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March 2015

Smart Defrag 4 launches with Game Defrag options

File defragmentation can slow down a computer system when it loads contents from a connected storage device.

This depends largely on the drive used to store data though. If you run Solid State Drives, fragmentation is usually less of an issue than on a traditional platter-based hard drive.

While Windows defragments Solid State Drives on Windows 8 and newer devices occasionally on purpose, platter-based drives benefit the most from defragmentation.

Microsoft Security Bulletins For March 2015

Welcome to the March 2015 Microsoft Patch Day overview. The guide provides you with information about all security bulletins that the company released this month.

Besides information about each bulletin and links to Microsoft support pages, you find information about affected products as well in this guide.

The number of bulletins that apply to each Microsoft operating system and software product are provided.

Below that you find the list of security advisories that Microsoft released since February and the list of non-security updates.

AllDup is a powerful duplicate file finder for Windows

Depending on how you use your computer and download and transfer files, you may end up with a large collection of files on it.

If you prefer to download in bulk for instance, then you may end up with duplicate files. The same is true if you have a large collection of files, for instance music or pictures, then it may be difficult to keep an overview of what you have and what you still want which may result in duplicate downloads as well.

Latest Vivaldi browser snapshot lets you turn off Google Safe Browsing

Vivaldi is pumping out new browser snapshots like crazy and they all seem to ship with at least one new feature or improvement of interest.

The most recent snapshot released a couple hours ago introduces an option to turn of Google Safe Browsing in the web browser.

Vivaldi uses Safe Browsing to determine whether a website you are visiting is considered malicious. This includes sites that attack you with drive by downloads but also phishing sites that you may have visited inadvertently.

WiFi Basics Part 1: Frequencies and Channels

In 1947, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a UN agency, designated certain bands of the RF spectrum as ISM. The idea was to have an international standard of frequencies that were reserved for Industrial, Scientific, and Medical equipment. Ironically, telecommunications was not the original purpose.

Before we discuss any particulars, I just want to note that this article will be primarily based on the US regulatory domain. Different regulatory domains have specific requirements regarding transmitted frequencies and power settings.

Should Mozilla worry about Firefox’s user share?

Every month tech journalists head over to the few sites on the Internet that collect user share data such as Net Market Share or StatCounter to report on the recent month's data.

While the data provided sometimes make good headlines, it is highly problematic for a number of reasons.

If you compare statistics between services you will for instance notice huge discrepancies.

Verify your music collection with AudioTester

If you have a considerable large collection of music and audio files on your computer or a storage device, you may at times want to verify it to make sure it is free of any issues.

It is advisable to verify new music files before you add it to your collection.

Files may become corrupt for example during transfers to a new location or download from the Internet, or tags may have been set improperly, for instance after running an automatic tagging program on your whole collection or a subset of it.

QuickMon is a powerful Windows monitoring tool

QuickMon is a powerful monitoring and alerting software for Windows that you can use to monitor specific local or remote events and receive alerts about them.

The program is not the easiest to work with as you need to understand what monitor packs, agents and collectors do before you can get started using it.

Note: QuickMon requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 (client or full).

The presets the program ships with help get a better understanding as you can set them up with just a couple of clicks.

Terminate multiple programs from the command line with Taskkill

Not all program termination options work all the time. If a program is not responding, you may not be able to use the window close button to terminate it. The same may be true for killing the process in the Windows Task Manager.

Taskkill is a versatile command line tool that you can use for these purposes. Among the many features that it supports is an option to close programs forcefully and to terminate multiple programs in a single operation.