The paid version, Recover Keys, can track down keys from over 8,000 apps!Ĭan’t get that video to play? Need something to play DVDs in Windows? VideoLAN’s VLC media player is a Swiss army knife for video files, and it has even worked on damaged files that I couldn’t get other players to even open. Don’t let it install any software you don’t want along with it, but this is an easy to use tool that can save you money. Need the product key for Windows or any of 300 plus other apps on your PC’s hard drive … or, say, an old drive you found in the closet? The ever so oddly named Magical Jelly Bean Keyfinder is the tool for you. Make sure there’s nothing you want on it first! It’ll format any type of SD card so your Windows or OS X machine can write to it. Enter SD Formatter 4.0, a free download from the SD Association. I’m not sure if it’s some of the weird cameras I’ve owned, or my experiments with the Raspberry Pi PC, but I’ve had a lot of 64GB cards that Windows was sure could only hold 6MB. There’s no cloud, so you don’t have to worry about somebody accessing your data, and it finds the shortest fastest path between your machines. If you want to sync files between Windows machines, or between Windows, OS X, Windows, Linux, and a host of NAS devices, consider BitTorrent Sync.

µTorrent is tiny - less than a megabyte - fast, free, and the page has links to some great music and video bundles you can legally download with it.

And if you’re dealing with big downloads, using µTorrent might be a lot faster than a regular download off a server.

There’s nothing illegal about torrent files, as long as you’re not, say, downloading copyrighted content. It has all the basic photo editing features, supports layers, unlimited undo, and offers more tools and plugins than most folks will ever have time to putter with. Photoshop is overkill for most folks - even the stripped-down Elements version. Writer, Calc, and Impress cover the basic office trio for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations, and there’s quite a few more apps bundled with it.

Not ready for an Office365 subscription, but working in Google Sheets or Docs not quite cutting it? You’re a prime candidate for LibreOffice, a free and open source office suite.

Ninite review