Articles about Free Software

Whether you’ve accidentally deleted a file, a partition or an entire drive, there are plenty of recovery tools you can turn to for assistance. And most of these claim ease of use as a key selling point. You won’t have to worry about low level drive structures or other complexities, as the program will try to handle everything for you.

If you’re at home with file systems, though, and familiar with partition tables and the MFT, you may sometimes get better results with a tool which lets you take more hands-on control. And the free (for personal use) DMDE is a great example.

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Mozilla has launched Firefox 18.0 FINAL, the latest stable build of its open-source, cross-platform web browser. Version 18 debuts a new, faster JavaScript engine to improve page loading times by up to 26 per cent over the previous version. Mac users will also be pleased to learn that version 18 finally includes full Retina-display support on Macs running OS X 10.7 (Lion) or later.

At the same time, Mozilla is readying the final release of Thunderbird 18, a minor update to its email messaging tool. The most notable new feature here will be support for zoom in the compose window.

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After almost two years without a significant update, you might have been forgiven for thinking that rootkit detector GMER was on its way out. But it seems there’s some life left in the program yet. Version 2.0 has just been released, and it’s the most important GMER update for a very long time.

The new build finally provides full Windows x64 support, for instance. If you’ve not used the program for a while because of its 64-bit issues then now might be the time to reconsider. And the addition of Windows 8 support means you can now run GMER 2.0 on just about any modern PC.

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If you regularly find yourself helping to fix other people’s PC problems then you’ve probably already thought about creating a portable troubleshooting toolkit. And this needn’t take very long. Just copy something like the Sysinternals Suite to a USB stick, for instance, and you’ll be more than equipped to diagnose and resolve all kinds of issues.

And if you find you need to extend your troubleshooting capabilities even further, then you can always add another free toolkit or two. Switchblade is an excellent free example: just download the latest version, unzip it to your USB key and you’ll gain all kinds of useful features and functionality.

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Everyone’s looking for that magic one-click solution to digitizing their personal video and movies collection. Often you find yourself having to jump through a number of hoops before you can get the movies in a format you like, but if you’re looking for a perfect 1:1 rip in MKV format, then MakeMKV 1.7.10 Beta is the tool for you.

MakeMKV 1.7.10 runs on Windows and Mac, and lets you simply select your DVD or Blu-ray disc, pick an output folder and click a button to rip it. Better still, it produces a 1:1 copy in much less time than other tools, and is completely free to use while in beta.

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While anti-virus packages are fine at removing malware, they’re often less useful at undoing the damage an infection has caused. And so even if you’ve managed to get rid of the initial threat, you might still have problems running Explorer, opening particular files, launching key Windows components, and so on.

Windows Medkit is an interesting collection of tools which promises it can help regain control, fix the Registry and get everything working again. Sounds impressive, especially when you notice that the package comes in the form of a tiny (107KB) download, but can it really deliver? We took the program for a spin.

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Microsoft chose to kill off Live Mesh, its PC-to-PC syncing service, late last year. Of course we knew this was coming when Windows Essentials 2012 was released without the Live Mesh app as a part of the suite, but  for some reason, the company waited to hold off making the official announcement until a bit later.

The reason for the move is clear -- Microsoft wants customers to migrate to SkyDrive. Although it's unquestionably a great cloud service, SkyDrive doesn't provide P2P syncing like Live Mesh, instead forcing customers to use the cloud as an intermediary. Sounds fine, but it only comes with 7 GB of free storage, or 25 GB if you were grandfathered in as an early adopter.

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Browsers are fine for displaying content, but not nearly as useful when you want to download it, and this is especially true with web galleries. No matter how simple the collection of images, you’ll still probably have to work them all manually, right-clicking each in turn and trying to figure out the appropriate option ("Save as", "Save link as", whatever it might be).

If you’d prefer an easy life, though, you could forget all the usual hassles and turn to NeoDownloader Lite, instead. While the program has some issues, it’s still a great way to simplify and speed up the process of downloading images from the web.

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It’s no secret that the Windows clipboard is, well, just a little limited. Copy a snippet of text from your web browser, say, and you’ve already reached the clipboard’s capacity: copy another and the first will be removed, lost forever, a real annoyance if you need it later.

There are plenty of clipboard extenders around to try and address this problem, of course. Basic examples might save clipboard text. Most will save text and images. But Save.Me is rather more ambitious, with the program aiming to save absolutely everything: text, images, URLs, files, folders, it’s all preserved for speedy access at a later date.

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Malwarebytes Corporation has released Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70. And while (as usual with this particular program) the upgrade isn’t particularly revolutionary, it does contain some important tweaks and additions.

The new build sees Anti-Malware finally get up-to-date with Windows 8, for instance. Not only does the program now properly identify Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 in scan logs, but it can also use the Windows 8 Start Screen to show notifications.

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Security vendor Anvisoft has released Anvi Rescue Disk 1.0, a free bootable Linux-based environment with tools to help detect and remove ransomware from an infected PC.

And while this isn’t exactly a new idea, the system does have a few welcome touches which make it little more appealing than some of the competition.

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Launch most image managers, even for the first time, and you’ll feel immediately at home. And that’s because they tend to follow very similar designs. You’ll have album or folder groupings on the left, and image thumbnails on the right; double-clicking something displays it full-screen; right-clicking gives you more options; and in just a few seconds you’ll have a very good understanding of what the program can do.

This is all very easy to use, then. But some say there are better ways to browse your images. Visions, for instance, drops the usual flat folders to present your photos in a configurable 3D interface, which (the developers claim) offers all kind of image management benefits. Really? We downloaded a copy to find out more.

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Sharing an image of your desktop can often be a useful way to help someone understand a point you’re trying to make, but making this happen isn’t always entirely straightforward. You’ll have to figure out how best to capture the screen, get the image to a file and send the file to your contact, for instance. And while none of this is complicated, it can take a little while, especially if you need to share several images with several people.

Puush is an application and web service which can greatly simplify this process, though, by capturing your image, uploading it and making the file accessible to others in a single step -- potentially a real time-saver.

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Oracle has announced the release of VirtualBox 4.2.6, the latest edition of its powerful cross-platform virtualization tool.

This is a maintenance release, and so looks more or less unchanged. But the build does include plenty of welcome bug fixes and other small improvements.

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UK software developer Comodo Group has launched the 2013 range -- version 6.0 -- of its free internet security products. COMODO Internet Security Premium 2013, COMODO AntiVirus 2013 and COMODO Firewall 2013 all debut a brand new, radically revamped and simplified user interface, plus come with the promise of being the lightest, fastest version of COMODO’s security tool yet.

The latest build also improves virtualization technology for running applications in their own sandbox, while COMODO Internet Security also ships with a number of new integrated products, including Autorun Analyzer and COMODO Cleaning Essentials.

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