Free Software

Mockuuups Studio is a simple tool which makes it easy to create professional product mockups. These are photos where your design appears on a phone, tablet, watch or other device, sometimes as it’s apparently being used.

The program doesn’t require any design skills. Just import a file and it’s instantly cropped and rotated to fit around 250 mockup templates, which are all then displayed in large preview thumbnails.

Screeny is a comprehensive free-for-personal-use screen capture tool for Windows. It’s a competitive market and there are a host of free screenshot and desktop recorders around, but Screeny manages to stand out anyway with its sheer weight of features.

The program isn’t just about full-screen and active window captures, for instance. It can also grab rectangular, circle, region or freehand selections, scrolling areas, DOS windows, menu structures, Windows objects (regions, windows, controls) and more.

Steam Cleaner is a portable tool for removing junk game files left behind by Steam, Origin, Uplay and GoG.

The program is as simple as this kind of application can be. It’s a single executable, no installation required, no settings to think about, not even a "Scan" button -- just launch it and within a second or two you’ll see a list of any game leftovers. The developer says Steam Cleaner can clear up "gigabytes" of data in a few seconds. It found more than 100MB of junk on our tiny Steam setup, so this could be plausible.

BMP Wrap is a free tool which can temporarily convert any file into a valid BMP image, and restore the original file later.

This is a familiar idea, but BMP Wrap does have one or two features that make it stand out. In particular, as a single 20KB executable, it’s probably the smallest steganography application we’ve ever seen.

SetACL Studio is an industrial-strength free tool for managing all your Windows security permissions: files, folders, registry keys, printers, drives, network shares, services and more.

The program is aimed at sysadmins and other Windows experts, but you don’t have to know about DACLs to find it useful: there’s something here for everyone.

CSearcher is a speedy portable search tool with a wide range of search options and features.

Basic operations are simple and straightforward. Type all or part of the file or folder names to search (this is plain text, not regular expressions), specify a starting folder, press Enter and wait for the results. That won’t take long -- it’s super-fast.

Foxit Software has released Foxit Reader 8.2, the latest point update of its free Windows PDF viewer and creation tool, alongside Foxit Reader for Mac/Linux 2.3. Both new versions introduces features for sharing comments and discussions and a cloud reading tool among other changes.

The Windows version is the more fully featured of the two, boasting numerous additional features including PDF creation capabilities and form filling tools, both of which have yet to be implemented on the Mac and Linux platforms.

NetSpot is a free tool for discovering local wireless devices and creating color-coded heatmaps.

Launch the program and it immediately detects all your local Wi-Fi devices, displaying their details in a table: SSID, BSSOD, Signal (current/ min/ max/ average), band, level, width, vendor, security, mode, and when it was last seen.

SPinger is a portable freeware program for quickly pinging multiple IP addresses and host names.

Does the world really need another ping tool? We would have said no, but it turns out there’s more than enough here to justify the program’s existence.

Kaspersky System Checker is a free portable tool which scans your PC for a wide range of problems: malware, missing updates, poorly configured Windows or application settings, and more.

The program is just a checker, and doesn’t provide any way to directly fix the issues it finds, but sometimes just being pointed in the right direction is useful enough.

Image to ZX Spec is a free Java-based application which shows you how your pictures and videos might have looked on the classic old ZX Spectrum home computer.

Never heard the Spectrum? It was released almost 35 years ago so that’s no great surprise, but all you really need to know is its extremely basic graphics specs: a cramped 256×192 resolution, about a 20th of a megapixel, and a palette limited to 7 colors at two levels of brightness each, plus black.

Opera Software’s first release of 2017 sees Opera 44.0 Developer made available for Windows, Mac and Linux users. The Developer edition is the Alpha branch of the browser’s development cycle.

Version 44 launches with four new developmental features, not all of which are available for preview (but likely to be switched on in subsequent builds over the coming weeks).

HashCheck is a lightweight, open-source tool for creating and verifying file hashes. The program is tiny (an 85KB download), has no frills, and as the last version came out in 2009, probably won’t be extending its feature list any time soon. And yet, it still does a worthwhile job.

Ease of use is a plus. Select and right-click a folder or a group of files, choose "Create checksum file", and the program quickly saves their hashes to a "checksums.md5" file.

MiTeC has released an updated edition of its freeware Task Manager DeLuxe with new disk and I/O charts, extra CPU stats and a memory map.

Sounds good, but does the program really have the power to tear us away from Process Explorer and Process Hacker? We grabbed a copy to find out.

By default Windows Explorer displays drive names first, letters second, like "OS_Install (C:)", but if you mostly use the letters this might not make much sense.

DriveLettersTool is a tiny portable application which tweaks Explorer settings to use one one four name and letter ordering schemes.