Articles about Free Software

The standard Windows Ping and Traceroute tools are capable enough, but their console interface is, well, basic, and GUI versions aren’t necessarily much better. All too often you’ll need to wade through tables to find the data you need.

PingPlotter Free makes life easier by taking a graphical view of network performance, giving all the essential core data at a glance.

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ERightSoft’s veteran encoder SUPER has been updated to build 65 with new support for playing and encoding HEVC/H.265 4K video streams.

There’s no extra work involved to make this happen. Just choose an Output Video Codec as usual, and HEVC/H.265 appears in the "may not play on QuickTime" list for any appropriate container.

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You’ve found a strange file. Maybe it has no extension. Perhaps it’s an unexpected email attachment. Could it be malware? You’d like to see what it contains. Sounds like a case for Binary Viewer.

This free program is a tiny download, with no installation required, and if you’ve ever used a hex editor you’ll immediately feel at home. Open your target file, it’s displayed in the usual Hex/ ASCII views, and you can browse the contents as required.

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The excellent free Windows network monitor GlassWire is now also available in Basic ($49), Pro ($99) and Elite ($199) versions.

All three builds have extra security features. "Ask to connect" blocks new network connections until they’re approved by you; "Lock down mode" blocks everything until you turn it off; a Wi-Fi monitor lists everything on your network and alerts you when devices join or leave.

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Sharing a screen capture with someone else can require many steps. You might take the screenshot, save it as a file, maybe attach that to an email, add a few text notes, then click Send and wait.

ScreenShooter is a free portable tool which allows you to capture an image, add text or highlighting, and share it immediately via the program’s own server.

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There are many ways an attacker might try to compromise your PC, and one common option is to download and run an executable without your knowledge. If your antivirus engine doesn’t recognize the threat then that could leave you with a serious problem.

Run ExeWatch and it might be a different story. The program watches your local drives, looking out for new executable files, and raises an alert the moment anything appears -- downloaded, extracted from an archive, written by some other program, whatever it might be. It has no malware-removal abilities, but that early warning may still save you a lot of pain.

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If you need to know more about a Windows executable then there are plenty of low-level tools which can help: PEStudio analyses the file itself, Resource Hacker gives you access to its icons and images, Process Monitor records what it does, and so on.

Flash files -- SWFs -- aren’t as well supported, but you do have a few options, and JPEXS Free Flash Decompiler is one of the best.

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Piriform has unveiled its routine monthly update to CCleaner with the release of CCleaner 5.06 for Windows PCs. The new release is also available as a portable build.

There’s only one new feature of note in this latest release, and it’s currently restricted to Windows 10 users. Nevertheless, a number of other improvements make it an essential update for existing users.

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Creating Windows icons can be a challenge. Regular image editors aren’t optimized for the process -- that’s if they have ICO support at all -- while specialist icon designers are often bulky and complex.

Seanau Icon Toolkit is a free icon editor which applies a few tricks to make the process much more straightforward.

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Microsoft Sysinternals has announced the latest round of updates for its stellar PC maintenance tools.

Startup program detector Autoruns 13.4 now reports Office add-ins, showing you the associated DLLs, their location and VirusTotal score.

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If you’re an experienced computer user then you probably don’t spend much time thinking about archive formats. You’ve just installed something like 7-Zip and are ready to extract whatever you find.

Not everyone is as well equipped, though, so if you’re sharing something like a .gz with others then it might be wise to convert it to a more basic .zip, first.

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Launch Windows desktop calculator Reor for the first time and it’s tempting to think: is that it? The tiny interface really is stripped back, with little more than a numeric keypad, four operators and an equals button.

But wait. There’s more. And clicking on the Menu button reveals all.

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You're busy working on your PC. Everything seems fine. But then, without warning, an error message tells you that some irreplaceable files have been lost forever.

It's horrible. A nightmare. But if you're the twisted type then you can now bring this experience to your friends, with a little help from Windows Error Message Creator (WEMC).

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IObit has launched IObit Game Assistant 3, a major update for its simple game launcher/ monitor/ manager.

The program automatically recognizes more than 4,000 games, and its launcher can now -- at last -- organize them into categories. As before, you’re free to add local or web-based games as required.

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Nektra Advanced Computing has announced that its system monitoring tool SpyStudio 32-bit/ 64-bit is now free for both personal and commercial use.

An essential download for geeks everywhere, SpyStudio reveals a host of low-level details on what a process is really doing: the files and Registry keys it’s accessing, the windows it creates, COM objects instanced, API calls made, and more.

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