the program or a rescue disk, and there’s a disk clone feature thrown in.

Browse the program’s menus, though, and some relatively unusual bonus features help it stand out from the low-end competition.

You’ve been online for hours, Chrome windows and tabs scattered everywhere, and now you need to revisit a particular page. Which would be fine, except you can’t remember which one it was, and the standard web history -- just titles and URLs -- doesn’t help at all.

Maybe you should have installed All Seeing Eye, a Chrome extension which takes a snapshot of every page you visit, indexes its text, and makes this freely searchable whenever you like.

High Motion Software has unveiled ImBatch 3.0, an interesting update to its free-for-personal-use image batch processing tool.

The headline addition is the Curves task, a versatile and configurable way to adjust image colors.

Setting up a new email or FTP client can take a while, especially if you’ve lots of accounts. Not only will you have to look up server names, ports, security and other details, but you’ll also have to try and remember all your various passwords.

If you didn’t make a note of yours originally (and you don’t use exactly the same password for everything), there are a few tools which might be able to help. NirSoft’s Mail PassView is one of the best known.

Softland has released FBackup 5.1 and Backup4all 5.1, minor new versions of its free and paid-for Windows backup products.

Both programs, which offer file-based backup and extended functionality via plug-ins, come with the promise of improved backup performance and more detailed statistics view, along with other minor improvements and bug fixes.

When we tried it last year, TEncoder impressed us as a powerful video conversion tool with a stack of features: file, folder and folder tree import, video trimming, 800+ output profiles, excellent subtitling support, deinterlace and crop tools, full control over output codec settings, and a whole lot more.

It was an outstanding package, but the developer had only just got started, and major updates have taken the program into whole new areas.

Downloading files is easy -- click a link, click “Save”, usually -- and if you need more features then most browsers have a range of free add-ons which can help.

But for real power there's no substitute for a stand-alone download manager like the new Download Ninja.

XBMC has gone through many iterations over the 12 years of its existence. The program, which now powers a number of home theater computers, began life as Xbox Media Player, then morphed into Xbox Media Center, before finally settling on the shorter abbreviation of XBMC.

But the platform has moved so far off from its original Xbox beginnings that it has announced it will get away from the old name as well.

AOMEI Technology has shipped AOMEI OneKey Recovery, a brand new tool that allows Windows users to create a custom recovery partition on their PC. The tool is primarily designed for use on a system whose on recovery partition has been lost, but should work with any PC.

The app creates the recovery partition from the user’s current setup, which means all existing programs and settings will be preserved.

Microsoft has unveiled Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit 5.0 (EMET), a free security tool which uses a variety of techniques to block common software exploits.

The update adds a new mitigation, Attack Surface Reduction (ASR), which prevents an application from running specific modules or plug-ins.

Auslogics has unveiled BoostSpeed 7, a major update for its PC cleanup, maintenance and optimization suite.

The Live Speedup module gains a Disk Priority Manager to optimize applications in real-time. Your hard drive is now monitored to reduce file fragmentation, while disk and Registry cleanups can be scheduled to run automatically.

Google has moved its dedicated 64-bit Windows build of Chrome one step closer to its final release with the launch of Google Chrome 37.0 Beta (64-bit). The new release requires Windows 7 64-bit or later to run.

The new build, which is also available in 64-bit form for Linux, moves to the beta channel, but despite media speculation, users should not assume a final release is just a few weeks away – it could yet be months before Google deems the build is stable enough for general consumption.

Support.com has updated its popular malware hunter SUPERAntiSpyware to version 6.0.

The major new feature is System Investigator, a tool which highlights files of interest in the most common infection points: startup programs, browser extensions, installed applications, Windows services, drivers, temporary and system folders, scheduled tasks, and more.

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 4.3 FINAL  for Windows, Mac and Linux. The new release sees some notable user-interface tweaks, performance enhancements and a number of new and tweaked features.

TDF is particularly keen to highlight four major new features: improved document interoperability, comment management, more intuitive spreadsheet handling in Calc, and support for animated 3D models in Impress.