January 2017

Microsoft is working on the next feature update for Windows 10 called the Creators Update.

The new version of Windows 10 will be made available in April 2017 according to latest projections, and it will introduce a series of new features and changes to the operating system.

The built-in Share functionality of Windows 10 will be updated in the Creators Update as well. We talked about this when the first screenshots of the new user interface leaked.

The core change is that the Share user interface will open up in the center of the screen instead of the sidebar.

ClickMonitorDCC is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices that enables you to control a monitor's brightness, contrast and volume using mouse and keyboard.

Most computer monitors come with buttons and options to change parameters such as the display brightness or contrast. While that is the case, it is usually not that comfortable to change the values using the built-in functionality.

On some device types, laptops for instance, you may not have these options at all, or only in basic form.

Kaspersky System Checker is a free portable program by Russian security company Kaspersky that runs diagnostics on your PC.

The program has been designed to scan the PC for issues, but not to correct them. Kaspersky System Checker is however not an advertisement product that tries to sell you one of Kaspersky's commercial products.

Some companies produce scanners that have only one purpose: to sell you their commercial products. Norton Security Scan is such a product. It is a free scanner that cannot remove a thing when it detects something.

So if you have been getting nothing but blank results when running searches on Windows 10, you are not alone in this.

Reports about search stopping to work completely on Windows 10 devices started to fill the usual chat rooms with frustrated and angry users of the operating system.

The following guide provides you with information on configuring Microsoft Edge so that the browser's address bar is displayed all the time.

If you are using Microsoft Edge, or have used it in the past, you may have noticed that the browser's address bar is not displayed on certain pages.

This is the case for the browser's startpage, but also on the new tab page. Microsoft made the decision to merge it with the search field that it displays on these pages.

If you encrypt the hard drive of a computer running Windows 7, and then on the same computer running Windows 10, you will notice that the encryption process is faster on Windows 7.

Bitlocker is a built-in disk encryption program that you can use to encrypt data so that it cannot be accessed by third-parties. If you don't encrypt your hard drive, anyone can access the data on it even if the PC is not on.

With Bitlocker and other encryption software, this is prevented.

Reasons why Bitlocker is slower on Windows 10

Silverdog is a free browser extension for Google Chrome -- it should work in other Chromium-based browsers as well, and maybe even Firefox (not tested) -- that acts as an ultrasound firewall in the browser.

In Talking Behind Your Back, security researchers Vasilios Mavroudis and Federico Maggi describe attacks and countermeasures of ultrasonic cross-device tracking.

Downloads Overwrite Already Existing Files is an extension for the Google Chrome web browser that changes Chrome's handling of duplicate file downloads.

Whenever you download a file in Chrome, it is saved automatically to the default download folder.  While you can change the behavior in the Chrome settings, most Chrome users have not done so probably.

Most modern web browsers support comfortable features like auto-filling forms on sites using data that you have entered in the past.

Instead of having to enter your name, email address or street address whenever you sign up for a new account for instance, you'd fill out the data once only and have the browser fill out the fields for you any time they are requested afterwards.

Opera Software has released the first Developer version of the upcoming Opera 44 web browser to the public today.

The new development version, a version that is made available for testing purposes mainly, gives a glimpse of new features that will find their way into Opera 44 Stable.