The "return of the Start button" in Windows 8.1 might not have delivered what everyone wanted, but it doesn’t really matter. If you need to bring the Start Menu back to Windows 8 then Classic Shell has always done a good job, and the new Classic Shell 3.9 beta build is better than ever.

Launch the Windows 7-style Start Menu and your programs now display in a tree on the left-hand side, allowing you to access them right away.

Norwegian browser developer Opera Software has confirmed the switch of its browser development to a rapid release cycle with the launch of Opera Next 16. The new version number comes less than a month after Opera 15 FINAL was released, which saw Opera switch from its own proprietary Presto web engine to the Blink engine used by Google Chrome.

As with all rapid release cycle updates, there are no major overhauls to be found in Opera Next 16, although a number of interesting new features have been showcased as the next iteration starts its journey towards final release.

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 4.1 for Windows, Mac and Linux, a major new release of its open-source office suite. Comprising word processor, spreadsheet, presentations tool and database, as well as drawing and math tools, LibreOffice 4.1 has been billed "the most interoperable free office suite ever" by TDF, keen to establish itself as the most viable free alternative to Microsoft Office.

Version 4.1 not only comes with a large number of improvements in the area of document compatibility, it also ships with a number of notable new features, including support for font embedding across the suite as well as app-specific improvements like a new Photo Album feature in Impress.

If a friend asks you to help troubleshoot his or her PC problems then it’s often useful to check their hard drive to see exactly what’s installed and where. But if they don't live nearby, and there’s no convenient screen sharing or remote access technology to hand, then don’t worry: there’s always Snap2HTML.

Point this tiny program (a 185KB download) at any location on the hard drive, click "Create Snapshot", and it’ll quickly scan the system, recording any files or folders it contains in a ready-to-email (after zipping, at least), self-contained HTML report.

NirSoft has announced the availability of NetworkLatencyView, a handy network monitoring tool.

The program detects new TCP connections on your PC, calculating and displaying their network latency. As NirSoft points out, "the latency value calculated by NetworkLatencyView is very similar to the result you get from pinging to the same IP address".

Whether you’ve been overclocking your PC, are worried about a specific device, or just wondering why your system has been so unstable recently, getting a better understanding of your computer’s inner workings can be very useful. And grabbing a copy of the Open Hardware Monitor is a great place to start.

The program is free, open source, and surprisingly easy to use. Unzip and launch it, and a simple tree view immediately displays temperatures, fan speeds, voltages, CPU load and more.

Google has updated its Cloud Print service, adding full support for Windows (XP, Vista and 7, anyway) and making it easier to share printers.

Cloud Print was first made available in 2011, and essentially allows you to access your printers from phones, tablets, PCs and more, wherever you happen to be. The service has previously been accessible via Chrome, but this new release makes it available to any Windows desktop application.

The PC world is packed with audio players of every type, which makes it difficult for smaller contenders to stand out from the crowd. Andreas Argirakis has done better than most with his BZR Player, though, thanks to a very simple strategy: he’s implemented support for just about every audio format you’ve ever heard of, and many more you haven’t, meaning the player now supports more than 480 file types in total.

The program doesn’t just open the regular formats, then: MP3, WMA, FLAC, OGG and so on. It also handles all kinds of game and hardware-specific formats, with the supported list including "Baldur’s Gate -- Dark Alliance", "Bio Hazard 2", "Conflict -- Desert Storm 1 & 2", EA formats, Nintendo GBS, NSF and NSFE files, and the list goes on.

The Apache Software Foundation has announced the release of Apache OpenOffice 4.0, a major update with plenty of interesting new features and enhancements.

The most obvious interface addition is the sidebar, a Lotus Symphony-sourced panel which provides quick access to options most relevant to the current editing task (setting fonts, text style and alignment in a text box, tweaking brightness, colors and contrast for an image, and more).

NirSoft has updated BlueScreenView, its "blue screen of death" troubleshooting tool, to version 1.52.

The program now includes three Google Search options, accessible both from the File and right-click context menus, to help you find out more about the currently selected crash.

It’s spent a lengthy two years in beta, but RIOT 0.5 has finally been released. And it just might have been worth the wait.

The major addition in the new build of the image compression tool is Full Auto Mode. Reducing the size of JPG, PNG and GIF files can be a complex business, and if you’re put off by talk of Chroma subsampling, Encoding and Color Quantization algorithms then that’s now easily avoidable. The program launches in Full Auto Mode, chooses all the options for you, and at a minimum all you have to do is click "Save".

Piriform has released Defraggler v2.15.741 and Defraggler Portable v2.15.741, brand new editions of its popular Windows defragmentation tool. Such lengthy version numbers usually mean this is a very minor update indeed, but not here: these new builds have some excellent additions and enhancements.

Top of the list is improved performance for both Analyze and Defrag functions across all operating systems.

For relative newcomers to the Mac, the need to delve behind the scenes using an array of powerful tools and the command-line Terminal can be quite daunting. There are a number of useful tools such as TinkerTool that give power users easier access to a range of system features, but what about less experienced users?

It seems Bitdefender -- better known for its range of security products -- has come up with a solution, with its new free app for Lion and Mountain Lion users in the form of Mechanic by Bitdefender 1.1.

If you’ve chosen your media player wisely then capturing a single frame from a video is usually very easy. In VLC Media Player, for instance, selecting Video > Take Snapshot -- or just pressing Shift+S -- will save a JPG of the current frame to your Pictures folder.

If you’d like to save multiple frames, though, perhaps as a way to summarize the content of a video, then your life becomes a little more difficult. Some players can still help (check out VLC Media Player’s command line options for one method), but for real simplicity you might prefer DVDVideoSoft’s Free Video to JPEG Converter.

Boris Eyrich Software has announced the release of Artweaver 4.0, the latest edition of its popular painting tool. It’s a significant update too, especially in comparison to the rather underwhelming 3.0, with both Artweaver 4.0 Free and the more powerful commercial Artweaver Plus (yours for around $40) gaining some worthwhile features.

Both editions benefit from a tabbed document interface, for instance, which makes it easier to switch between images.