Articles about Free Software

Opera Software has unveiled Opera 48 for Windows, Mac and Linux. After the last feature-light release, version 48 adds a number of interesting new features as well as improvements.

Chief among these is a new pop-up search tool, which also doubles as currency, unit and time zone converter. Opera also adds a new screenshot capture tool for web pages, plus widens its bookmark-importing tool to support Edge and Yandex browsers.

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You’re busy using your PC and it’s suddenly 2004 again. Your system is running slowly and your drivers are to blame.

Should you keep your drivers updated? Usually, the rule is "if it’s not broken, don’t try and fix it." It’s simply not true that out-of-date drivers will slow or your hinder your computer. Usually, Windows itself will make sure you have the most relevant drivers for your system and, if you have Windows 10, you’ll usually have the latest drivers. And even if you’re using Vista, and there are newer drivers, it doesn’t necessarily mean your system will be enhanced by installing them.

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It doesn’t seem that long ago that all website editing was made by hand, coded carefully, put live and tested until the page worked as planned. The advantage of producing web pages in this manner is that it developed coding skills and enabled just about anyone to get a basic website live.

Tools such as Dreamweaver came along in the early 00’s and changed everything, offering the ability to create web pages from simple templates, even closing off areas to non-developers so people making site changes could only edit the text components across a site.

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You may ask yourself why on earth would you need a specific tool to create a PDF from an application when Windows 10 has the ability to quickly print as a PDF?

A few years ago, PDF tools were all the rage. You had to spend big bucks for Adobe’s Acrobat and Nitro to generate a document. And business users paid the price, too. For a good reason. You need a commercial-level tool to create documents suitable for a professional environment and, in particular, for printed material.

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WinX MediaTrans is a fast and easy to use iTunes alternative for Windows that lets you manage content on your iPhone/iPad/iPod. No iTunes or Apple ID needed, and no file erasing risk.

The software, from Digiarty WinXDVD, usually retails for $59.95, but BetaNews readers can get it entirely free for a limited time.

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When it comes to protecting yourself online -- particularly when surfing through insecure public connections -- then nothing beats a good old VPN. Virtual Private Networks create encrypted tunnels in which you can surf the web, check your email and connect to remote networks secure in the knowledge you can’t be hacked.

If you’re a Windows user, then the recently released Hotspot Shield 7.1.2 may appeal, offering a free, ad-supported (and bandwidth-limited) way of connecting via VPN.

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Non-profit organization The Blender Foundation has released Blender 2.79, an update to its cross-platform, open-source 3D graphics tool. The new build further improves its Cycles Rendering feature, bringing feature parity with NVIDIA CUDA and improved performance to AMD OpenCL hardware.

Other highlights include additional tools and options being added to the Grease Pencil, Alembic, Mesh Modeling tools, while simplified video encoding and user interface improvements have also been implemented.

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There are so many methods for keeping up with your daily tasks that you need a task manager to keep them all centralized. We can’t tell you how many times we’ve had various calendars auto-group our events into one central database, multiple times.

My Workspace from Microsoft is an Office 365 menu bar tool for Mac users. Although it’s only in development stage, it has potential. The basic idea is to bring all your Office 365 information into one central location, so it’s immediately accessible.

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There are many cloud-based synchronization services, including Dropbox, Google Drive, SugarSync and others. These services all use the same method of synchronizing your files. Choose the data you want across your computers and the content is uploaded to the cloud and then made available across your other devices.

The issue here can be if you don't have fast broadband, making uploading huge files problematic. The answer is a peer-to-peer service where your data remains on one device whilst it’s synchronized to others, whether you own these devices or they are authorized users.

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We still use Skype. It’s still a decent tool to be able to converse with a wide range of colleagues spread across the world and, frankly, most people we need to communicate with are on Skype (or have access to a Skype account, at least).

Recent changes to the mobile version caused more than a few eyebrows to be raised. Luckily we don’t use the mobile edition, so when Microsoft announced changes to the desktop edition, this had us worried. Windows 10 users will receive the update automatically, as it’s built into your operating system, but Windows 8/7 and Mac OS X users can download a v8 preview right now.

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With an ever-rising number employees wanting to work from home or going freelance, how do you bring these team members together? There are plenty of messenger tools aimed at business owners, including those from heavyweights such as Facebook and Microsoft.

Problem is, adopt one of these tools and you might find that they change direction and are aimed towards flirting teenagers rather than business users.

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Buy a new computer and you’ll often find it ships with one big partition, which can be inconvenient. We usually allocate space on a drive to our music collection, documents and other important files. By partitioning one large hard drive in to separate drives, it makes it easy to manage, backup and migrate content.

You can perform basic partitioning tasks within Windows, such as creating, resizing or assigning a new drive label. However, we’d always recommend a complete partitioning toolkit and there’s few better than EaseUS Partition Master 12.5 Free.

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Opera Software has unveiled Opera 47.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s a fast turnaround from Opera 46, taking less than the usual six-week development cycle to go from alpha to final release.

As a result, the new release is light on major features, but does boast a number of improvements, including smoother video and exportable bookmarks. It also updates the underlying Chromium engine to version 60.

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We used to be a huge Paragon Software supporter, met the company a few times in London to discuss strategies, but in the past couple of years it has almost completely disappeared under the radar, despite having a fantastic range of products across its portfolio. Whilst Acronis and our friends at O&O Software have powered forward, Paragon appears to have taken a step back.

Whether this is because it is focusing on its core market, Germany, or it moved in to the corporate market, it’s unclear. Either way, we’d still recommend its products and and wrote about the updated Paragon Backup & Recovery 16 Free the other week.

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Privileged accounts allow access to all aspects of a company's IT infrastructure, so if they fall into the wrong hands the consequences can be disastrous.

A new hardware appliance solution from identity management specialist One Identity aims to make it easy for businesses to deploy, operate and maintain their privileged password systems.

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