When you’re looking to improve your PC’s speed and stability then there are plenty of actions you might take, but one of the most effective is often just to uninstall any applications, add-ons and extras which you don’t really need. You’ll free up plenty of system resources, and that alone could help to deliver a real performance boost.

You’ll have to figure out exactly which programs you need to keep, though, and which can be safely uninstalled, and that can be a challenge if you’ve hundreds of apps to explore. Don’t worry, though, because Should I Remove It? is here to help: just download the program, the authors say, "and within seconds we will help you purge your PC".

Rapid7 -- the security company behind vulnerability scanner Metasploit -- has released details on three security flaws affecting some Universal Plug and Play implementations. And their research indicates that 40 to 50 million IPs are vulnerable to at least one of those vulnerabilities, which the company says is exposing users "to remote attacks that could result in the theft of sensitive information".

Could you be vulnerable? Fortunately Rapid7 has provided a free Windows-based tool, ScanNow for Universal Plug and Play, to help you find out.

Adobe’s PDF is a great format for sharing information with others, and normally you might go to considerable effort to export a particular file as a PDF document.

Occasionally, though, you might have an existing PDF file which you’d really prefer to be in another format: HTML, plain text, images, whatever it might be. That’s when a PDF conversion tool comes in handy, and the free PDFMate PDF Converter -- which claims to export your documents to EPUB, TXT, HTML, SWF and image formats, amongst others -- just might be able to help.

Norwegian browser developer Opera has announced its first release of 2013. Opera 12.13 FINAL is a security and stability release with a couple of notable bug fixes. The release, also available as a separate 64-bit build for Windows 64-bit users, comes just 48 hours after Opera 12.13 RC2 was released for public testing.

Bug fixes include a resolution that saw no webpages being loaded on startup if Opera is disconnected from the internet, plus one that led to internal communication errors appearing on Facebook.

Shutting down your PC is often simple and straightforward. You finish what you’re doing, save your work, close any applications and hit the shutdown button: done.

Sometimes, though, life is more complicated. Maybe you want to leave your PC running and have it automatically close at a particular time, say; when a program has finished running, or on some similar event. And that can be more difficult to organize -- unless you get a little help from Shutter.

Social networks are great, in theory. But then you run into problems with other users, advertising, spam, unexpected and unnecessary interface redesigns, security issues, privacy problems and the list goes on.

If you’re in the mood to try something different, then, you might be interested in RetroShare. It’s a cross-platform, open source tool which provides a rich set of features -- instant messaging, voice chat, forums, channels, file sharing and more -- but in a peer-to-peer form, so you only get to connect to people that you’ve specifically invited.

PhrozenSoft has released Mirage Anti-Bot 3.0, a tiny tool which aims to prevent your PC from accessing sites infected by the Zeus, SpyEye and Palevo families of malware.

The core of the program remains very simple. It just downloads the excellent www.abuse.ch blocklist and updates your HOSTS file accordingly, immediately preventing you from accessing any of the included malicious domains.

Downloading is such a fundamental part of the online experience that you might expect every browser to include a quality download manager by default. The standard offerings are usually a little more basic, though, so if you’d like some help in, say, downloading online videos more easily, then you’ll need to install a specialist download manager like the new EagleGet.

This kind of tool is notorious for trying to drown your PC in adware during installation, but EagleGet is much more straightforward, for the moment at least: it’ll install itself, and nothing else at all. This might be because the program is still in beta, of course, but at the moment it’s safe to try.

Piriform has released CCleaner 3.27, a minor update for its popular Windows free cleaning tool. CCleaner 3.27, also available in portable form, basically adds updates for major new browser releases, including support for Internet Explorer Metro in Windows 8.

The release is joined by Speccy 1.20, a minor update of Piriform’s system information tool, which adds version number detection for a number of major apps.

AVCLabs has released Any Video Converter Free 5.0.2 a major new version of its freeware video transcoding and conversion tool for Windows. The new build sports a radically overhauled and simplified user interface, plus promises faster, more powerful performance.

AVC Free promises to effortlessly convert videos from over 60 formats, with presets for popular mobile devices such as Android and iOS phones included. It’s also capable of downloading YouTube videos and includes limited video-editing tools.

Having to reinstall software is never exactly fun, but it gets particularly annoying if you’ve been unfortunate enough to lose the CD case, email or whatever else contained that application’s product key. Especially if the developer isn’t able to send you a reminder.

Even if you can’t find any record of the product key, though, you may be able to use a product key finder such as Weeny Free Key Recovery to recover it from your existing installation.

At first glance, Effective File Search seems much like any other Windows search tool. Enter the file spec here; choose the folder you’d like to search over there; optionally filter by date or file size, or maybe enter some text which the file must contain. It all seems very familiar.

Take a closer look, though, and you’ll find this free program offers a real depth which goes far beyond what you’ll see with most of the competition.

If you’re an old hand at Linux then downloading a specific distribution won’t be a problem. You’ll probably have your preferred distro bookmarked already, if not a quick search will turn up the necessary links and you’ll be downloading the appropriate files in a few seconds.

If you’re a total Linux newbie, though, it’s a very different story, and just figuring out which variations might best suit your needs may seem like a major challenge. But fortunately help is at hand in the shape of a small Windows tool called Get Linux.

It’s important to keep your wireless network secure, and turning your encryption levels to the max is usually a very good place to start.

This doesn’t in itself guarantee safety, though, so you may want to also equip your system with SoftPerfect Wifi Guard, which will monitor your network and alert you to devices which it doesn’t recognize.

COMODO has released COMODO Rescue Disk 2.0, a bootable environment which includes a copy of Cleaning Essentials for Linux to help remove even the most deeply embedded malware.

Changes from the previous 1.x betas are fairly basic, and for instance include some bug fixes and the inclusion of the very latest COMODO Antivirus Engine for Linux (1.2.3). Otherwise the package remains a capable rescue disc which is worth considering for your emergency toolkit.