January 2015

Whenever a new Windows 10 build gets released, new tricks and tweaks come to light shortly thereafter that reveal additional features that are not available by default.

The most recent build of Windows 10 that Microsoft released a couple of days ago shipped with many changes including the personal assistant Cortana (limited to English) and the new Start Menu that is a design iteration of the previous start menu integrated in the operating system.

For the past couple of days I have received notifications about Adobe Flash Player on sites that I visited in Chromium.

The message read Adobe Flash Player is required to display some elements on this page. It displayed a button next to it to install the missing plug-in and a link to support users if they ran into installation issues.

I checked chrome://plugins first to display all installed plugins and noticed that Flash was not installed.

The only options you had previously to upgrade from an older copy of Windows to a new one was to run the installer either while the installed operating system was running or by booting from an installation disc or Flash drive to initiate it.

Microsoft wants to make things more comfortable and has added an option to upgrade to Windows 10 using Windows Update.

Sandboxing finally comes to the Firefox web browser. After enabling a (currently) non-restrictive content sandbox in Firefox Nightly last month, the organization enabled the upcoming NPAPI plug-in sandbox in Aurora and Nightly versions of the browser as well.

These sandboxes are designed to limit the rights of tabs and plug-ins in the browser to harden and stabilize it.

One of the tools that you can use to visualize web dependencies is to run Mozilla's Lightbeam add-on for the Firefox web browser.

It visualizes all sites that you visit directly and also sites that are loaded during connection automatically by the server you are connecting to.

Are you following the development of windows 10? If so, you know that Microsoft mentioned two days ago that it would release a new preview build of the operating system next week.

In a surprising move, updates and downloads are already available. If you have installed Windows 10 already you can run a check for updates in the PC Settings to download and install the new build.

All installed programs and most modifications are carried over to the new build which means there is nothing to worry about in this regard.

You may have a hard time adjusting to other input types if you are used to work with a mouse and keyboard on desktop PCs.

Switching to touch input or a touch pad on a laptop may slow you down a lot because of it. While you will get better over time, you may prefer to use a mouse and keyboard even in situations where none are connected to the device you are using.

Remote Mouse is a free mobile application that turns your smartphone into a mouse and keyboard that you can use for that.

While not identical to a physical mouse and keyboard, it works surprisingly well.

If you want to manage user accounts on a local Windows system, you can use the control panel or the command line for that.

Both options are not really ideal when you need to perform bulk operations like adding multiple new users, disabling accounts or changing user privileges.

Microsoft revealed two days ago that it will integrate Project Spartan, a new web browser, in its upcoming Windows 10 operating system that is expected to ship later this year.

According to Microsoft, Spartan has been designed for Windows 10 with interoperability in mind. The main idea behind the project was to create a browser that would run well on all device types Windows 10 would run on.

Google pushed out an update today for its Chrome web browser that brings the version to the version of the web browser to 40 on the stable channel.

Most Chrome users should have received the update by now automatically as the browser is configured by default to update silently in the background whenever a new version is picked up it.