If your Wi-Fi isn’t performing well then using a scanner to check for competing networks can often tell you more.

Unsure where to begin? Acrylic WiFi Free claims to be "the most advanced WLAN Scanner", which sounds encouraging. It’s free for personal use and runs on Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10, so we grabbed a copy to take a closer look.

With so many image viewers and editors available for the PC, it’s not easy for developers to make their product stand out. Some try to win you over with the sheer quantity of features, but Imagina is more about the quality: it doesn’t do much, but what you get works very well.

The thumbnail browser doesn’t just open with the usual JPGs and PNGs, for instance -- dcraw support means it can handle many RAW formats, initially displaying them in an attractive photo collage-like "3D Desktop" view.

At first glance, PDF to DjVu GUI doesn’t sound like the most promising of programs. Convert documents from one of the most commonly supported formats ever, to something most people don’t know at all? If you need to share files with a wide audience then there’s no way that will ever be a good idea.

And yet, DjVu does have its advantages, especially with document size. We tried out the program with 12 PDF files, and while one DjVu version was fractionally larger, most were 25 percent -- 80 percent smaller than the original, and a couple dropped by around 90 percent.

Apple has released iTunes 12.2, bringing Apple Music and the new Beats 1 radio station to OS X and Windows.

Additions include the new Connect, a sort-of social networking service where artists share "thoughts, photos, music and videos", you can comment or "love" anything they’ve posted, and they can respond directly.

Sordum has released DNS Jumper 2.0, an update of its freeware DNS changer for Windows.

New startup options mean you can have the program load along with Windows, test for the fastest DNS server and apply it automatically, no more manual interventions required.

Most video editors provide various effects you can apply to a movie, maybe tweaking its brightness, contrast or colors. But typically these filters work with the entire frame only, which seriously limits their usefulness.

Sensarea is a free video editor for Windows which allows you to select objects, then tracks them in the frame, automatically applying your chosen effects. If you wanted to conceal someone’s identity, say, you could set up the system to pixelate their face with just a few minutes work.

Big data can provide many benefits for businesses, but the complexities of dealing with systems like Hadoop can make it expensive and time consuming to roll out projects.

California-based Kyvos Insights is launching a new product specifically designed for big data that enables business users to easily and quickly derive powerful insights from their data for more informed decision-making, with no programming required.

UnChecky developer RaMMicHaeL has announced the release of Virtuoz, a simple and lightweight virtual desktop utility for Windows.

"It was inspired by Sysinternals Desktops", the author explaines, "but uses a different approach, which doesn’t impose the limitations which Desktops is bound to".

Building a media collection is much more fun than organising it, and no matter how good your intentions, it’s all too easy to end up having to navigate a scattered mess of audio and video files.

MediaPurge is a freeware Windows application which provides several ways to restore order, including finding audio duplicates, tagging, renaming or sorting files into a new folder structure.

If you find a suspect executable file on your system then you’ll probably start by running an antivirus scan, but that may not tell you very much. Even a "clean" verdict only means "clean right now", and it tells you nothing about the file itself, where it’s from, or what it might be trying to do.

Exeinfo PE is a free tool which analyses executable and other types of files, and tells you more about them. It can’t directly detect malware, but might be able to help you better understand a mystery file.

Piriform has unveiled the latest monthly update to its Windows cleaning tool with the release of CCleaner 5.07 FINAL. The new release is also available as a portable build.

The headline new feature is the ability for users to manage their Web Apps in the Firefox web browser. This feature is accompanied by a number of new improvements, including better support for Windows 10 ahead of its official release.

Some people’s archiving needs are simple: right-click to extract zips, combine a few files into a zip of their own occasionally, and that’s about it. Nothing that can’t be handled by Explorer on its own.

If you’re, well, a little more demanding, you might be interested in Explzh, a free archive manager for Windows with a host of features you won’t always find elsewhere.

Finding your way around big cities is generally a challenge, even if you live there. You might know the best bus routes, or have mastered the metro, but you can still be in trouble if a service is unexpectedly cancelled and you're left looking for an alternative.

Transit App is a free Android and iOS app which helps out with a host of tools for planning journeys around and across your local city.

Free virtual PDF printer PDF24 Creator has been updated to version 7.0 with a range of new and enhanced features.

Top of the list -- and not before time -- is Explorer integration. Right-clicking one or more files now displays options to open, split, join, optimize, extract and convert them, while right-clicking the desktop allows users to import from the scanner, camera or clipboard.

Convert.NET is a free (for personal use) text processing toolkit with maybe the most bizarrely mixed-up feature set we’ve seen.

Choose "Language Translation" from the list top-left and it seems reasonably normal. Type or paste text into the box, enter a URL, choose one or more files, select your source and target languages and the program translates them for you via Google, Bing, Yandex or Excite.