Mike Williams

PNG is an excellent graphics format which can achieve very good compression rates. We’ve regularly covered tools which can optimize them still further, though -- including PNGOptimizer, just last month -- and PNGmini is the latest contender.

The program installs easily (no adware), and looks great. There’s a sleek, black interface, flat buttons, red status bar and highlighting, while menus slide out smoothly with a click. It manages to be modern, without simply copying anything else.

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Video Comparer is an interesting commercial tool which can find similar videos by their content.

The key word here is "similar". The program doesn't just look for identical files. It can also match files when one has been cropped, rotated or resized. It's even able to identify videos where one clip exists within another (video A is a single scene extracted from video B).

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Video Comparer is an interesting commercial tool which can find similar videos by their content.

The key word here is "similar". The program doesn’t just look for identical files. It can also match files when one has been cropped, rotated or resized. It’s even able to identify videos where one clip exists within another (video A is a single scene extracted from video B).

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Many people say we’re now living in a "post-PC world". The desktop is dead, they claim, or at least on the way out, while touch is the future. And all this might suggest that command line tools are entirely irrelevant, and best forgotten.

If you need to automate PC tasks, though, for yourself or others, then a little command line knowledge can still save you a vast amount of time. Especially if you extend the regular DOS commands with the cross-platform Swiss File Knife.

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Adobe’s open source code editor Brackets has received an update to Sprint 36, adding some significant new features.

Smart file watchers mean the editor and Project tree now recognize when files are modified outside of Brackets, and update automatically. You’re always looking at the latest state of your project, no manual refresh required.

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Leave a PC unattended for a while and the standard lock screen keeps it reasonably safe. Press Win+L, the lock screen appears, and only someone who knows your password will be able to restore the desktop.

This is simple, straightforward, and easy to use. It's not particularly configurable, though, so if you need more control then you might prefer ScreenBlur.

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Smartphones make it very easy to capture documents or notes -- just point your camera, and tap -- but the results aren’t always good, and may require some work later.

CyberLink YouSnap - Camera Scan to PDF is an Android app which can take photos of documents, screens, whiteboard presentations and more, automatically squaring them up, optimizing image quality, and saving the results as a JPEG or PDF.

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Animated GIFs may be the most dated and inefficient form of animation around, but they can still be useful. In particular, you can use them almost anywhere, no need for a special movie player, and they’ll be viewable on almost any device.

As we saw in January, GifCam is an excellent general purpose tool that can record any desktop activity as an animated GIF. But if you’re looking to create your GIF from a video, then you might prefer QGifer, which can usually extract the footage you need in just a few seconds.

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If you're wondering how other people might be using your PC then there are plenty of free system forensics tools to point you in the right direction. TurnedOnTimesView lists when a PC has been started and closed down, for instance; UserAssistView shows which programs are being launched, while BrowsingHistoryView reports on recent web activities.

If you’re interested in this kind of application then you could download each one, run various tests, research the competition, and gradually build up your own forensic toolkit. Alternatively, you could just download Win-UFO, which combines around 100 popular freeware PC forensics and system information tools into a single portable package.

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With even budget PCs now including at least 4GB RAM, application memory usage isn' the issue it used to be. But if you're using an underpowered computer -- or a program with a memory leak -- then you could still run short of RAM, drastically cutting your system performance.

Process Piglet is a simple tool which monitors the memory use of running processes. New programs are tracked for 30 seconds to access their average requirements, and you'll then be alerted if that application starts to consume significantly more RAM.

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Translation services from Google, Bing and others mean it's now very easy to translate plain text, and there are a host of apps and browser extensions available to simplify the process further. Translating text embedded in an image requires a little more work, but Screen Translator is an open source tool which may be able to help.

Installation is trickier than it should be, thanks to a setup program which lists some options in English, others in Cyrillic. It's not the most impressive start, but choose to install everything (which is safe, there's no adware here) and setup proceeds with no other problems.

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The Windows desktop is a great place to work, when you're running two or three programs. Launch 10, 20, maybe 30, and life becomes rather more difficult. Application windows are everywhere, taskbar buttons become tiny, even Alt+Tab becomes awkward to use.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to be this way. Install ScreenTabs and the program will equip your system with two extra virtual desktops, giving you three in total. Each one gives you a fresh start -- an empty taskbar, no visible application windows -- and switching between them is as easy as clicking a tab on the left side of your screen.

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Browse just about any Windows tips site and you’ll find tutorials on how to customize various Explorer right-click menus. Adding the ability to open the command prompt at a particular folder is a particular favorite; shutting down your system from the desktop right-click menu is another.

Applying this kind of tweak usually requires nothing more than a few quick Registry edits, but if you’re in a hurry then you might prefer to use Easy Context Menu. It’s a compact portable tool which makes it simple to apply 20+ common right-click tweaks, as well as adding a few small extras of its own.

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Whether you need to know what a particular installation program is doing to your system, or you’re just wondering why your hard drive is busy all the time, being able to track disk activity can be very useful. It’s surprisingly easy, too, as Free Folder Monitor demonstrates.

There’s a selection of adware to avoid during installation, but get past that and Free Folder Monitor starts to work immediately, displaying current system drive activity as it happens. A table lists the date and time of the event, its type (Add, Modify, Rename or Remove), the file name, size and attributes.

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There’s a lot of presentation software around, but the free SlideDog attracted our attention immediately with its claims of wide file format support. The program doesn’t just sequence images, the website boasts: you can also use videos, PowerPoint files, web pages, PDFs, Prezi presentations, and more.

While this sounds great, all isn’t quite as it seems. On installation, SlideDog points out that it doesn’t handle these file types itself, and instead depends on you having suitable viewers available (VLC Media Player for movies, PowerPoint or the PowerPoint viewer for PPT/ PPTX files, and so on).

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