Microsoft Windows 10 Home

We haven’t enjoyed your behaviour, Windows. You’ve spoiled what could have been quite a lovely past few years for desktop PC users. Now go home and think about what you’ve done, and don’t come back until you’ve learned your lesson!

Admittedly, there were some contrarians who liked Windows 8 on the desktop, but they’re the same sort of masochists who pop up in online comment sections saying that Prometheus is the best Alien film, or that Metallica’s St Anger isn’t really that bad. Whether a few people liked Windows 8 or not, though, it was generally a disaster for desktop users, with many PC makers still having to offer Windows 7 as an option when ordering. But now Windows 10 is now finally out, and Microsoft promises that it’s learned its lesson.

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Panda Internet Security 2016

With Windows 10 compatibility, this updated security software from Panda aims to keep your PC safe. Roland Waddilove takes it for a test drive

Malware software is under constant development and new variants appear daily, which is a problem if you have old security software. To combat the latest malware Panda Security looks to update its software range every year with newer and better threat detection and security features. Internet Security, reviewed here, is one step up from the base package, Antivirus Pro and costs just £9 more. This, it strikes us, makes it the best value for money package in Panda’s range.

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Xara Designer Pro X11

The latest update to Xara’s high end product, Designer Pro X11

Xara are one of the oldest software developers in the UK; starting in 1981 it has been responsible for some very innovative software, mainly in the realm of graphics. This latest product Designer Pro X11 is the culmination of its work in this field. Combining the elements from all of the Xara graphic products into a single all encompassing program that, certainly at the latest price, represents excellent value for money. It includes Vector Illustration, drawing, Photo Editing, Web Design and DTP layout all within a single contextbased interface, giving you just about everything a graphic designer could ever need. It also comes at a fraction of the cost of other leading brand products.

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Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac

A major upgrade for OS X users

Apple keeps selling more and more MacBooks, while other PC makers struggle. Everyone loves the sleek, minimalist hardware. But what about the software? Although every Mac comes with beautifully designed free apps, not every Windows program is available for Apple’s OS X operating system. Microsoft Office is, but the Mac version hasn’t been updated for five years. Until now.

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Corel PaintShop Pro X8

Andy Shaw tests the latest version of a classic Windows image editor

PaintShop Pro is a PC classic. Originally developed by Jasc Software and released as shareware, it was one of the first full-featured image processors available for the PC, rivalling Adobe’s Photoshop (at the time only available on Apple computers and aimed at professionals) for a fraction of the price.

Corel took over the PaintShop Pro brand in 2004 and while the software has been tweaked and refined over the years, it essentially does the same job it always has: providing you with tools to improve your photos. Whether they just need a crop and straighten, or more complicated retouching, there are plenty of tools available.

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BubbleUPnP

Accessing and streaming media from one device to the next has never been easier

The power of a modern mobile device is truly amazing. Not only can we play some devilishly clever games on them, but they can also play back a wealth of media file types with perfect clarity and in most cases, in glorious high definition. Thanks to the continuing development and improvements to DLNA, which started off life as something of a pain to get going, we can now utilise the impressive abilities of our mobile devices to stream content to and from various sources around our digitally connected homes.

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LibreOffice 5

Graham Morrison needs to find a collective noun for people who love word processors

We must admit. Despite their prosaic nature, and a tendency to be associated with open plan offices, we quite like office suites. This may be something to do with the Amiga, and the emergence of proper graphical word processors like Wordsworth and Final Writer. Even to our younger selves, opening the physical packaging around those (costly) products and patiently installing a single application off several floppy discs was exciting. To be then presented with a WYSIWYG view of your writing, as you typed, seemed revolutionary.

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Sony Catalyst Production Suite

Video editing for more than just home movies

There are plenty of options for editing videos. Windows Movie Maker is free and surprisingly good, and other software from Adobe, Corel and Pinnacle come in at under £100. But there’s a gap between these ‘enthusiast’ programs and what the professionals use, such as Adobe Creative Cloud (which is expensive) and Avid Media Composer (which makes Creative Cloud look cheap).

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Serif Affinity Photo

A serious new rival to Photoshop for Mac users

No image-editing program compares with Adobe Photoshop, with its ridiculously comprehensive range of tools covering everything from medical scanning to 3D printing. But quite a few mimic some its features at a lower price. For PCs, Serif’s PhotoPlus X7 is one of the best. For Macs, the company has launched Affinity Photo, a different program with a new approach that could make it the best Photoshop rival yet.

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Auslogics BoostSpeed 8

Keep your computer running like a Swiss watch with this latest product from Auslogics

It’s been my experience that the majority of computer users never carry out any essential maintenance on their machines. Naturally most will have a virus killer; there’s been enough scare mongering to ensure that these days such a utility is almost mandatory. Yet they will merrily stand by while their machines get slower and slower for the sake of a little maintenance. Of course I realise that not everyone has the knowledge or perhaps the courage to attempt this anyway. However, there are products out there that are quite capable of doing the job for you, this latest release from Auslogics being a likely candidate.

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Adobe Photoshop CC (2015)

The world's best image-editing program

Photoshop isn’t just a PC program, it’s a verb. Nobody ever looks at a celebrity on a magazine cover and thinks, ‘Hmm, I bet she’s been Corel PaintShop Pro’d’. In short, there’s no disputing that Adobe’s photo editor (currently celebrating its 25th year) is the first choice. The question is whether it’s the right one for you.

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SiSoftware Sandra 2015 SP2b

SiSoft's Sandra (the Sytem ANalyser, Diagnostic and Reporting Assistant) had a recent upgrade last November with the 2015 edition and followed by SP2b, which was released on 6th July this year. Better support for all current versions of Windows along with Windows 10 were included with the new version, along with updated hardware, Device Performance Certification, new GPU, APU and CPU Scientific Analysis Algorithms and an updated overall score. There were also many other tweaks and improvements to the main structure of the program itself and a dash of Windows 8-esque flair with a set of new styles and themes.

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UniGine Valley Benchmark

UniGine is the commercial game making engine that allows you to design multi-platform game environments. As a result and because of its use in the industry, the company has on offer a number of GPU stress testing tools available.

There are a four main benchmark stress testing tools for download: Valley (which is what we're reviewing here), Heaven, Tropic and Sanctuary.

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Futuremark PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is the sister program to the Futuremark main product, 3DMark 11. The difference here is the fact that PCMark is more of a whole system benchmark solution, rather than being focused on gaming, DX11 and graphics, like the 3DMark tests are.

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Windows Experience Index

The Window Experience Index (AKA the Windows System Assessment Tool - WinSAT) first appeared as a module in Windows Vista as Microsoft's attempt to create a base score for all PCs so buyers could better ascertain which systems would run the OS better than others. In theory, it was a good idea, but it didn't quite work out as well as planned.

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Maxon Cinebench

The benchmark purists among you may regard Maxon's Cinebench as more of a fancy display suite rather than a fully fledged benchmarking tool. However, there's more to this program than you first imagine, and the results can be taken quite seriously.

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Futuremark 3DMark 11

Futuremark's 3DMark became the de facto benchmark software some time ago, and with the launch of DirectX 11 it then went on to be an absolute necessity when it comes to measuring one system's performance against another.

It's designed to measure the computer's gaming performance using all the newest elements and features inherent to DirectX 11, which include tessellation, compute shaders, GPU and combined CPU stress testing and multi-threading.

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SparkyLinux 4.0

Wars have been fought over what is the best Debian-based distribution, but Shashank Sharma is convinced that this ready-to-use OS is a contender

Apart from being one of the first Linux distributions (distros), Debian also has the distinction of fathering, or inspiring a large number of other distros. Several of these descendants, such as Ubuntu and Linux Mint have since gone on to achieve fatherhood in their own right. Despite the choice of different repositories (repos) as their base,most projects prefer Debian Stable as the foundation for their distro. But the Stable repos features thoroughly tested, albeit older, software which makes it ill-suited for distros that wish to serve only the latest of everything to their users. SparkyLinux is one such distro and it uses the Debian Testing repository as its starting place.

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Atom 1.0

Ben Everard's hair is beautiful - as is this lovely text editor.

GitHub primarily concerns itself with project hosting, so it came as a bit of a surprise to us when the project released a text editor. According to the Atom release announcement, Atom exists because GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath wanted a text editor built using modern programming techniques, "His dream was to use web technologies to build something as customisable as Emacs and give a new generation of developers total control over their editor."

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Sony Catalyst Production Suite

Andy Shaw looks at a video-editing suite that lets you transform your high-definition footage into a professional-looking film

Sony’s Catalyst software sits somewhere between Windows Movie Maker (which is surprisingly good for a free program), and the kind of software you would find in a professional TV-editing suite. It’s pricier than the basic tools for home-movie makers but not so costly that only a professional video editor would be willing to pay for it.

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