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Windows only: The newest version of the popular Avast Antivirus is finally available for download. It’s lighter, faster, and more feature-filled than ever, bringing a new behavior shield, heuristics engine, and code emulator to keep you protected at all times.

Apart from its far easier-to-navigate interface, Avast has a few new features that make it hard to turn down. It’s new code emulator can emulate a suspicious executable’s code, isolated, for use in its new heuristics engine, designed to detect malware that would otherwise be undetectable with normal definitions—in other words, spotting malware by learning what the code does. If you use the pro version, you also get their new sandboxing feature for even further protection.

Apart from the new features, Avast has also lowered scanning times as well as the resources necessary to scan and update—a common issue with antivirus programs that are always running in the background. If you’re already an Avast lover (and many of you are), you can either wait for the program to update itself in the near future or go download 5.0 straight from Avast. If you’ve tried Avast and turned it down before, it may be worth another look—you may find that it’s former cons (such as the difficult-to-use GUI and resource use) are now more up to your standards.

Avast Antivirus is a free download, Windows only.

Windows only: Free utility Copy Path adds a new entry to your right-click context menu that lets you quickly copy the full path to any file with two clicks of your mouse. Why would you want something like this?

I can think of plenty of reasons this functionality would come in handy, but we mentioned the most useful back when we covered ClipPath, a similar tool:

[L]et’s say you’re looking at a file sitting happily inside its folder, but you want to send it to a friend with Gmail. In order to do so, you’d have to browse through your whole file system to find the file from your browser, even though you were already staring at the file in the first place.

With Copy Path installed, all you’ve got to do is right-click the file you want to upload, copy the path, and paste it into the attachment text box. The same holds true for uploading a file to any web site, naturally. It’s a small difference, to be sure, but it’ll definitely save time, and nothing’s more irritating than navigating to a file using your browser’s upload dialog when you’re already staring at the file in Explorer.

Copy Path is a free download, Windows only.

Windows only: Free application Explore&Burn adds an entry to your right-click context menu that allows you to quickly burn files and folders to CD or DVD.

This right-click utility is dead simple: Click any file, folder, or disk image (e.g., ISO, IMG), select the Burn to disc context menu option, and go through the very quick burning wizard. The application supports most types of burnable media (including Dual Layer discs) and skips the bloat that accompanies a lot of burning software, opting instead for a completely pared down interface and footprint.

Explore&Burn is freeware, Windows only.