Let’s be fair, for reading a PDF your average end user will rarely need anything more than a simple reader, so Preview on the Mac or Edge on your Windows 10 PC will suffice.

For business users, portable document format files offer a method for sharing commercial-grade documents which can be marked up before they are sent to a printer. Indeed, if you share your PDF through the cloud, anyone can download, view, add a comment and save it back for others to read the comments and make changes.

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Open-source sound recording, editing and mixing tool Audacity 2.2.0 has been released for Windows, Mac and Linux, around two years after version 2.1.0 made its bow.

Version 2.2.0’s highlights include support for themes -- with a choice of four provided, plus reorganization of the program’s menus, additional help buttons and a major code overhaul.

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Foxit Software has released Foxit Reader 9.0, a major new version of its free PDF creation and reader tool for Windows PCs.

The new release focuses on improving the program’s accessibility with new single-key accelerators among other changes, but also adds a new single-column Reflow view and features notable updates to the program’s commenting features and search tools.

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Keeping in touch with other users is essential for your business. We use Skype to keep in touch with contacts all over the world, from freelancers writers, through to key contacts.

With this in mind, all we want is a relatively simple tool that enables us to perform our business without distractions.

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Microsoft officially pulled the plug on the free Windows 10 upgrade offer last year, but the truth is you can still get the new operating system free of charge if you know how.

There are two main methods. You can either simply upgrade using a Windows 7 or 8.x key, or you can go through the assistive technologies page. The latter option lets anyone who claims to use assistive technologies to upgrade for free, and works on an honor system. You don’t need to actually prove you have any kind of disability to make use of it.

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Everyone will tell you that you really need to backup your data. It’s simply the easiest way to quickly recover your computer if you suffer from malware or even a ransomware attack.

Backing up your data also makes sense for testing new software. Make a system backup, test as required, then simply revert back to the previous state by restoring the backup.

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There are a wide number of system optimization tools on the market, many with varying degrees of success. There are few we’d care to recommend.

With this in mind, we were pleased to hear IObit has released IObit Advanced SystemCare 11, its hugely comprehensive all-in-one PC optimization suite.

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Install software and it’s soon out-of-date. Developers release rapid updates when they find issues, often reported by end users.

Having the latest version can be important. Software can conflict and slow your PC, be compromised, wrongly report information and need to be updated to support the latest operating system patch. Unless you’re prepared to go through every single installed application, it’s tricky to keep on top of the available updates.

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The average Windows 10 user will never be aware of the privacy issues associated with the operating system and with every major update, these privacy rights are amended by Microsoft.

With the release of Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, your privacy is actually improving as apps will now require you to opt-in rather than opt-out of storing your location and other information. The downside is that these new privacy rights apply to apps from the Windows Store, so third-party tools will still abide by their own rules, privacy settings and EULA.

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Softland has released FBackup 7.0 and Backup4all 7.0, major new versions of its free and paid-for Windows backup products.

Both programs, which offer file-based backup and extended functionality via plug-ins, add new cloud backup destinations, while FBackup gains support for CD/DVD backups and a Fast Mirror backup option.

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Three years ago, AOMEI unveiled the first version of PE Builder. We were thrilled, because it provided a simple -- yet flexible -- way of creating the Windows equivalent of a "live" Linux CD, whereby you can run a graphically friendly operating system direct from CD/DVD or USB flash drive.

After a few updates, the software appeared to have died -- with only support for Windows 7 and 8. Imagine our delight, then, when we were informed that AOMEI PE Builder 2.0 had been released.

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Why does anyone need a third-party firewall when Windows offers one of its own? One huge plus for switching firewalls is to provide yourself with two-way protection: the Windows Firewall only monitors inbound traffic from the internet, not traffic that originates on your PC.

The annoying thing is, the Windows Firewall can offer two-way protection, but it’s fiddly to configure and not enabled by default. Enter stage left, the recently updated Windows Firewall Control 5.01.

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We might regard ourselves as advanced web users, but occasionally we still double-take when visiting a new website. Google a search term and you see a whole host possible options, including paid website ads and there’s very little stopping a rogue retailer from popping up and populating their store with known brands.

Anyone can register a .com or .co.uk and you can host one of these domains from any location. There’s simply nothing stopping a company in Asia, from obtaining a .co.uk and then setting up a store with a bunch of fake products.

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Paramount Software (UK) Ltd has released Macrium Reflect Free Edition 7.1, a major new release of its disk imaging backup tool for Windows.

Macrium Reflect 7.1 adds three headline features: integrated viBoot2 providing instant virtualization of Macrium backup images, Task Scheduler 2.0 API use for compatibility with the latest versions of Windows 10, and finally a license for use in a business as well as a non-commercial environment.

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Mozilla has released Firefox 56, with Firefox for Android 56.0 due imminently. Firefox 56’s chief highlight is the rollout of Firefox Screenshots to all users. The built-in tool for capturing, saving and sharing screenshots from the browser was made available to a subset of users with the previous release.

The announcement comes with news of Firefox 57, which has been billed by Mozilla as "our biggest release of the year." It will unveil portions of a new next-generation browser engine as well as a major design refresh to fit in better with modern operating systems.

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