Recording what’s happening on your desktop can help you create presentations, share ideas, troubleshoot problems, or just impress others with your gaming skills.

Getting started is surprisingly easy. There’s no need for complex native clients, just installing a free Chrome extension like ViewedIt or OpenVid Screen Recorder could give you everything you need.

The comprehensive hard drive activity tracker SoftPerfect File Access Monitor is now freeware. The program enables logging and filtering all the file system activity on a PC, including file creations, reads, writes and deletions.

Setup requires installing a service on your system. This isn’t as convenient as portable products, but does deliver more reliable results, and allows logging more of what’s happening as Windows boots.

New research from cloud business management specialist ServiceNow indicates that enterprise cloud services have reached a tipping point, with 52 percent of respondents saying they would select cloud as the platform of choice for new business applications.

In addition 85 percent say they now are headed towards a cloud-first footing, with almost nine out of 10 saying they will complete the shift within two years.

Jpeg-recompress is an unusual open-source tool which can cut JPEG file sizes by 50 percent or more.

The program works by intelligently selecting the lowest possible quality setting for your JPEG, which also has the minimum effect on its perceived visual quality. This is still lossy compression, and not something to use with images you might want to edit later. But it’s ideal for shrinking pictures you’d like to share elsewhere, perhaps on social networks, by email, or on your own websites.

Avira has released Avira Free Security Suite 2017, a comprehensive bundle of its antivirus, antiphishing, VPN and speedup products.

The package includes four products. Avira Free Antivirus keeps malware at bay, Avira Browser Safety blocks dangerous links, Avira Phantom VPN encrypts web traffic and masks your IP address, and Avira System Speedup optimizes your PC’s performance.

We're seeing attacks on endpoint systems becoming more common and increasingly clever. Yet for administrators knowing what's happening on their endpoints presents a challenge.

Privileged account management specialist Thycotic is launching a new, free Endpoint Application Discovery Tool to automatically discover and reports on applications installed on Windows endpoints.

Opera Software has released Opera 41 for Windows, Mac and Linux, making reduced start times its major priority. The headline new feature is accompanied by a number of other performance improvements.

Opera 41 also includes a majorly revamped personalized newsreader, containing a wide list of tweaks and enhancements to give users some extra features to play with on top of the under-the-hood updates.

Cisco’s Talos Group has released MBRFilter, a Windows disk filter which prevents malware overwriting a drive’s Master Boot Record (MBR).

This can stop some ransomware variants -- Petya, Satana -- from installing and taking full control of your PC. Installation is straightforward. Well, mostly. Download the 32 or 64-bit version as appropriate for your PC, unzip the file, right-click MBRFilter.inf and select Install. Reboot when you’re asked.

Simple Software Restriction Policy (SSRP) is a free tool which gives complete control over the folders where software can be executed.

Program Files, System and other folders are allowed by default. But commonly-exploited locations like your desktop and temporary folders are blocked, instantly protecting you from a host of potential threats.

The popular PC "photo-to-painting" converter FotoSketcher is now available on Android in a very basic, advanced-user-only test release.

This alpha app is only available as a stand-alone .apk file, and if you manage to install it anyway you’ll find there’s only a single painting effect, and even that is a work-in-progress.

Foxit Software has released Foxit Reader 8.1, a point update of its Windows PDF viewer and creator. Version 8.1 widens the app’s cloud integration with two new services, including an extension of Foxit’s recently launched ConnectedPDF online document management tool.

Elsewhere, the new release also improves annotation workflow and collaboration, plus adds JavaScript form submission support.

Free cleanup tool Wise Program Uninstaller has been updated to version 1.97 with new support for removing Windows 10 Universal Apps.

It’s easy to use. The interface now lists apps along with your desktop applications, and to remove one you just select it and hit "Safe Uninstall".

NirSoft has released EncryptedRegView, a free tool which finds, decrypts and displays Registry data protected by Windows’ DPAPI encryption scheme.

DPAPI isn’t widely used, even by Microsoft products, but the program managed to find Outlook passwords, Microsoft Edge details and a few other interesting items on our test PC.

Rclone is an open-source command line tool which enables copying and syncing data to and from a host of popular cloud storage providers.

Supported technologies include Google Drive, Amazon S3, Openstack Swift / Rackspace cloud files / Memset Memstore, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Amazon Drive, Microsoft One Drive, Hubic, Backblaze B2, Yandex, and -- if all else fails - your local file system.

ScreenWings is a free Windows tool which prevents malicious software capturing your screen.

The program is convenient to use. There’s no drivers or services involved and it doesn’t require installation, so you can run it from a USB key whenever necessary. The interface is equally basic: a small gray window with a close button and an icon of a monitor (if you’ve two or more monitors you’ll get an extra icon for each one). That’s it. At this point, you don’t even get a minimize button.