Paragon Backup & Recovery 16 is a very comprehensive backup tool with a vast array of professional backup and disk management features.

The program can back up a hard drive's master boot record, its first track, individual partitions or complete drives, for instance. It can also run file-based backups on the files and folders you specify. You can run a quick backup of your documents, music, videos, music or other media files. And there's even an E-mail backup, that will save your messages, accounts and address book (Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Mail are supported).

You're able to run full, differential or incremental backups, the latter including only new or modified files for improved performance. A scheduler allows backup jobs to be run when you're not around. And your backup files can be saved to local, external or remote drives, FTP servers, or burned to disc.

Virtualisation support allows you to copy your entire system to a virtual drive (all the main formats are supported), ready for use in your virtualisation tool of choice.

Restoring data from backups is easy. You can selectively restore just the files and folders you need from within the program (even if they're held within a complete hard drive image). And if you purchase the program then you'll be able to create a recovery disc to restore your system drive even if Windows will no longer start (though beware, that is not possible in this trial version - don't rely on it as your main backup tool).

There are a host of useful extras, from basic hard drive partitioning tools, to an Undelete Wizard, secure drive wiping option, hard drive sector editor, and more. And there's more. You can create incremental disk images, helping to save backup time and storage space; you get the latest backup engine, for even better performance; and it supports the very latest hard drives, including AFD's and hard drives over 2TB in size.

Go out and buy a new computer, turn it on for the first time and you’ll be amazed how quickly it boots and launches the installed applications. Your first thoughts will be that you were right to sell your old PC as this one is so much more speedy that you have become more productive.

Result? You settle in to your old habits of installing and testing software, removing them from your system and quickly misunderstanding that it’s the software that drives your computer, not the hardware. There’s little difference between a 1-year-old PC and a brand number computer. They all rely on the same element and that’s the operating system and installed applications.

After installing and removing software, then browsing the Internet for a few months, all sorts of temporary information is left strewn across your hard drive. Worse, the Registry, which is a database of information about your computer, is left with erroneous entries that point to long-deleted directories, link filetypes to applications that don’t exist and even attempt to launch startup applications that were removed from your machine.

The answer is a system cleanser and there are few better tools than the free CCleaner. This tool will remove unwanted information, temporary files, your browsing history, huge log files and even the settings left behind by previously installed software. It also includes a Registry cleaner and optimiser, which will find and remove entries and streamline the database.

CCleaner doesn’t stop there. It includes some security tools such as a data eraser so you can make sure files and information is completely removed from your PC.

This is CCleaner 5.354, which is a minor release (see full changelog for more):

- All builds signed with new Digital Signatures