Free Software

With so much attention focused on the file encrypting-type ransomware it's easy to forget the simpler variety, which pops up when your PC boots and won’t allow access to your system until you pay up.

Even these basic infections can sometimes be tricky to remove, but Trend Micro offers a couple of tools which may be able to help.

High Motion Software has updated its powerhouse image processor ImBatch with multithreading support for even greater performance. The new feature is only available in the $29.95 licensed edition, but is it worth the money? We took a look.

We used a test set of 345 PNG images, 918 megapixels in total, and set up only two processing tasks: just a "Sharpen" and a "Save as JPG".

Jam Software’s quick and easy PC stress-tester HeavyLoad has just been updated to version 3.4, its first release in more than two years. The package is as easy to use as ever, maxing out your CPU, allocating RAM and drive space and stressing your GPU with a click.

This release is mostly about compatibility, in particular improving results with the latest OpenGL drivers and handling individual cores in Windows 10.

If you’re looking to improve your chess skills then watching the best players at work will usually teach you a lot. There are plenty of chess sites to help you do just that, but they mostly offer only a very basic view of the game with few tools or options.

Kvetka is a free Windows package which can display games from chess.com, chessbase.com, chessgames.com, chessok.com and many other sites, as well as opening PGN, FEN and other formats, and importing games from the clipboard.

IObit has shipped IObit Uninstaller 6 with new support for removing Microsoft Edge plug-ins and extensions.

That’s the only significant new feature in this release, although IObit also says it now removes more programs and browser plug-ins, does a better job of uninstalling Windows Apps and troublesome Windows updates, and has enhanced real-time monitoring to help you strip out everything else.

Piriform Software has released CCleaner 5.21 and CCleaner 5.21 Portable for Windows PCs. The app’s rate of development continues to slow, this release once again focusing on minor updates and improvements instead of introducing new app support or additional features.

The most notable changes are better cleaning of Chrome 52’s history and cache, and updates to its DOMStore cooking cleaning component, which is used by Internet Explorer.

Windows audio editor Wavosaur (and 64-bit edition) has just been updated to version 1.2, its first release for almost three years. One handy new feature is real-time spectrum analysis. Click Tools > Spectrum Analysis, Display > Autorefresh and you can watch your waveforms update as the music plays.

A new Keyboard Shortcuts editor allows any of the program’s 46 hotkeys to be replaced.

Wmail is an open-source Chromium-based Gmail client for Windows, OS X and Linux. The program supports both Gmail and Google Inbox accounts, and you can add and manage as many as you need.

You could do this with a browser, of course, but Wmail gives you much improved support for drag and drop and keyboard shortcuts, as well as providing native desktop notifications when a new message arrives.

EaseUS makes some excellent Windows software, including tools for recovering lost data, backing up your system and files, managing disk space, and more.

It offers both free and paid editions and, from today, to celebrate the company’s 12th birthday, you’ll be able to get your hands on some of its best paid software, for free.

Protecting your web traffic can be very easy: use HTTPS where you can, maybe install HTTPS everywhere to enforce that, use a VPN for an extra layer of security. Meanwhile DNS gets so little attention that many people don’t even realize there’s an issue, even though DNS eavesdropping and spoofing are very real security concerns.

DNSCrypt is an open-source technology from the OpenDNS team which encrypts your DNS traffic, making it much more difficult for others to snoop on your activities or hijack your browsing with man-in-the-middle attacks.

Managing your Windows command prompts has been getting more complicated recently. A regular command window here; PowerShell there; maybe another, only elevated; update to Windows 10 Anniversary Edition and you could get bash, too.

Fortunately the open-source console emulator ConEmu can make life easier and save you time, whether you’re a console expert or only head to the command line when it’s really, really necessary.

Duplicacy is a free-for-personal-use cross-platform backup tool with a stack of professional features. There’s support for backing up to Dropbox, Amazon S3, Backblaze, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Storage, as well as any SFTP server or your own local disk.

Backups are optimized for extreme efficiency. File and block-level deduplication means Duplicacy doesn’t waste time storing multiple copies of the same data, and the incremental backup scheme ensures the program only backs up what’s changed.

Powerful PC cleanup tool Revo Uninstaller Free has been updated to version 2.0 with full 64-bit support. Launch the program and you’re now able to view all your installed programs, both 32 or 64-bit, run their standard uninstallers and clear up any remnants afterwards.

The Icons view has gained a Details panel. Clicking any program displays its install date, drive space used, company, website and more.

You’re trying to troubleshoot some PC issue, the answer could be in a log file, so you open it using Notepad… And often wait, and wait, and wait, because the program takes so very long to parse larger files.

As an example, we pointed Notepad at a relatively small 46MB log file, and even this took 23 seconds to appear.

Windows 10 was free for an entire year, and Microsoft nagged users to upgrade to the new OS almost constantly during that period. Yet, despite this, it seems there are plenty of people looking for ways to get Windows 10 for free now it’s a paid product. Go figure.

As it happens, there are still ways to legally get Windows 10 without paying, so if you’ve decided you do want to upgrade after all, here are some methods to try.