What's New

File downloads are just a matter of clicking on a link and waiting for the download to finish in most cases. There are however situations where downloads are interrupted so that you end up with a broken file on your system that you cannot do anything with.

Several users who tried to download the excellent Tech Toolkit I reviewed yesterday for example have reported that downloads of the 1.6 Gigabyte archive would fail whenever they tried to download it.

When you enter queries into Firefox's address bar, you will receive results depending on what you have entered. If you enter an url for instance, Firefox attempts to load the address in the current tab.

Things are not as clear when you type in a single-word query, queries with periods or arithmetic expressions. If you take a query with a period for example, Firefox attempts to load it as if it were a url, even if it is not.

The query 8675309 returns an unable to connect error message and the query 867-5309 a search results page after some time.

I tend to get more calls and emails asking for help with computer related problems in Summer than in any other season.

The core reason for that -- it is not scientific but purely based on my experience -- is that the rise in environmental temperature causes PCs to overheat more frequently.

If a PC component overheats, the processor or video card for example, it may shut down itself automatically, or hang or crash instead right away.

Whenever I visit a family member or friend who asked me to fix a computer issue, I take a USB flash drive with me containing dozens of tools to analyze and repair computer issues.

GEGeek Tech Toolkit is a free collection of more than 300 portable freeware tools that serve a similar purpose. The collection has a size of 1.6 Gigabyte compressed and about 3 Gigabyte uncompressed on the system.

Firefox users have access to a selection of VPN add-ons for the browser which they can install from Mozilla's official add-ons repository.

Whenever a connection to a virtual private network is established, it will be used as the entry point to the Internet. Websites and services that users connect to will reveal the IP address of the VPN server and not the local one.

That's great for a number of purposes. Since you connect to a server in a specific location, you can access contents that are restricted to that location.

The makers of the popular BitTorrent client Vuze, formerly known as Azureus, have released a first public beta version of a new lightweight client they call Vuze Leap.

Why another torrent client? The company addresses that question in a blog post that it published to announce the beta.

Development focus was to create a lightweight modern client that is simple to use but offers all the privacy and security features users would expect from such a client.

I'm somewhat of a fanatic when it comes to optimizing sleep. While I have not convinced myself yet to try and reduce it drastically, I have tried different things to make it better and improve my overall health in the process.

I don't sleep well most of the time which I attribute to a couple of things including working long-hours in front of a computer monitor and being rather noise sensitive.

I hear things that others don't hear or don't mind hearing which is one of the things that is keeping me awake at night.

Virtual Private Networks, short VPN, serve a variety of purposes. From providing unfiltered access to contents on the Internet over privacy and security benefits to bypassing country-locks of select services.

Regardless of for what it is used for, it works always in the same way. A secure connection is created from the local computer system to a remote server that is maintained by the VPN company. From there, connections to the Internet are established.

If you check a folder's properties on Windows, values for the data's size and the data's size on disk are displayed to you.

These values may differ slightly or a lot, depending on the file system used and the type of files stored on the drive.

It can happen that you see a Gigabyte or more of a difference between the two values.

You can test this by right-clicking any folder or drive letter in Windows Explorer and selecting the properties option from the context menu.