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June 2018

Turn local OneDrive files to on-demand files automatically

Microsoft plans to launch a new OneDrive storage feature in the next feature update for Windows 10, out September/October 2018, that turns local OneDrive files to on-demand files automatically when the files are not accessed for a set period of time.

The company launched OneDrive's files on-demand feature just last year; it is the classic placeholder feature that displays all files hosted on OneDrive locally even if the files are not available locally.

IOBit Uninstaller 8 comes with Bundleware monitoring

IOBit Uninstaller 8, the latest version of IOBits installation monitoring and software uninstallation program for Windows, comes with new bundleware monitoring capabilities among other new features.

The default option to remove installed software from Windows machines is pretty basic even though you may improve it. Some of the shortcomings are that you are limited to removing individual programs (no batch uninstallation), and that leftovers are not removed from the system.

Search the Windows Group Policy and look up Registry keys

NIT-GPOSearch is a free software program for Microsoft Windows devices that you may use to search the Group Policy to find policies quickly.

Professional versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system come with options to manage devices using the Group Policy. The program gives administrators some control over settings and features, and while it does not provide 100% control over them all, it is used widely especially by organizations and companies to limit and manage certain operating system features.

Grab an offline copy of Microsoft Windows Live Essentials

Microsoft released the last version of Microsoft Windows Live Essentials, or Windows Essentials, back in the year 2012. While that is a long time ago, it is the case that some included programs are still useful and that first-party alternatives may not really be available.

Microsoft ended support for Windows Essentials 2012 in 2017 and removed all downloads of Windows Essentials and individual programs from its web properties.

Windows Live Essentials included several programs, most notably Movie Maker, Photo Gallery, Mail, Messenger, Writer, and SkyDrive (OneDrive).

Google working on Customize Background option in Chrome

Google Chrome engineers are working on a new customization feature that may introduce options to Chrome to set custom background images in the browser.

The feature is hidden behind a flag currently in Chrome Canary and anything but stable at this point in time. Still, it may make its way into Chrome Stable at one point in time so that it warrants a closer look.

Map or disable mouse buttons 4 and 5 on Windows

Mouse Manager is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices that gives you full control over the functionality of the mouse buttons 4 and 5.

Many computer mice have more than three buttons. While you can still buy a mouse with two or three buttons only, you may also buy mice with five or more buttons as well or other crazy designs.

Especially gaming mice tend to come with a lot of buttons that you can map all kinds of in-game actions to.

Add WebP support to Microsoft Edge

Microsoft published a new application for Windows 10 that adds support for Google's WebP media format to Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge.

WebP is an image format developed by Google that supports lossy and lossless compression. Google announced the format in September 2010 and integrated support for the WebP format in the company's Chrome browser.

Google claimed that WebP offers size reductions when compared to popular formats such as PNG that do not affect the quality of the image.