Bopsoft has released Listary 4.0 and Listary Portable 4.0, the latest builds of its lightweight, ultra-compact search add-on for Windows users. The new release has been rewritten from scratch, and simplifies browsing and searching for files from a number of locations, including Windows Explorer, Open/Save dialog boxes and various third-party tools.

Version 4.0 includes a number of major new features, including disk and sub-folder search, fuzzy navigation, History, Actions and Projects. It also comes with a number of notable improvements, including enhanced search performance and ranking.

The standard Windows taskbar clock is small, simple and efficient, but also a little dull. And there are no significant options to change how it looks or behaves, either, so if you’d like to customize this part of your desktop then you’ll need a little assistance from the Talking Desktop Clock.

We were initially a little suspicious of the program, as it has a fairly small installer, but then downloads several additional files as setup progresses. Was this going to be adware? Fortunately the answer was no, the program really is free with no catches, and on first launch it immediately displayed an attractive analogue clock in the bottom right corner of our desktop.

There are many reasons why you’d want to hide your internet IP address. The most common one is that you’re trying to access services or web sites restricted to a specific country or territory -- this might be to catch up with UK BBC TV’s shows via iPlayer or for more fundamental reasons, such as bypassing a country’s censorship restrictions.

Spoofing your IP address so you appear to come from another country than the one you’re residing in isn’t by itself a difficult task -- all you need is a decent VPN service. But when it comes to simplicity and decent performance, you can’t beat a service called Hideman, available on Windows and Mac via the free Hideman 2.0 tool, and Hideman VPN 1.9.7 for Android.

Launch Windows, open a folder or file, install, remove or run a program -- just about everything you do on a PC results in Windows writing to the Registry. And over time that means the Registry files will grow, as they contain more and more "slack space", gaps where old entries used to be.

This isn’t particularly harmful, but it does waste a little memory and hard drive space. And so you might like to try Tweaking.com’s Registry Compressor, a small and simple tool which can defragment your Registry, removing this slack space (nothing else -- this isn’t a Registry cleaner) and cutting the files down to size.

When you’re troubleshooting a network problem then it often makes sense to take a look at your network adapters, and all their associated details. But Windows doesn’t make this nearly as easy as it should. The information is available, but very fragmented, so you’ll probably have to browse various Control Panel applets and run a few command line tools to get the details you need.

Fortunately there now an easier way, though, in the shape of a new tool from NirSoft, NetworkInterfacesView.

Open-source Windows defrag tool UltraDefrag 6.0 FINAL has been released along with a 64-bit build and portable editions. The new build promises optimized disk processing algorithms for speed and efficiency, support for optimizing FAT disks and the ability to minimize the main window to the Taskbar Notification area.

Ultra Defrag comes with a graphical interface for less experienced users as well as options for defragging individual files, folders and drives from the Explorer context menu, but power users can also control it via a console, with options for batch processing and setting up scheduled tasks available. It also comes with boot-time options for defragging system files and Registry hives.

Oracle has released VirtualBox 4.2.8, a maintenance update for its open-source, cross-platform virtualisation tool that should improve stability and fix various regressions. Notable changes include a fix that caused guests to crash when using a huge amount of guest RAM on machines with Intel Virtualisation (VT-x) technology.

Aside from bug fixes, there is one minor performance tweak of note, which sees the time for merging snapshots reduced under certain conditions. Users can now also change VRDE settings for saved VMs under Settings.

Download an ISO disc image onto a brand new PC and you probably won’t need any third-party software to handle it. Windows 8 makes it easy to mount the image as a virtual drive, so you can access the contents without needing to burn them to a physical disc.

This option isn’t exactly configurable, though. It offers no support for the many other disc image formats out there. And it’s not much help if you don’t have Windows 8, either -- which is why you might prefer to install VirtualDVD.

If you’d like to edit an audio file then there’s plenty of free tools around to help, however most of them are prone to altering your files in unexpected ways. To test this yourself, just open any file, save it with a different name, and compare that file with the original. Even though you’ve not performed any operations on the second file at all, you’ll still often find there are differences, and inevitably that’s going to mean some compromise in sound quality.

WaveShop takes an alternative approach. The program is specifically designed to be bit-perfect, only altering your audio when it’s absolutely necessary. So if you open a file and then save it immediately, there will be no changes. And if you carry out some editing task on one area of the file -- fade it out at the end, say -- everything else remains exactly as it was.

Astonsoft Ltd has released EssentialPIM Free 5.5 and EssentialPIM Pro 5.5, major new versions of its Windows personal information manager. Highlights in this new release include support for iCloud synchronization, native Dropbox support and improved CardDAV tools.

Also updated are EssentialPIM for iOS 2.6 and EssentialPIM for Android 1.8.2, mobile apps designed to give users access to their EssentialPIM data while on the move. While iOS users only see minor bug fixes in this update, Android users will enjoy major improvements to the Calendar and Contacts modules.

Piriform Software has released CCleaner 3.28 and CCleaner Portable 3.28, updated versions of its popular freeware Windows cleaning tool. Version 3.28 is a minor release, promising better performance and compatibility, plus support for cleaning up behind two new programs.

Piriform has also announced that the release of CCleaner 3.28 will be the last of the 3.x branch, with CCleaner 4.0 the next release slated. It also hints that this is the first of a number of major updates to its product line planned over the coming months.

If your browser has been taken over by an aggressive addon then you can try the standard routes to remove it (the "Manage Addons" dialog in IE, for instance). These can be confusing for beginners, though, and may not always work, so avast! has developed a custom Browser Cleanup tool as a simpler alternative.

The program is portable, a compact 1.75 MB download which runs on Windows XP, 7 and 8, so it’s generally convenient to use. It supports IE, Firefox and Chrome, and on launch checks each of these to evaluate your browser addons.

If the latest Java security scares have persuaded you to ditch the technology forever, then removing it from your PC is normally straightforward. Java’s regular uninstaller should do the job in just a few seconds.

If this doesn’t work, though -- or you just want to remove and reinstall Java, because of problems with your system -- then it might be worth trying JavaRA, a compact tool that can help you to update or cleanly uninstall the Java Runtime Environment.

If you’re confident enough with hard drives to have tried editing them before at the sector level, then you’ll know that most disk editing software is, well, less than helpful. Open a drive and you’ll generally be presented with a basic hex view of your data, then left on your own to figure out what it all means. And okay, it’s true, sector editors are only for the most knowledgeable of PC users, but even experts could benefit from a little help, occasionally.

You don’t have to put up with this, though. Some editors do make a real effort to help you interpret what you’re seeing while browsing a drive. And you don’t always have to pay big money for them, either: Active@ Disk Editor can be yours for free.

When you need to share files with others, setting up a web server probably won’t be the first idea that comes to mind. It just seems like too bulky a solution, too complex, and so you’d probably opt for something more conventional: setting up a network, using a file sharing service, whatever it might be.

With the right software, though, setting up a web server can be much more straightforward than you think. And the open source HFS (Http File Server) is a particularly good example of this, because even if you’re a networking novice, it could have you sharing your files locally within minutes.