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Backtesting can be applied to any historical data, but it's particularly useful in finance. Backtesting can use historical data to predict how a particular strategy might have fared under certain conditions so analysts can learn from the mistakes of the past. EzBacktest is a free financial tool that can verify and back-test virtually any stocks or funds, individually or in combination. You can compare your results to major stock indexes, change your allocation scheme, and run the data again. EzBacktest lets you load up on risk or reduce your position at will, and its graphical displays make the data … Read more

The market for media players is a crowded one, with options ranging from the bare-bones to the extravagant. Hiro Player falls somewhere in the middle, with some useful features -- it comes with the K-Lite Codec Pack, for example -- and some areas that leave room for improvement.

Hiro Player has an easy-to-navigate interface split into three connected modules: a playlist, a control panel, and a viewer that displays videos or, for audio tracks, visualizations. You can add media to the playlist either by individual file or by folder. The fact that Hiro Player supports so many different formats and … Read more

Trusted Power Search by Moose-Tech Software is a free Web search tool that promises faster, more efficient searches. The application is able to deliver on this by limiting the number of sites that it searches to a predetermined list that is defined by the user.

The application presents a simple, easy-to-understand toolbar interface. There is a Help tab to guide the user in how to use the application. You can set your preferences as to which sites you want to use, Google, Microsoft Internet Explorer, or Yahoo, and how many searches are displayed. There is also a parent-friendly Safety mode … Read more

Windows offers numerous accessibility options in the Control Panel under Ease of Access, including the ability to activate windows by hovering the mouse over them and to control the mouse with your keyboard. But there's considerable room for improvement, such as the mouse control options offered by Clikka Mouse Free.

This simple tool places a series of icons controlling mouse buttons in a tiny interface that stays out of sight on the left side of your screen until you mouse over to it. All you have to do is hold the cursor over a button to activate the corresponding … Read more

Windows lets you configure many of its features to suit individual needs, such as gaming or CAD or video. But maybe you use the same PC for work and play, and some settings might not suit both. Or maybe you share a PC with family members or co-workers, and agreeing on settings is a challenge rivaling legendary thermostat wars. You can change things to suit your needs every time you use the computer, and then maybe change them back when you're done. Or you can use Intelloware's Quick Config.

This free tool lets you create different profiles, each … Read more

If you've ever wished you could have that multipage graphical user interface (GUI) that you see in Macs and Android devices, your wait is over. Blacksmith from jLab promises to bring that type of functionality to a Windows environment for free.

The Virtual Desktop Manager might seem daunting to the newbie at first, but the application is well worth knowing once you get the hang of it. Blacksmith allows Windows users to configure as many as four desktops into their system and provides them with quite a number of options to manipulate them. These include assigning separate icons for … Read more

Simpler is better, we often hear, and nowhere more so than in notekeeping applications that can bring order to the most chaotic life. Like CintaNotes. This freeware note-taking application is designed to help you save, organize, and make good use of those great ideas and newfangled concepts you're always turning up. You can quickly save personal notes, Web addresses and snippets, articles, images, and anything else that exists in the cyberworld that you'd like remember, take note of, and tag for retrieval.

When it comes to the user interface, notekeepers tend to range from tiny black rectangles to … Read more

Roboreader is a free sequential image viewer that is designed to replace the default Windows image viewer (typically Photo Viewer) with a faster, more capable tool. It displays animated GIFs as well as most image files, and it can let you view images directly in a wide range of archived files, too. It automatically continues on to the next image archive in a directory.

There are several options for fitting images to the desktop, which is one of Roboreader's chief advantages. As widescreen displays become common, more users will appreciate the ability to get the best fit for their … Read more

Power users will love GrepWin, a free search-and-replace tool that enables regular expression searches from context menus in Explorer. It essentially adds a sophisticated interface to the grep command-line search tool developed for Unix and used in Linux, MacOS, and other operating systems, including Windows. It can replace whole strings of text in compatible files and documents, such as text files. Regular expressions (regex) enable incredibly specific searches, such as words with a specific number of letters or sequence of vowels, or "cats" when preceded by "house" or "wild." With special characters, groupings, and … Read more