AOMEI Tech Co. has released a new version of AOMEI Partition Assistant, and along with a name change, has added several new features, one of which is support for UEFI boot. The previously called AOMEI Partition Assistant “Home Edition” has been changed to AOMEI Partition Assistant “Standard Edition”. The term “Home” was dropped in favor of “Standard” because the new edition is now completely free to use for both private and commercial purposes, eliminating the need for businesses to buy licenses.

Pattern locks are popular on touch screen devices such as smartphones because they are easier to enter than typing passwords. When Windows 8 debuted, pattern locks became an alternate but necessary inclusion. Although most people are using Windows 8 on traditional non-touch based systems, touch-based laptops, tablets and monitors are catching up especially after the release of the Surface pro tablets.

The universal appeal for portable applications lie in the fact that they aren’t associated in any way with the host computer. You can run them from a hard drive or a flash drive. You can move portable applications from one drive to another, or between computers and it takes all associated data and settings along with the program. If you don’t like a portable application, you can simply delete it because there are no file or registry leftovers to deal with. Portable applications operate almost in stealth.

Start Menu Reviver is a new start menu replacement for Windows 7 and Windows 8, that succeeds at merging the design style of “Metro” with the traditional list based menu system in a way that Microsoft failed.

At first appearance, Start Menu Reviver looks more like a Windows Phone launcher than a Windows start menu. But flick the mouse to the right, and the menu expands to reveal the familiar programs list.

Here are the results of last week’s Themefuse WordPress Themes Giveaway. Based on the random number generator at random.org, we have picked three winners. Each have won a premium Wordpress theme of their choice designed by ThemeFuse. The three winners are:

Spell checkers are standard issue on all word processing programs. Browsers started installing them too since people spend more time typing in forms inside browsers than typing notes in MS Word. Lately, spell checkers have found their way into a variety of applications such as programmer’s notepad and even a spell checking clipboard manager. But why limit yourself to a selected set of programs?

Google today announced that it will merge the storage space offered on several of its services into one that will be shared among them. This means that instead of having 10 GB for Gmail and another 5 GB for Drive and Google+ Photos, you’ll now get 15 GB of unified storage for free to use as you like between Drive, Gmail, and Google+ Photos.

There are many users who aren’t planning to upgrade to Windows 8 from Windows 7, yet there are things in Windows 8 that are positively attractive. For instance, the new Explorer, new file copy dialog boxes and the new task manager. The ribbon explorer has already been created for use in Windows 7. For file copying operations, better alternatives has been available for a long time. Now a Neowin member has created an identical copy of Windows 8’s task manager that can run on Windows 7.

Think websites not optimized for mobile viewing are still in the game? More than 80 percent of smartphone users never leave home without their mobile phone and on-the-go shopping and finding the exciting are more popular than ever.

A selection of articles containing the best tips, resources and software reviews published between April 1 and April 30 of last year.

• Spotflux: Free VPN With Encryption, Anti-Virus Protection and Ad Blocking
• Put Your Dropbox or Google Drive Folder Inside SkyDrive for Multiple Cloud Backup
• 20+ Chrome Apps for Google Drive