Software Bargains for PCs and Macs Going Strong Through January

Do you still have coins jingling in your pockets after that holiday buying spree? Are you thinking about spiffing up a new (or old) Windows PC or Mac soon with some brand new software? Then here's some upbeat news for you. Software bargains are still available on various Web sites through various dates in January.

Adobe, Paragon, Bitdefender, and many other well known vendors are opting this year to keep going with their holiday price promotions beyond the pre-Christmas shopping season. The hot bargains cut across software categories that include photo and video editing, security tools, other sorts of system utilities, and more.

It's true that some very sweet software deals will have bitten the dust by January 1. Still, though, other great offers are good through January 4, January 31, and a bunch of different dates in between. To help make sure you hit the right Web sites in time to cash in, here are some of the best bargains out there, organized by purchase deadlines.

January 3

Adobe is continuing its price breaks for photo and video editing buffs through January 3, 2012.  On downloads of software for either Microsoft Windows or Apple Mac, you can get $100 off on Adobe Lightroom 3, for example, or $50 off on a bundle of Adobe Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10.

Elsewhere on the Web, also through the third of January, you can buy VMWare Fusion 4 -- a package for running Windows apps alongside Mac apps on Apple's OS X -- for only $49.99.

January 11

January 11, on the other hand, is the last day for grabbing a 50 percent price cut on the Paragon Hard Disk Manager 11 Suite. The Windows-based software includes a highly rated partitioning management program capable of handling the Advanced Format used in contemporary solid state drives (SSDs) and high capacitiy hard disk drives (HDDs). 

The Paragon suite also supports partition management and resizing for the NFS+ drives used in modern Macs. Other ingredients include backup and recovery and disk copying and migration tools. Use coupon code PMXMAS50 on Paragon's Web site.

January 15

Through January 15, Windows and Mac users alike can get a 20 percent discount on Eltima's Flash Optimizer, a product regularly priced at $99.95. In the event that you're unfamiliar with this software, it's designed to compress Flash movies and other elements of SWF files by as much as 70 percent without quality loss.

January 16

The purchase deadline is one day later for huge discounts on Bitdefender's Internet security software for Windows.

Through January 16, "PC Lifetime Editions" are priced at $79.95 for Bitdefender Internet Security 2012 (a company-estimated savings of up to around $247) and $59.95 for Bitdefender Antivirus Plus 2012.  For these special editions, you pay only once during the life of the PC, as opposed to signing up year after year for an ongoing series of annual subscriptions.

January 31

How about big savings on a new set of maintenance tools for your Windows PC? Until January 31, downloads of Iolo's just released System Mechanic 10.7 are slated to be available for merely $24.95 -- a discount of more than 50 percent -- if you use coupon code TEN7.

The latest edition is touted as offering new tools for finding and fixing 50 percent more registry problems, as well for garnering advice in realtime from user experts and for quickly gauging the "total performance impact" of any specific program or service on your PC. 

August 7

That's right, August 7! This isn't a typo. Just in case you've missed out on the January software bargains here, you might take comfort in the fact that you can still get discounts of 15 percent any time through August 7, 2012 on some of Xilisoft's well regarded video editing and conversion software for PCs and Macs. Just use coupon code WOND-QN5X.