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July 2015

Finally! Audio indicators and muting arrives in Firefox Nightly

Mozilla just enabled audio indicators and muting in the most recent version of Firefox Nightly, the cutting edge version of Firefox that gets features first.

If you happen to have lots of tabs open, you sometimes may find it difficulty to locate an audio source in your browser of choice.

Chrome users had tab audio indicators for some time now thanks to the browser's native implementation of Adobe Flash which gave Google more control over it and thus options to identify and control audio.

How to switch Google Chrome’s download toolbar to notifications

Whenever you download a file in Google Chrome, a toolbar is displayed at the bottom of the screen listing the file.

The toolbar displays download speed and progress, and remains visible after the download finishes. You may use it to open the file right away, which you do with a double-click, or to open the folder it was saved to using the default file browser on the system.

Tip: How to resume the Windows 10 installation media creation process

Windows users can run Microsoft's Media Creation tool to create a Windows 10 ISO image or copy the installation files required by the operating system to a USB Flash drive.

Since the download has a size of several Gigabytes, it can happen that it stops at one point during operation, or that the operation stops at the processing phase.

If you then run the tool again to complete the process, you will notice that the download starts from zero instead of resuming from the position the previous operation stopped at.

How to protect your Android device against Stagefright attacks

Stagefright is a media playback engine on Android that supports several media formats by default, features audio and video playback, session management, DRM and more.

It is also a name of a vulnerability, or a series of vulnerabilities that were recently discovered. Since Stagefright is a core Android technology, it is affecting (nearly) all devices running the operating system.

Windows 10 Privacy

This Windows 10 privacy guide is a work in progress. We will add new information and make adjustments once they become available.

When it comes to Windows 10 and privacy, there are lots of things that you need to consider. Probably the best starting point before you even begin to upgrade an existing system or set up Windows 10 on a new one is to read through the Privacy Policy and Service Agreement.

Mozilla to release 64-bit Firefox to stable channel in version 41

Firefox users who prefer a 64-bit version of the web browser instead of a 32-bit version on Windows will be able to install and use a 64-bit stable channel version when Firefox 41 gets released.

Firefox 41, which will be released on September 22, 2015 if things go as planned, will be offered as a 32-bit and 64-bit version for the Windows platform.

Fix Windows Shell Experience Host process using too much memory/CPU

The Windows Shell Experience Host process may use quite a bit of memory or CPU when it is running.

To find out whether this is the case on your machine running Windows 10, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Esc to open the Task Manager.

Click the "more details" link at the bottom left of it and locate the Windows Shell Experience Host process in the listing. You may click on name to sort the processes alphabetically which may make it easier to find it in the listing.

How to do a clean install of Windows 10

Microsoft released a tool yesterday that enables you to create installation media, an ISO image or USB files, so that you can use it to upgrade existing Windows systems or clean install Windows 10.

Users who run Windows 7 or Windows 8 currently will run into issues when they try to do a clean install as they are prompted for a product key during installation of the new operating system.

When they try to enter their Windows 7 or 8 product key, they will receive information that it is invalid and not accepted.

How to download Windows 10 and create installation media

Windows 10 is finally available and while many users have seen their machines get upgraded automatically to the new operating system, some have reported errors and issues that prevented the upgrade from completing successfully.

This ranged from update servers that were unavailable to specific error codes such as C1900200, 80240020 or the unhelpful "something happened" error.