Free Software

An office suite is regarded as an essential part of your daily work toolkit, whether you’re a big business or a retired individual wanting to keep on top of daily tasks. So you want to make the right choice, without spending a huge amount of money.

Although it’s too easy to subscribe to Office 365 and use the suite across devices, we sometimes wonder if we really need the functionality? Do you use your word processor for more than a few essential documents or your spreadsheet to manage basic finances? If not, you might as well take a second look at the free LibreOffice.

Mozilla has released Thunderbird 60.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. Also released in portable form for Windows users, Thunderbird is Mozilla’s free and open-source email client.

Version 60 unveils a new look -- named "Photon", along with newly designed light and dark themes. Elsewhere it now adds support for WebExtension themes, plus makes substantial improvements to various elements including the calendar and attachment management.

Thanks to legislation like GDPR businesses need to report data breaches promptly or face large fines. However, in the heat of a security incident it can be easy to overlook vital procedures.

Privileged account management specialist Thycotic is aiming to help with the launch of a free Incident Response Policy Template to help businesses take the right steps at the right time.

Paragon Software GmbH has released Paragon Backup & Recovery 17 Free 64-bit (also available for 32-bit), a brand-new version of its free (for personal use) backup and restore tool for Windows PCs.

Version 17 sees the program gain support for incremental and differential backups for more faster backups and more efficient use of available drive space. It also unveils a brand-new user interface with slick, user-friendly modern UI. This has made certain aspects of the program -- restoring selected parts of a backup, for example -- trickier to find.

Popular open-source image-editing tool GIMP 2.10.4 has been released by the GIMP Development Team. The latest version of the popular cross-platform image editor adds a new Simple Horizon Straightening tool to its feature complement.

Performance is improved thanks to asynchronous loading of fonts on startup, while macOS users can rejoice: official builds for OS X have been restored.

People are worried about their personal security. Who do you trust? Facebook recently admitted it tracks just about everything you do whilst using its network, whereas one of the biggest technology companies in the UK, Dixons Carphone, announced a huge data loss.

You have to ask yourself, if a technology company can’t safeguard your data, who can you trust? On top, do you trust your web browser? What’s it storing, what information does it pass to the manufacturer and to the website you are browsing?

Protecting your personal information has made big headlines in 2018, and will continue to do so as hackers continue to outwit even the biggest firms. This is what makes our new software giveaway so essential: a year’s license for Sticky Password Premium.

Sticky Password is a suite of products for mobile and desktop that allow you to store your online passwords, form fills and credit card information securely -- our giveaway will give you access to all its Premium features across all supported devices, including Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Antibody-Software has released WizFile 2.0, a major update to its freeware Windows file-searching tool. The program -- also available in portable form -- provides users with lightning quick filename-based searches of their entire computer.

Version 2.0 adds support for non-NTFS hard drives, allows users to specify individual folders or network shares for more targeted searches and

Everybody needs a backup -- with ransomware added to the list of threats to your data, now is the perfect time to take full advantage of our first BetaNews full software giveaway: O&O DiskImage 11 Professional, worth $49.95, this Thursday (June 7).

What makes O&O DiskImage 11 special is that it enables you to back up both individual files and folders as well as take a full drive image, so you can protect key data alongside your fail-safe drive image covering your entire Windows installation -- all from one application.
The program is simple to use -- the main user interface is a series of tabs allowing you to jump between different parts of the program, while a start screen makes it easy to get started with taking a drive image or choosing which folders to back up.

How many people backup their data? A decreasing number. The new standard is to upload our data to the cloud, storing our most important files and documents in a remote location and then synchronizing those files across our various devices.

Backing up our data is old-school, right?  There’s certainly an element of truth to this. These days, along with the cloud, if you have a password manager, retrieving your important data now takes minutes, not hours. Gone are the days when your system would crash and you’d have to start recovering your entire drive to get access to your system.

Why pay a monthly subscription for Office software? SoftMaker FreeOffice 2018 has just been released, promising full compatibility with the latest Word, Excel and PowerPoint formats and debuting a new optional ribbon interface for those switching from Office 2007 or later.

FreeOffice comprises word processor TextMaker 2018, spreadsheets package PlanMaker 2018 and presentation tool Presentations 2018.

When traveling, we like to take as little as possible. We don’t want to be dragging a huge 15" laptop on the road, but we still need access to our files, data and even our favorite apps.

With this in mind, often we carry around a small USB stick with our most important data. Simply plug the USB stick into any computer and you have full and secure access to your files, without having to worry about copying them to the temporary PC.

Irish security developer Safer Networking has released Spybot -- Search & Destroy 2.7, a new version of its Windows free and paid-for anti-malware tool.

The major new feature in this release is the addition of an additional Start Center screen giving users access to frequently used functions. It also promises a number of improvements -- including Secure Boot support -- and better reliability.

German email back-up company MailStore Software GmbH has released MailStore Home 11.0 for PCs running Windows 7, 8.1 and 10. The tool makes it easy to create archives and backups of POP3, IMAP and internet mailboxes, including Gmail and Yahoo!

The program, which also works with Outlook, Thunderbird and the now-depreciated Windows Mail and Windows Live Mail, gains a faster archive search tool with this new release. It also introduces a more robust recovery tool.

Following the release of Linux kernel 4.16, Linus Torvalds has said that the next kernel will be version 5.0. Or maybe it won't, because version numbers are meaningless.

The announcement -- of sorts -- came in Torvalds' message over the weekend about the first release candidate for version 4.17. He warns that it is not "shaping up to be a particularly big release" and questions whether it even matters what version number is slapped on the final release.