hMailServer has been the default answer to “free mail server for Windows” for two decades. It is still alive: development moved to a community organisation on GitHub, and version 5.7.1 became the latest stable release on 29 September 2026. Still, admins keep asking for an alternative, usually for one of
Windows Firewall is strict about incoming connections and relaxed about outgoing ones, so admins who want to control what leaves a PC reach for a second tool. Two free, open-source ones come up in almost every search: SimpleWall and TinyWall. Both block outbound traffic by default, both are tiny, and
Every small IT department ends up asking the same question: how far can a stack of free tools carry us before someone has to ask for budget? The answer depends less on features than on limits. A remote-support tool that is free for 30 computers is a different tool at
“Free” on a download page rarely answers the question an IT department actually has: may we install this on company computers? Some free tools say yes outright, some allow it only up to a number of devices, and some are free for home use only, with the business licence hidden
GlassWire is the tool people install when they want to see their network: a live graph of which application talks to which host, an alert the first time a new program goes online. Then they find that the one button they wanted — block this program — is greyed out
PingPlotter answers the question every admin eventually gets: “is it our network or the provider’s?” It traces the route to a destination, pings every hop continuously and draws latency and packet loss per hop, so you can point at the exact step where things go wrong. Its Free edition is
NetLimiter is the tool most Windows administrators reach for when one application is eating the connection: it shows traffic per program and lets you cap it, per application or per connection. It is also shareware, so sooner or later the question comes up — is there a free alternative that
Mail-in-a-Box and mailcow are the two names that come up first when an IT team decides to run its own mail server on Linux. Both are free, both are open source, and both bundle Postfix and Dovecot into something you can actually install in an afternoon. After that, they go
Short answer: VirtualBox itself is free for commercial use. The VirtualBox Extension Pack is not. The two are separate downloads under separate licences, and the trouble companies get into almost always comes from the second one being installed “because the tutorial said so”. This guide explains exactly what is free,
TinyTask is loved for the same reason it frustrates people: it does one thing. Press record, do the task, press play. No scripting, no settings worth mentioning, one small file. The moment you need more — a macro that survives a window moving, a hotkey of your own, a Mac
