February 2016

Windows ships with built-in operations to generate a battery report, a detailed status report highlighting useful information about the battery and its usage history.

If you run the Windows operating system on a battery powered device, you are probably keeping an eye on the battery status regularly to make sure the system won't just shut down at one point in time due to a lack of power.

It is rather difficult to download ISO images for previous versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system from official sources.

Microsoft wants users to use the company's Media Creation Tool instead which downloads and creates installation media on a system running a supported operating system version.

When Windows 10 users want to change default apps on their system, they will likely stumble upon the "default apps" options menu in the operating system's Settings application.

There they find listed core types of applications, email, maps, music player, photo viewer, video player and web browser, that they can map apps or programs to.

Microsoft maps default programs by default, and it has happened in the past that updates reset some or even all file and protocol associations on the operating system.

Reports are coming in that the recent patch for Windows 10 with the identifier KB3135173 may reset default applications on systems it is installed on.

Opera Software has released version 12.18 of the classic Opera browser two years after the latest update has been made available.

When Opera Software switched from the company's own Presto rendering engine to Chromium/Blink, it was clear that this was the end of the classic Opera browser.

Users who still run the classic version of Opera may receive an update notification that version 12.18 of the browser is available.

Whenever a new operating system is released, regardless of whether it is a new version of Windows or a mobile operating system, it is almost a given that battery performance improvements are highlighted in press releases and during presentations.

The release of Windows 10 was not different in this regard, with Microsoft promising battery use improvements across the board.

Microsoft added new tools to the Windows 10 operating system that help you analyze, troubleshoot and improve battery use when using a device running the operating system.

Polarity is a dual-engine web browser that is powered by Chromium and the Internet Explorer Trident engine.

The browser, available for all versions of the Windows operating system starting with Windows XP and Android, ships with an impressive set of features of which several are usually only available as browser extensions.

Note: Polarity requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 or 4.5 on Windows depending on the version of Windows installed on the machine.

Mozilla will enable its multi-process architecture this year in the Firefox Stable web browser. The organization runs tests currently on Firefox's Beta channel, and provided that those don't result in major stopper bugs, will release the first version of Electrolysis (e10s) when Firefox Stable hits version 46.

This multi-process version won't ship with all features and improvements that Mozilla plans to add to it. There will be only one content process for instance initially with e10s enabled in the Firefox browser.

Three new mockups for the Firefox web browser reveal how the browser's New Tab Page, Share functionality and Activity Stream (browsing history and bookmarks) could look like in the future.

Mockups are design ideas that don't make it necessarily into the Firefox web browser in that form or at all.

Mozilla designers release mockups regularly, just recently one highlighting a combined Firefox address bar and search field.

VeraCrypt 1.17 has been released on February 13, 2016. The new version fixes several security-related issues, improves compatibility, and even includes optimizations.

VeraCrypt is without doubt the TrueCrypt-based encryption program that appears to be the most active project right now.

Its developers release new versions regularly that fix security and other issues in the client, and add new functionality to it.