Powerful open source screenshot tool ShareX has been updated to version 9.0 with some significant changes and additions.

Top of the list is new support for screen recording with audio. This makes use of FFmpeg to do the hard work, with ShareX downloading the program if you don’t have it already.

Images2PDF is a simple tool for saving your chosen digital images to a PDF file. Yes, you’re right, there are plenty of ways to do this already, but the program has one or two touches which help it stand out from the crowd.

Images2PDF is a lightweight 1.66MB download, for instance, and there really isn’t anything more (this isn’t one of those tools which comes bundled with Ghostscript). It’s adware-free, too, always a plus with this type of application.

Adobe Creative Cloud went down for 24 hours earlier, which means that creative brains around the world were desperately struggling to complete jobs that require the comprehensive suite of services.

The good news is that there are plenty of free alternatives professionals can use to get by and below is an extensive rundown of each product.

Cost is often a powerful driver in the battle for market domination. Expensive products while, arguably, extremely capable for the money, may account for a smaller piece of the pie as opposed to free, powerful alternatives which often take the lion's share. For buyers, especially those with tight budgets, diminishing spendings to maximize profits comes naturally, so they tend to favor the latter. The way to go, to capture more market share, is not to compete on the same pricing level, but to make things cheaper so they appeal to more potential customers.

This is the path that Arizona-based software company Axosoft has taken with its bug tracker. Previously costing $70 per user per year, it can now be purchased for a mere $1 per year, no matter the number of users. It is basically free. "We know, it's pretty hard to believe, but we've decided to go after market share which is why we are doing this", says Axosoft CEO Hamid Shojaee.

Spam rates may be high, at around 70 percent of all email traffic, but protecting yourself is easy -- at least, in theory. Just install an internet security suite and you’ll probably get a spam filter along with everything else.

The problem? While this sounds convenient, bundled antispam engines aren’t generally very accurate. If you really want your inbox to stay junk-free, then you should try a specialist filter like Cloudmark DesktopOne.

The revelations made by Edward Snowden have irreversibly changed the face of the internet. There is now suspicions at every turn, every site and provider is the subject of questioning, and web users are warier than ever before. The use of encryption to hide the content and nature of online activity is nothing new, but it seems that it is very much on the increase. As reported by TorrentFreak, analysis from Sandvine shows that there has been a global increase in the use of encryption.

The figures have been reached by looking at the levels of SSL traffic over the past year, and these show that in North America, during peak hours, encrypted traffic just about doubled. In Europe the increase is even more marked, jumping fourfold so that it now accounts for over six percent of peak time traffic. Europe appears to have a greater interest in encryption than North America, with the latter's SSL traffic accounting for 3.8 percent of peak time traffic.

Vinyl Software has announced the release of Winyl 3.0, an extremely major update to its popular music player. A new Radios menu gives easy access to nine internet radio stations, and you can add more as required.

Lyrics now appear automatically whenever you play a recognized song. Well, usually -- they’re not yet visible in all skins (try iTunes if you have problems).

Removing the traditional Start button and menu from Windows 8 was a bold move for Microsoft. Unfortunately the tech giant underestimated just how attached to it users were. Rather than embracing the (slightly clumsy) full screen Modern UI, vast numbers of early adopters simply opted to install one of the many Start menus made available by third-party developers.

While most of these programs are straight copies of the Windows 7 Start menu, ReviverSoft has chosen to go down a different route with its product. Start Menu Reviver is a Modern-UI styled touchscreen-friendly Start menu that’s been designed to look as if it’s part of Microsoft’s OS. The recently released Start Menu Reviver 2 improves on the first edition by offering a sleeker design, greater customization, and a Windows 7 mode. I spoke to Davide De Vellis, co-founder of ReviverSoft, about Start Menu Reviver and what he thinks about Microsoft’s plans to introduce a Start menu of its own in a future Windows 8.x.update.

BurnAware Technologies has released BurnAware 7.0 Free, BurnAware 7.0 Premium and BurnAware 7.0 Professional, the latest builds of its free and paid-for disc burning products for Windows.

Version 7 adds a new user interface to all of its tools, plus adds a multi-erase tool for wiping discs simultaneously. It also replaces the built-in file browser with an external file manager.

Every time you use your PC, files are being created, modified or deleted in the background. For the most part you won’t care, but if you’re worried about malware, or wondering what someone else is doing on your system, then it might be interesting to find out exactly what’s being changed.

Enter Whirlpool File Checker, an open source file integrity checker which can scan a set of files and highlight any which are new, or have been changed.

You’re busy on the PC when you need to make a note, manage a task, maybe save a link. You could open Notepad, enter the details, save the file, and hope you can find it again later. But it might be easier to use FreeText to manage the whole process for you.

At its simplest, the program works like a more convenient version of Notepad. Links you type are recognized and become clickable; its window will by default remain on top of others; it minimizes to the system tray, and FreeText automatically saves your current file at regular intervals.

You might have taken some great digital photos, but they can always be made better, and one way is to transform them into a photo mosaic: a picture built from the color-matched thumbnails of other images.

This isn’t always easy. As we’ve discussed before, AndreaMosaic is a very powerful mosaic creator, but with a complex interface which means it can be hard to follow. Fortunately there are simpler alternatives -- and Mosamic is one of the very best.

Windows PCs are messy beasts at the best of times, with uninstallers leaving great swathes of program files and Registry entries behind. The complicated way that programs and hardware is tied in with Windows can have more serious repercussions too, should you suddenly find your graphics card not working properly and the installer refusing to play ball.

It’s at times like this you need a tool that can thoroughly remove the driver and all traces of the other paraphernalia installed. Thank goodness, for the clearly labeled Display Driver Uninstaller.

Keyloggers are a real malware menace, recording everything you type -- user names, passwords, credit card numbers and more -- for misuse later.

Your antivirus software will intercept most keyloggers before they can be installed, of course. Well, hopefully. But if you’d like another layer of protection, just in case, then you might be interested in Zemana AntiLogger Free.

It’s easy to view the contents of a PDF, but extracting them for reuse elsewhere takes more effort. Even if you install something PDF to JPEG Expert to grab the images from a document, for instance, that won’t help you save the text, fonts, or other resources a PDF might contain.

Weeny Free PDF Extractor claims to offer a simpler solution. It doesn’t just grab the pictures, or the text. Instead the program cycles through 1, 10, 100 or as many PDFs as you like, extracting all their resources -- images, text, fonts and files -- and saving them to disk.