Free Software

Your PC is misbehaving. Is it malware? Faulty software, maybe? Scanning for PC for digitally signed files can help to pick out trustworthy executables, and highlight unsigned files for more investigation.

Sysinternals’ Sigcheck provides a vast amount of information and options, but it’s also a console tool, maybe inconvenient if you don’t use it enough to learn the various switches.

Makagiga started life long ago as an open-source, Java-based RSS reader. But then the developer started to take it further. Much, much further.

The program now also has a capable to-do manager. A note taker. A simple image editor. And, via optional plugs, web searching, an OpenStreetMap viewer, a thesaurus, LaTex/ Markdown/ BB Code previews, screen capture, barcode generation and more.

You’re browsing the web, find some interesting text, copy and paste it elsewhere… And then realize it’s got all the original formatting, now entirely unnecessary. And maybe an unwanted image, too.

Copy Plain Text is a Firefox add-on which supports copying plain text only, and adds some handy text processing extras as well.

AlomWare Actions Lite is a scripting tool which allows even novice users to automate many PC tasks.

There are commands to launch applications, download web pages, send emails, type text, simulate mouse clicks, work with files, and a whole lot more, and these may all be combined to make up a single action.

You’ve been working on it forever, and had almost finished, but… Disaster. That all-important Word document no longer opens.

If you’re using some other viewer, try reopening it in Word. It may offer to repair the file, and this can fix a lot of problems.

Artists and photographers often need a clear understanding of the colors used in an image, but standard photo editor tools like the histogram do little to help.

Image Color Analyzer is a free Android app designed to deliver a clearer view of an image palette.

The Document Foundation has released LibreOffice 5.1 64-bit and LibreOffice 5.1 32-bit. It comes just under six months after version 5.0 debuted back in August yet unveils some major changes to the user interface as well as performance improvements.

LibreOffice 5.1 promises new and simplified application menus, faster start-up times and a number of application-specific improvements, including better slide transitions in Impress and a host of new features in Calc.

It happens all the time. You’re working in Explorer, maybe opening or saving a file, but the current folder is so far away that you have to click, and click, and click to get there.

Quick Access Popup -- a new and improved version of Folders Popup -- is a freeware tool which ensures your favorite folders and apps are only ever a click or two away.

NETRESEC has shipped NetworkMiner 2.0, the latest edition of its powerful network forensic analysis tool.

The update does a better job of interpreting your network traffic, with new parsers for SMB2 and Modbus/TCP, file extraction from SMB writes, and improved parsing for SMTP, FTP and DNS traffic.

Copyfish is a free Chrome extension which can extract text from just about anything in a browser tab -- images, videos, documents, more -- and optionally translate it, too.

That’s great, but it’s just got even better, with new support for desktop OCR.

ActivTrak is a professional cloud-managed service which can help you covertly monitor activity on PCs and Macs.

The system is extremely easy to set up, very difficult for others to spot, and provides a range of usage reports which you can access from anywhere.

If you’ve tried your share of WordPad replacements then you’ll know they’re usually identikit me-too products with barely any interesting ideas of their own.

SSuite NoteBook Editor is a rare exception which manages to bring something a little more original to the standard text editing feature list.

Sidebar Diagnostics is a well-designed professional system monitor for Windows Vista and later.

No, we’re not usually interested in this kind of tool, either, but wait -- this is a package you might actually want to use.

Sandboxing is a smart technology which isolates programs from the operating system, preventing them from making any permanent changes.

Run your browser in a sandbox, say, and it won’t matter if you’re hit by a drive-by download, a toolbar gets installed or your home page is updated: clear the sandbox and all changes will be lost.

Foolish IT has released fGet, a freeware portable tool which enables downloading files from a script.

The program uses Internet Explorer components to handle the tricky bits, which means the fGet executable can be a tiny 51.1KB.