Welcome to 2017, and another year (hopefully!) of contributions from me. As you may have noticed, I took a couple of weeks away from the PC over Christmas, but I'm now back behind the keyboard again. In 2016 the stories I posted on this Hot Finds section achieved more than 2 million hits, so we're clearly doing something right. But if there's a great item of freeware that you've found, and which needs to be brought to more people's attention, then drop me an email and let me know. You can reach me directly at tsa@schifreen.co.uk and I look forward to hearing from you.

Now, back to the Hot Finds, and here's a nice technical one to start off the year. It's a program which displays loads of figures and graphs about the state of your DSL internet connection. So whether you're having issues with speed or reliability that you want to troubleshoot, or whether you simply want to understand more about the DSL/ADSL standards, this will be of interest.

The program is called DSL Stats, and it's a 3 MB download. It's also malware-free according to VirusTotal and Web of Trust, and is portable. Just download, unzip, and run.

The program works by connecting to the telnet command-line interface on your router or modem in order to issue and interpret commands needed to generate the reports. And while it doesn't support every router and modem on the market, it does work with a wide variety of models (especially those that use a Broadcom chipset). You'll find the list of supported devices at the developer's website if you need to check for yours.  Read More