Hi,

Not entirely photography related but these free programs are really useful.

First there’s a fully-featured program that I’ve been using for ages, ShareX. This is great for, among other things, screen capture as well as lots of other great tools. https://getsharex.com/

Recently, for some reason best know to itself, my PC sound volume mysteriously increased itself to a deafening 100% whilst playing some music late in the evening which almost gave me a heart attack, thank heavens we live in a detached property! else I would have had neighbours knocking loudly on the door. I found this nice small program called Quiet on Set which allows one to set a maximum volume and has a password setting to stop anyone changing it. https://github.com/troylar/quiet-on-the-set/releases/tag/1.0.0.15 On my Windows 10 PC I had to set it to run in Windows 8 compatibility mode for it to work correctly.

I found this software called Spybot Anti-Beacon which one can use to block all that telemetry rubbish that Microsoft and others inflict upon us which eats up CPU and network usage and slow things down. https://www.safer-networking.org/products/spybot-anti-beacon/ I’m using the recommended settings plus a few additional blocks to taste and my PC now changes CPU speed correctly and doesn’t run at full frequency all the time which of course makes it run cooler and more efficiently.

I also decided to use a program called Throttlestop to UNDER VOLT my CPU to reduce CPU temperature during the hot months as the ambient temperature in here has hardly dropped below 30-32 C in the daytime for the last couple of weeks and last year it reached in excess of 40 C!. There’s lots of guides to correctly setting this software and test for system stability. https://www.techpowerup.com/download/techpowerup-throttlestop/ Note: If you do Under Volt your CPU do it gently in small steps and run a CPU intensive application for a while to test system stability before proceeding to lower the voltage further. There are some excellent online guides to using this software to under volt the CPU, I strongly recommend that you read them before making any voltage adjustments using this software. Unlike the previous two programs this one doesn’t have a load on widows startup option so one has to use the Windows Task Scheduler to load it on startup but it does remember whether it on or off and this can by toggled by the program’s system tray icon if required.

Not free but very reasonable and great eye-saver software. IRIS, https://iristech.co/

For some years now I’ve been using another free program Rainmeter and various skins which I customised to monitor my system which is really useful in keeping an eye on system temperatures, fan speeds, drive usage etc. as well as few other bells and whistles. https://www.rainmeter.net/

Hope you find the above info useful,

Kind regards

Leigh