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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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If you’re looking for an easier way to save images from web pages then you’ll probably start by looking for a browser extension, but there may be a better way.

The open-source SavePictureAs has been speeding up the image-saving process for years, but it’s not restricted to a specific browser -- it works with almost all of them.

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The Document Foundation has unveiled LibreOffice 5.2 64-bit and LibreOffice 5.2 32-bit. It arrives on time, six months after the last major release in the 5.x branch. Like the previous two major releases, LibreOffice 5.2 contains numerous user-centric changes and updates, continuing to refine the GUI while introducing significant new features.

Headline new features include the addition of a Standard (Single Mode) toolbar option in Writer and Calc. This provides a streamlined set of common formatting, function and insert tools that take up half the space of the original toolbar to increase the size of the available workspace.

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AsciidocFX is a cross-platform open-source markup editor for building PDF, HTML, ePUB and MOBI ebooks, documents, slides and more.

It’s not the easiest package to use, but could still have a lot of appeal for anyone creating academic, technical or scientific documents.

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Open source hard drive monitor and smartctl front-end HDD Guardian has been updated to version 0.7.0 with some welcome new features.

The program detects even more drives, but if they’re still not found it’s now possible to add them manually. If a drive is failing, or its temperature is too high, you can have the program play a sound or power off the PC (other options include displaying a popup message and sending an email).

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One-stop Windows command line tool Swiss File Knife has just been updated to version 1.7.7. A new sfk web command allows sending a web request to a server, filtering and displaying the results.

For example, you might use sfk web domain.com +xex "_<head>**</head>_" to extract an HTML Head tag, or pass sfk a file to batch process every URL it contains.

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