The Windows clipboard is very convenient, but it does come with some privacy and security risks.

Most dangers are clear. Copy some lengthy password to the clipboard, forget about it, and the text may be viewed by anyone with access to your PC. (Until you copy something else there, anyway.)

Your project is urgent, the deadline imminent -- but PCs have so many distractions that it’s easy to get pulled into doing something else, without even really noticing.

Motivate Clock is a free time tracker for Windows which makes it quick and easy to understand exactly where you’re spending your computer time.

Install any anti-malware with real-time protection and you’re generally weighing down your system with services, drivers, DLLs, background processes and more.

Crystal Security does things differently, its tiny download unpacking to a single 830KB executable which runs happily on Windows XP and later.

Microsoft’s blog editor Windows Live Writer has been revived with an independent open-source fork, Open Live Writer.

OLW’s first release allows you to create blog posts, add photos, videos, maps or more, and publish them to your website.

While the browser is likely to remain the most-popular and convenient way of managing a WordPress site from a PC, Automattic, the company behind the hugely-successful content management system, also wants to give users a more focused tool for the job. So, in late-November, it announced dedicated apps for Windows, OS X and Linux.

The idea behind the PC apps is to make it easier for users to focus on their content, by getting rid of the distractions that come with working inside a tabbed browser environment. The OS X app launched first, arriving at the time of the announcement, and now it is Windows users turn to get a dedicated WordPress.com app.

PNGmicro, GIFmicro and JPEGmicro are freeware Windows tools which optimize images to reduce their size.

Each program offers lossless compression by rewriting files more efficiently and stripping out surplus data, and you also get options to cut file size even further by reducing image quality.

Photo managers offer many ways to organize and sort your images -- name, date, size, tags -- but these typically rely on your pictures being set up in a consistent way.

ImageSorter for Windows and Mac doesn’t care about any of that, because it only uses the image content, sorting and presenting it by color and layout.

Ukranian software developer MacPaw has unveiled CleanMyDrive 2 for Macs running OS X 10.10 or later. It’s a free tool designed to help users monitor their hard drives and quickly clean unspecified junk files from external drives.

Version 2 debuts a completely redesigned user interface, plus adds a number of new tools and features, including the ability to set custom icons for drives via additional in-app purchases.

Opera Software has unveiled Opera 34 FINAL, a major new release of its desktop web browser, with a separate mobile release due shortly.

The new desktop build's primary focus is on delivering an improved Opera Turbo experience, but it also adds a handful of new features, including a number of improvements to its download engine as well as support for MSE Audio.

Chrome's a great browser, but open too many tabs and it can turn into a real resource hog, grabbing vast amounts of RAM and maybe impacting your system's performance.

Tabr is a new Chrome tab manager which helps you deal with this, by providing new ways to browse, archive and control your browser tabs.

IT asset management (ITAM) software manages the lifecycle of hardware and software. It can help influence decisions about which assets need to be purchased, redistributed, or disposed of.

There is a lot of choice in the market when it comes to picking the right ITAM software for your company, but Camterra has made it easy by rating the top 20 IT asset management software solutions as measured by total customers, users, social presence and vendor size.

IP cameras have always been marketed as security tools, but you probably don’t have time to watch them, and they wouldn’t give you much information, anyway.

OpenALPR is an open source software library which changes all that, by transforming an ordinary camera into your own automatic license plate recognition system.

Popular Android emulator BlueStacks has been updated to version 2.0 with some major new features.

Launch an app and it now opens in a browser-like tab, allowing users to play multiple apps simultaneously.

Piriform has released Speccy 1.29, a new version of its free Windows system information tool. The headline new feature in version 1.29 -- also available as a standalone portable build -- is improved support for the latest generation of Intel processors.

Speccy 1.29 also strengthens hardware detection, restores compatibility with the latest build of Windows 10 and updates its hardware detection algorithm.

Edward Snowden-endorsed developer Open Whisper Systems has announced the first public beta of Signal Desktop, a secure chat app for Chrome.

The new release enables users of its popular mobile app, Signal Private Messenger, to carry on a conversation across even more devices.