COVER FEATURE
Your Favourite SOFTWARE REVEALED!
We recommended hundreds of free programs in 2024, but which were the most popular with you? Robert Irvine reveals your top 20 tools and explains how to master them all
With another year over, it’s interesting to reflect on all the software we’ve written about – and you’ve read about – over the past 12 months. In every issue of Computeractive, we aim to bring you the best new and updated tools, but some inevitably prove more popular than others.
We’re able to measure this popularity through our Snipca service, which turns long web addresses into short, simple links. These URLs are quicker to type, take up less space on the page and ensure we safely direct you to the correct web pages.
BUY OUR 2024 BACK ISSUE CD & USB STICK
You can read every feature, workshop and review referred to in this feature on our new 2024 Back Issue CD and USB Stick. These contain searchable PDFs of all 26 issues from 2024 to give you one-click access to all our recommendations and advice. You’ll be able to order the Back Issue CD and the USB stick soon from www.snipca.com/53179 and www.snipca. com/53180 respectively.
Snipca also tells us how many times each link has been clicked – or tapped in our digital editions – so we can see which programs and apps you find most useful. This data is collected anonymously (only the number of clicks is recorded), and allows us to tailor the content of the magazine accordingly. After all, there’s little point in us writing workshops about software nobody’s interested in, and we’d be foolish not to provide tips for programs you obviously love.
In this feature, based on those Snipca clicks, we reveal your favourite free software of 2024. Your top 20 most-downloaded tools are an illuminating reflection of the varied needs and interests of Computeractive readers, mixing familiar names with new programs we’d never covered before last year.
YOUR FAVOURITE PROGRAM OF 2024
1 Glow
www.snipca.com/52372
The free system-information tool Glow was your favourite program of 2024 by a considerable margin, attracting almost twice as many of your clicks as the runner-up. We wrote about Glow several times throughout the year, in our Best Free Software section, our ‘Take the ultimate PC health check’ feature in Issue 677 (page 62) and most recently in our Workshop in Issue 699 (page 38), which covered its new RAM-checking functions.
Aside from its simplicity and quality, the reason we recommended – and you downloaded – Glow so often is that it was regularly updated with useful new features, design tweaks and other improvements. However, this almost wasn’t the case – a year ago, developer Eray Türkay announced that Glow 3.00 would be the final version because the program was “where I wanted it to be” (see Issue 676, page 19).
Thankfully, he soon changed his mind – which may be partly because of your keen interest in the software – and Glow has continued to evolve and improve. Its version-numbering system was revised – the latest is 24.21 – and Glow now has its own web page as well as a GitHub repository (www.snipca.com/53114).
Best of all, Glow now provides more than 250 insights into your PC’s hardware and software, across sections including Operating System, Motherboard, Processor, Memory, Graphics Card, Storage and Sound. Select one in its left-hand menu to view information about specific components – details that have become more accurate and comprehensive with each update.
If you need to know, for example, how much RAM your PC has installed, the model number of your CPU or the amount of free space on your SSD, Glow will tell you in a jiffy. It also checks components are working smoothly and reveals small but interesting details such as when your version of Windows was installed, your monitor’s refresh rate and when your system last suffered the dreaded Blue screen of death.
What makes Glow so special
Glow has transcended its origins as an alternative to Piriform’s Speccy (www. ccleaner.com/speccy) by introducing practical options for identifying and fixing PC problems. You can access these in its Tools menu top right ( 1 in our screenshot above) or by using their keyboard shortcuts. They include tools for deleting junk files, benchmarking your CPU and hard drive(s), testing your RAM, troubleshooting network issues and much more. We particularly like the monitor-test tool 2 added in Glow 24.09 (see Issue 686, page 18) that identifies ‘dead pixels’ on your screen, and the tool that reveals forgotten Wi-Fi passwords.