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46. Worldwide Telescope
Enjoy the best imagery from the world's ground- and space-based telescopes, including Hubble, with Worldwide Telescope. Look out for the Guided Tours tab – a great place to get started.
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47. Microsoft Photosynth
Photosynth goes one step further than Microsoft ICE, enabling you to create a 360° panorama from photos quickly and easily. You'll need to sign up for free access with your Windows Live ID, and your finished results are uploaded to the same site, either for public consumption or private sharing.
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48. Server Quest II
Indulge in some retro gaming with these re-imaginings of classic games, such as King's Quest. The graphics are old-school, but Server Quest II is a great way to spend a quiet afternoon.
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49. Microsoft Photo Story 3 for Windows XP
It may only create a photo slideshow, but Photo Story 3 does it exceptionally well. Import your photos, then follow the wizard to create your sequence, adding captions, transition effects, minor corrections and a soundtrack. The finished collection can be shared online or burned to DVD using Windows DVD Maker. Note that despite the name, Photo Story 3 works fine in later versions of Windows too, including Windows 8.1.
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50. Microsoft Touch Pack for Windows 7
Before the launch of Windows 8, Microsoft was keen to extol the virtues of touch - and one of Windows 7's best-kept secrets was that it supported a more basic - two fingers rather than ten - touch interface. This free collection of tools is designed to showcase those capabilities, and while most of it is little more than fluff, there are one or two tools in the collection worth installing. The most notable is Collage, which lets you drag, place and resize photos from your pictures library onto an interesting collage that you can subsequently set as your desktop background.
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51. Bing Twitter Maps
Another Silverlight plug-in, this enables you to view tweets geographically, letting you see who's posting nearby.
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52. Microsoft Express Encoder 4
Although this tool is targeted at web developers, Expression Encoder 4 has a powerful feature set for video enthusiasts, too. Import clips, edit, de-interlace, crop and add overlay effects, then output the finished result to a WMV file, perfect for sharing over the internet. There's even a handy screen-capture tool built-in, too. You need to install .NET Framework 4.0 to run this program.
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53. Microsoft Flight
Microsoft's Flight Simulator was long considered the de facto program for those wishing to experience the joys of virtual flight. Now you can download the basic version of the game for free, which provides you with one 'mission', based around the Big Island of Hawaii. While additional missions and planes will cost you, you'll find a number of free preview versions are available to give you a taster of what's to come.
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54. Fresh Paint
Fancy indulging your creative side? This free Windows 8 app is a painting app designed for touchscreens. You can select from a variety of different brushes, paints and canvases to create original artwork or trace over existing photos to turn them into works of art.
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55. Taptiles
There are lots of eye-catching, free Windows 8 games to choose from, including the Microsoft Solitaire Collection and Microsoft Mahjong. But if you want something a little more original, try Taptiles. It's a little like Mahjong, only in 3D and it offers three different gameplay modes to attract even the most hardened puzzle players.
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56. Virtual PC
Looking for free virtualization software? Microsoft offers two versions of its Virtual PC software, depending on whether you're running Windows 7 (Windows Virtual PC) or XP/Vista (Virtual PC 2007). Either tool is a great way to resolve stubborn compatibility issues by running older versions of Windows in a virtual machine. But you'll need to provide your own legitimate copy of Windows to use it. You may get a warning about Home versions of Windows not being supported, but they should still work.
