Articles about Free Software

In recent years there has been a lot of love shown for Plex, the slick and frankly brilliant media sharing solution that encompasses just about any platform. But it’s not the only media server in town.

It’s lurked in the shadows for some time, but now there’s a serious competitor starting to eye up Plex’s crown, and that solution is Media Browser.

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Utilities developer Foolish IT has released dMaintenance Home Edition, a free version of its PC maintenance and cleanup tool.

The program can perform various maintenance tasks, including cleaning up your print queue, browsers (IE, Firefox and Chrome) and hard drive, as well as resetting your browser home page, clearing proxy settings, and resetting your HOSTS file. There’s an option to scan your computer with Windows Defender, and once it’s complete dMaintenance can create a restore point, reboot your PC or just shut it down.

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One welcome addition to Windows 8 was its ability to mount ISO images. If you need to explore the contents of an ISO, just double-click the file and it opens in a virtual Explorer drive, where you can browse, play and generally treat it like the original disc. This works very well, too, but there may still be times when you need a little more drive management power.

GBurner Virtual Drive is a free tool which can also mount ISO images in virtual drives. In addition, you get support for another 20+ formats (ASHDISC, DAA, DMG, IMG, NRG and more). You’re able to mount up to 16 images simultaneously, and these can be loaded automatically when your PC starts, so they’re always available.

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Avast Software has released the fourth update to its Avast 2014 range of products with the unveiling of build number 9.0.2021 for Avast Free Antivirus 2014, Avast Internet Security 2014 and Avast Premier Security 2014.

As with the previous few updates, R4 contains no new features, but does include several important security enhancements among other tweaks and optimizations that once again make it essential for existing users.

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NPO The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.71, an update to its cross-platform, open-source 3D graphics tool. Version 2.71, also available in 64-bit and portable form on Windows, includes new features and continues to build on the recently revamped user interface.

Areas that enjoy significant changes include the Cycles renderer, Animation, Modelling, Sculpting-Painting, Game Engine and Freestyle NPR Rendering tool.

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Linux is great for a litany of reasons, but one of the most important is refurbishing. You see, an operating system based on the open-source kernel can breathe new life into an older computer, and effectively turn it into a new machine. This is because the operating systems are typically less system intensive than Windows.

Unfortunately, not all Linux-based operating systems are equally lightweight. Some may require better specs than others, usually due to the environment. Something like Unity or KDE may require a more modern computer for an optimal experience, but what if your machine has really low specs? A great environment for an old and weak machine is Xfce. Though not the lightest, it feels modern, while lighter environments can feel archaic. Today, Linux Mint embraces the low-end, with version 17 of its operating system, now with Xfce as an option.

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Unix is renowned for its powerful command line tools, and there are many ways you can try at least some of them on the PC. Installing Gnu on Windows gets you 100+ of the best known tools, recompiled to run under Windows, while favorites like grep have been ported individually.

But if you’re looking for simplicity and convenience, it’s hard to beat BusyBox, which crams tiny versions of 117 Unix utilities into a single 645 KB executable. There’s no bulk, no complex folder structure, just one package which provides everything you need.

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Browsing Instagram photos online is simple and straightforward, but if you’d prefer local copies then that’s also easy to arrange, with just a little help from the open source InstagramSaver.

Download, unzip and launch the program and you’re presented with a clear and simple interface. At a minimum, all you have to do is enter an Instagram user name, click Download, and watch as InstagramSaver grabs all the photos from that account.

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If you’re managing your hard drive, and need to have a group of files accessible from two or more folders, then the solution seems obvious: just make some copies. But while this is quick and easy, it wastes hard drive space, and if you forget about the copies (which you will) they could be cluttering your system for a very long time.

Hard links are an NTFS feature which could offer a better solution. A hard link is essentially an alternate name for a file on an NTFS drive, enabling you to make one or more files appear in as many locations as you need. And as all the references point to the same file, no extra disk space is required at all.

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As the month draws to a close, Piriform issues its regular update to its freeware Windows cleaning utility with the releases of CCleaner 4.15 and CCleaner Portable 4.15.

Highlights in the latest release include support for the forthcoming 64-bit build of Google Chrome, plus an improved secure wipe algorithm as well as memory and architecture optimizations.

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It’s been a long wait -- nearly six years in fact -- but dotPDN LLC has finally unveiled Paint.NET 4.0 FINAL, the first major update to its popular freeware image-editing tool for Windows since version 3.5 was released in October 2008.

The new build comes with the promise of major performance improvements, particularly on multi-core processors, anti-aliased selections, a revamped user interface, a number of new features and revised system requirements that lock out Windows XP and Vista users.

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Portable applications can be very convenient, especially if you regularly use different computers. Just copy the programs to a USB stick and you can run them anywhere, no installation required, and no traces left behind afterwards.

Unfortunately many applications don’t have an official portable version, but there are other options you can try. Evalaze is a free (for non-commercial use) tool which converts full applications into a single portable exe file which runs on any Windows PC, from XP up.

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BDReader is a comic book viewer with ambition. It doesn’t just zoom to page width and wait for you to scroll: the program also supports “panel view”, which uses computer vision technology to detect the panels in a page, and display them in order. at the maximum possible size for your page.

There are one or two other comic readers which try to do the same thing, but they’re typically commercial products for tablets. Can an open source Windows tool really compete? We grabbed a copy to find out.

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Irfan Skiljan has unveiled IrfanView 4.38, a major new build of his popular Windows image viewer and editor that’s free for personal use.

Despite the minor revision number, IrfanView 4.38 is packed with a significant number of new features, as well as newly added support (via a plugin) for legacy image formats stretching back to the days of 8-bit computing.

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It’s extremely easy to research almost any topic online, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. You can be drowning in links and PDFs before you know it, and browser bookmarks simply aren’t enough to keep everything under control.

Zotero is a smarter solution for organizing both online and offline research. It’s aimed at a professional audience who need a quick and easy way to create bibliographies and properly formatted citations, but the core technology really does have something for every web researcher.

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