Mike Williams

If you’re looking to keep your PC running at peak performance then it’s vital to ensure the drive is properly defragmented. And Auslogics Disk Defrag Pro 4 is the perfect tool to help.

The program has multiple optimization strategies; can defragment selected files, folders or your entire system (including system files); minimizes future fragmentation to keep your system running smoothly; and is exceptionally configurable. You can set every aspect to work just as you’d like, including deciding which files need to be stored on the fastest part of your drive. Or you can just run Disk Defrag Pro’s wizard, answer a few simple questions and let the program decide what to do.

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It’s no secret that the Windows clipboard is, well, just a little limited. Copy a snippet of text from your web browser, say, and you’ve already reached the clipboard’s capacity: copy another and the first will be removed, lost forever, a real annoyance if you need it later.

There are plenty of clipboard extenders around to try and address this problem, of course. Basic examples might save clipboard text. Most will save text and images. But Save.Me is rather more ambitious, with the program aiming to save absolutely everything: text, images, URLs, files, folders, it’s all preserved for speedy access at a later date.

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Have you kept an eye on our amazing software giveaways this year? Hot on the heels of our first two amazing deals comes this, a free and fully functional copy of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer 6. This universally acclaimed design tool runs on Windows PCs and is capable of photo-editing, drawing, graphics design and even desktop publishing, all rolled into one super program.

And the best news of all? For a 48-hour period from midday GMT, Saturday December 29, you’ll be able to download this amazing app, worth $89, for free thanks to Downloadcrew Giveaway.

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If your PC’s performance is currently suffering because of a few memory hogs, then a few minutes spent with Process Explorer,Process Hacker, or even just Task Manager will probably be enough to tell you what’s going on.

Those tools can be a little intimidating, though, so if you’d like something simpler – or would just like to monitor your system’s RAM usage all the time -- then you may prefer Cathargo Software’s free and extremely lightweight MemInfo.

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Malwarebytes Corporation has released Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70. And while (as usual with this particular program) the upgrade isn’t particularly revolutionary, it does contain some important tweaks and additions.

The new build sees Anti-Malware finally get up-to-date with Windows 8, for instance. Not only does the program now properly identify Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 in scan logs, but it can also use the Windows 8 Start Screen to show notifications.

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Setting up a new PC can be a tedious experience, as you have to spend an age browsing the web, finding and downloading all your usual tools: Flash, Adobe Reader, CCleaner, Paint.NET, Dropbox, whatever you might use. DDownloads aims to simplify the process, though, by providing download links to more than 200 popular free applications, allowing you to perhaps grab everything you need without ever seeing a browser window.

Small and portable, the program launches with a simple home page which points you at a series of application groups. Click “Windows Starter Kit”, for instance, and you’ll see a list of apps which will come in very useful on most new systems: Adobe Reader, Flash, Java, DirectX, the Visual C++ 2010 redistributable package, .NET 4.5 and the Windows Essentials Codec Pack.

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If you’ve just spent an age downloading a huge MKV file, then eventually discovering that it won’t play properly is always going to be, well, a little frustrating. To put it politely.

It’s best to resist your immediate urge to shout a lot and break things, though, because there may still be hope. Grab a copy of the free Meteorite and it’s just possible that the program will be able to restore your movie to its full working order.

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Security vendor Anvisoft has released Anvi Rescue Disk 1.0, a free bootable Linux-based environment with tools to help detect and remove ransomware from an infected PC.

And while this isn’t exactly a new idea, the system does have a few welcome touches which make it little more appealing than some of the competition.

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Buying a monitor online has plenty of obvious plus points, with the wide choice and low prices coming very high on the list. But if you’re making a purchase in person -- maybe you’re buying a second-hand system, say – then you can at least check the display for stuck pixels or similar defects, which could save you considerable time and hassle.

And that’s where the very useful and entirely free InjuredPixels comes in.

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If you’re tired of the big-name web browsers, then there are plenty of alternatives around. Most aren’t particularly inspiring, but there are a few which try to create something new, and SlimBoat (a WebKit-based tool from the people who brought you SlimBrowser) is an especially interesting example.

That’s not to say the program offers anything particularly revolutionary, of course -- there’s no major new browsing metaphor here, no new way of working (in fact it’s essentially the same tabbed interface as offered by everybody else). Instead SlimBoat tries to win you over with its sheer weight of functionality, by simply providing more features out-of-the-box than anyone else.

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You’ve spent a long time organizing, planning and preparing, and Christmas is finally here. And it’ll be over all too quickly, of course, but if you’d like to extend the festivities, then maybe we can help. Because after kicking off the latest Downloadcrew Giveaways last week, we’re back, with two more full commercial packages which can be yours for the very appealing price of absolutely nothing at all.

To get started, for 48 hours from midday (GMT) on December 26th we’re giving away full copies of Ashampoo Burning Studio 2013. If you’re tired of overweight, bloated disc burning suites then its feature-packed yet lightweight approach could be very interesting.

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It’s taken a little longer than we were expecting, but Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition is now available in an English language version. And if what you most want for Christmas is a lightweight and very simple antivirus tool, then this could be very good news indeed.

The program offers a reasonable core feature set, with basic real-time protection, simple on-demand scanning (right-click any file or folder in Explorer for a “Scan with Bitdefender” option), and system scans that will run automatically when your system is idle.

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Launch most image managers, even for the first time, and you’ll feel immediately at home. And that’s because they tend to follow very similar designs. You’ll have album or folder groupings on the left, and image thumbnails on the right; double-clicking something displays it full-screen; right-clicking gives you more options; and in just a few seconds you’ll have a very good understanding of what the program can do.

This is all very easy to use, then. But some say there are better ways to browse your images. Visions, for instance, drops the usual flat folders to present your photos in a configurable 3D interface, which (the developers claim) offers all kind of image management benefits. Really? We downloaded a copy to find out more.

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While there are plenty of tools around which promise to help you download online videos, most have snags or compromises that make them annoying to use in real life. They don’t support your favorite sites, maybe; they don’t let you download the precise format or resolution you need; there are restrictions on downloading videos simultaneously, or whatever it might be.

4K Video Downloader claims to be different, though. “Downloading is simple and pleasant”, the authors say. The program covers “YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, Dailymotion and Metacafe”, and you’ll want to use it because “we pay great attention to simplicity and usability”. Interesting, but can the reality live up to the hype? We took a look.

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Oracle has announced the release of VirtualBox 4.2.6, the latest edition of its powerful cross-platform virtualization tool. This is a maintenance release, and so looks more or less unchanged. But the build does include plenty of welcome bug fixes and other small improvements.

VBoxManage now properly converts disks from raw images, for instance. It improves media handling, supports new metrics for “network rate” and “disk usage”, and includes fixes to ensure other metrics are now properly handled. An El Torito BIOS fix should help when you need to boot VMs from a CD. Windows Additions has been tweaked to work better with Windows 8 and Windows 2000.

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