January 2018

The release of Linux Mint 18.3 in November 2017 put the development focus of the team on Linux Mint 19, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution.

Linux Mint 19 is the first significant release of the operating system since June 2016 when Linux Mint 17, codename Sarah, was released by the team.

Fakespot is a free online service that helps you uncover fake reviews on Amazon, Yelp, and Tripadvisor by analyzing reviews and grading them.

Most shopping, travel and business listing sites support user reviews. Reviews are designed to assist Internet users in making decisions. Should you eat in restaurant A or B, or buy that motherboard or another one.

Microsoft released updates for Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 yesterday on the January 2018 Office non-security Patch Day.

Microsoft reserves the first Tuesday of the month for the release of non-security patches for Microsoft Office. The second Tuesday of a month brings security patches for Office, Windows, and other Microsoft products.

The company released updates for Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 only. Patches were not released for Office 2010 or 2007.

Ever since Microsoft released Windows 10, users and administrators had options to upgrade Windows 7 or Windows 8 systems to Windows 10 for free.

Microsoft lost a lot of trust in the beginning with its Get Windows 10 campaign as it pushed harder and harder until the whole campaign backfired.

You may get the error message api-ms-win-core-libraryloader-l1-1-1.dll is missing when you try to upgrade a PC running Windows 7 to Windows 10.

The error is not limited to the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and the Windows10UpgraderApp.exe. Windows 7 users ran into the error when they tried to run other programs on Windows 7 as well, but the bulk of issues is caused by Microsoft’s upgrade tool.

If you visit Yahoo Search right now from a location in the United States, the chance is high that you get more ads on the search results page than organic results.

It is quite easy to set up virtual machines using VirtualBox and other virtualization programs. You configure a few parameters such as disk size or memory, select an ISO image of an operating system, and wait for the program to create the virtual machine and install the operating system on it.

Virtual machines are useful for many different tasks. You can use them to test updates or new software programs, to browse the Internet, and to chain VPN connections.

Visual C++ Installer / Uninstaller is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices to install or uninstall Visual C++ runtimes in one swift operation.

We talked about Visual C++ Redistributables before here on Ghacks and how you may get an ever-increasing number of them installed on your Windows PC over time.

Grammarly is an online spell and grammar checker for the English language. It is available as a free and limited version and a premium version.

I always wanted to try the premium version of Grammarly but found it to be quite an expensive affair. Grammarly Premium is available as a subscription service; the lowest price, if you pay annually, is $11.66 right now. That's $139.95 for spell and grammar checking.

Depending on where you live, setting up a wireless network may be as easy as plugging in the router and connecting your devices to the network. If you are unlucky, however, you may run into performance issues right away with the default settings.

Maybe reception works fine in one room but not another, or it is not fine at all once you move a couple of steps away from the router.