Free Software

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Google has unveiled Chrome 43 FINAL for Windows, Mac and Linux. Version 43’s main new feature is support for hardware MIDI instruments.

Chrome 43 also implements a couple of behind-the-scenes tweaks for developers that will help benefit end users through reducing the number of unnecessary prompts for action without compromising security.

Fabulous PC monitoring tools Process Hacker and Process Hacker Portable have been updated to version 2.35 with some welcome extras and enhancements.

One major addition is support for viewing the load time and load reasons for process modules, on Windows 8 and above. If a long-running process like Explorer.exe is developing problems, you can now sort its modules by load time to get clues about the cause.

Viewing images is easy these days. No matter which platform you’re on, or what application you’re running, just about everyone uses the same standard formats, and these can typically be displayed on your device’s native viewer, with no need to install anything else.

In the early days of computing, 30+ years ago, it was different. There was no JPG, no PNG, so companies like Atari and Commodore had their own graphic formats. Even these weren’t fixed, with new variations all the time, which makes it very difficult if you’d like to view any of them on a modern computer.