ISpy is a versatile surveillance tool that will turn your webcams and microphones into a powerful security system.

Add as many cameras and microphones as you need, and the program will use them to detect movement around your home. You can limit motion detection to particular areas, to minimise false alarms. And if iSpy picks something up then you can have it run any program, send an email, even raise an SMS alert to let you know.

You prefer a more hands-on approach to security? That's possible too. ISpy can be set up to regularly email you image grabs from your cameras. Install an add-on like iSpy Server and you can publish your webcam to the web, for easy monitoring. And in a new feature, it's now possible to access and control your iSpy setup from many mobile devices (Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 7).

The program is highly configurable, with many useful tweaks, settings and options allowing you to customise it to suit your needs. And, surprisingly, this is all open source, so there's no cost to worry about - just download iSpy and see how it works for you.

v5.1.0.0 changes, include:

Fix for media panel checked item display
Better results when using the wizard to add IP cameras
Fixed the VLC plugin to detect lost connections and reconnect
Added a seek control to VLC file sources
VLC file sources now auto-disable at the end of the file playback.

ISpy is a versatile surveillance tool that will turn your webcams and microphones into a powerful security system.

Add as many cameras and microphones as you need, and the program will use them to detect movement around your home. You can limit motion detection to particular areas, to minimise false alarms. And if iSpy picks something up then you can have it run any program, send an email, even raise an SMS alert to let you know.

You prefer a more hands-on approach to security? That's possible too. ISpy can be set up to regularly email you image grabs from your cameras. Install an add-on like iSpy Server and you can publish your webcam to the web, for easy monitoring. And in a new feature, it's now possible to access and control your iSpy setup from many mobile devices (Android, iPhone and Windows Phone 7).

The program is highly configurable, with many useful tweaks, settings and options allowing you to customise it to suit your needs. And, surprisingly, this is all open source, so there's no cost to worry about - just download iSpy and see how it works for you.

v5.1.0.0 changes, include:

Fix for media panel checked item display
Better results when using the wizard to add IP cameras
Fixed the VLC plugin to detect lost connections and reconnect
Added a seek control to VLC file sources
VLC file sources now auto-disable at the end of the file playback.

Keeping a PC running at its peak performance can seem a time-consuming and complicated process. There are endless junk files to clean up, services to be tweaked, startup programs to eliminate, and hundreds of Windows settings to optimise: it's hard to know where to begin. Unless, that is, you get a little expert help from SpeedUpMyPC 2013.

Launch the program, click Start Scan, and it'll crawl over your PC and its settings, looking for speed-related problems and recommending potential fixes. We tried SpeedUpMyPC 2013 on a test PC and found it delivered all kinds of advice, from the obvious (clear the Recycle Bin, delete temporary files), to the intelligent (disable 6 unnecessary startup processes and 8 surplus services), and the seriously geeky (speed up your browsing by increasing your DNS Cache Size).

You don't have to worry about the technicalities, though: in fact these low-level details aren't displayed unless you go looking for them. All you need to do is click the Speed Up Now button, and SpeedUpMyPC 2013 will automatically apply all its selected optimisations in just a few moments.

And as a bonus, you'll probably also find the program has enabled three new speedup tools of its own. "Software quick-starter" helps speed up the launch of applications via the Start menu; "Proactive thumbnail generator" improves Explorer navigation speeds by generating the thumbnails you'll need in advance; and "CPU manager" monitors the PC, and makes sure that runaway programs aren't allowed to hog all your processor time.

You can also schedule a scan, so you can keep your PC clutter-free, perhaps once-a-week, at the end of every week.

If you're a Windows expert then you may occasionally be concerned about the lack of control here. There's no way to see exactly what CPU manager is doing, for instance. And SpeedUpMyPC 2013 might tell you it wants to disable unnecessary startup programs, or turn off particular services, but nowhere does it say exactly what's going to be dumped.

However, if you just want a quick and easy way to speed up your PC, then SpeedUpMyPC 2013 really delivers, giving you plenty of advanced tweaking power with the absolute minimum of hassle.

SpeedUpMyPC 2013 build 5.3.8.0 brings these changes:

- Bug Fixes

Xara Photo and Graphic Designer (the package formerly known as Xara Xtreme) is a one-stop graphics package with the power to satisfy all your creative needs.

Photo editing? An excellent core set of features caters for all the most common requirements (crop, resize, fix red-eye, sharpen, fix perspective issues and so on). And if you need more, the program supports Photoshop plugins so can be extended just as much as you like (and there are 46 bundled filters to help you get started).

Illustration? The QuickShape tools allow you to draw preset shapes in seconds. There are plenty of other vector and line drawing tools on offer. 3D extrusion means you can drag any shape to create a properly lit and rendered 3D version, and it's just as easy to apply transparency, feathering, blends, shadows, bevels and more.

DTP? The built-in Designs Gallery gives instant access to templates for all kinds of projects (brochures, newsletters, greetings cards, calendars, covers, labels, stationery, more). If you prefer to start from scratch then bundled photos and clipart (3,000+ items) will help. And powerful print and various export options (including PDF and PSD) make it easy to share your creations with others.

If you're looking to create web graphics then Xara Photo and Graphic Designer MX can produce simple Flash animations (visuals only, no scripting or sound), animated GIFs, image maps, buttons, headings, icons and more.

And if you're just wondering what's new from the previous edition, there are some useful additions.

Text styles make it easy to change an entire document (font, colour, line spacing, more) in a few clicks.

The new Share menu makes it easy to share media files with Flickr, Facebook and other Xara/ MAGIX MX applications.

And along with some powerful new tools (colour selection, hue adjustment, shape eraser), the program includes improved image optimisation, enhanced import for many areas (SVG, PDF, RAW, web URLs), faster publishing, and a stack of usability improvements.

The brand new Photo and Graphic Designer 9 ships with a host of photo editing improvements, such as photo healing, background erase and new masking tools. There are other enhancements such as a new shape painter tool, support for Google fonts and much more.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition is an unusually straightforward malware hunter which keeps all complexities to the absolute minimum.

The program doesn't require any configuration, for instance. There's no desktop gadget to manage, and you won't be hassled with security alerts. Instead, the program simply checks files as you access them, runs occasional system scans when your PC is idle, and cleans up any infections all on its own. You can also scan files and folders on demand by right-clicking them and choosing "Scan with Bitdefender", but that's about it.

Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition does have a basic interface available, if you need it - but we do mean "basic". Click its system tray icon and you'll find you can turn the real-time protection or automatic scanning system off, while other buttons display system logs or help you access your "My Bitdefender" account (if you have one). But, again, there's nothing complicated or difficult, and perhaps 30 seconds of browsing will show you everything there is to see.

We have one or two small concerns about the program. It protested about being installed alongside an "incompatible" product (Norton Internet Security), for example. Everything still seemed to work just fine, but we'd expect Bitdefender Antivirus Free to be installed as a second line of defence, not a primary antivirus tool, so it really needs to run happily alongside just about everything else around.

And, for some reason, we found the program's status was displayed as "Updating..." almost all the time. Maybe it was just taking its time, being careful to use minimal bandwidth, but this still became a little worrying after a while.

At its core, though, Bitdefender Antivirus Free looks very promising: the program provides a good basic level of protection, yet remains exceptionally easy to use.

Build 1.0.15 changes include:

- Improvements made to Quarantine module: restore/exclude quarantined items
- Threat Control replaced the following tabs: Pending Cleanup and Quarantined Files 
- Http alerts with temporarily exclusions
- new http proxy module
- fixed windows 8 login issue
- fixed avc incompatibility with Comodo
- fixed uninstall issues
- fixed Cleaning Previous Threats message reappearing at every boot
- implement Cleaning system task: when OnDemand or QuickSweep has found an infection, a special system scan task is triggered
- Scan speed improvements on windows8 systems
- AutoScan bugfixes and improvements

StylePix is a portable but powerful image editor, easy to use yet also packed with features.

Just launch the program and its capabilities are immediately obvious. There are bulky toolbars top and left, a thumbnail browser, multiple panels and some very lengthy menus, and browsing these reveals extra capabilities everywhere you look (the Filter menu has 13 entries, for instance, and clicking the Color option alone provides another 18).

This doesn't mean StylePix is complex, though. The interface is generally well designed, and in our experience the program's extra functionality doesn't get in your way. If you're in a hurry then you can carry out all the usual basic edits - crop, resize, rotate, colour tweaks, brightness and contrast correction, text and annotation options - just as quickly as with anything else.

Life gets more interesting when you move beyond the basics, though, because StylePix just has so much to offer. So if you just want to draw a line on a photo, say, then you could simply click the Line button and drag your mouse across the image. But you can also customise this by choosing the line type (straight or curve), the colour (solids, presets, gradients and more), width, alpha blend, blending mode and a whole lot more.

Similarly, if you need to add a caption to an image then you could just select the Text tool, click on the photo and start typing. But if you need more, then you can choose your preferred typeface, its size, width, kerning or tracking, paragraph alignment and so on. Once you've defined your caption, then it's added as a vector, which means you're able to reposition and resize it to suit your needs. And if you want to edit that caption later, it's not a problem - click it, select whatever you want to change - right down to individual characters - and you can resize that, change colour or generally tweak whatever you like.

It's much the same story elsewhere (selection types include auto selection, color range, rectangular region, circular region, lasso region, polygonal region, layer selection, channel selection and quick mask, for instance), and StylePix also includes plenty of features to help keep this manageable. The Batch Processing option, for instance, combines multiple actions to speed up operations, so for example you can add multiple layers (including watermarks) to a set of images in a single operation.