What's New

Norwegian company Opera Software has released a new developer version of its Opera browser for the desktop. While previous updates to Opera were most of the time rather uneventful in terms of new feature support, this one is packed with additions including one that users requested for a long time.

Probably the biggest feature that Opera Software added to Opera Dev 24.0.1555.0 is a bookmarks manager. While it is not enabled yet by default, it is easy enough to do.

Programs that provide you with options to take screenshots, create animated gifs or record videos are not available in abundance on Windows.

While you get lots of tools that allow you to take screenshots, and some that can create screencasts, only a few can create all three types.

And if you leave out commercial programs, you end up with even fewer options.

Welcome to the overview of Microsoft's Patch Tuesday for July 2014. It lists all information about this month's security and non-security updates for Microsoft operating systems and other company products.

A total of six bulletins are released this month that fix 29 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Server Software.

While I cannot really remember when I have changed default cursors in Windows the last time, I know some users who like to use custom cursors for a variety of reasons.

Some like to install cursors that match a custom theme that they have installed on their system or even install a theme that ships with cursors, while others prefer cursors that may offer better visibility.

Distributing adware to computer users is a lucrative business. It is that lucrative that software companies as well as download portals have started to integrate services such as Open Candy into their installers to earn extra money.

When Cnet's Download.com started to offer custom download managers with adware offers, it was heavily criticized for it by part of the Internet community.

The Chromium web browser and browsers based on it such as Google Chrome are not very flexible when it comes to placing extension icons in the interface.

Extension icons are always displayed in the main toolbar of the web browser. You can right-click those icons to hide them, or use drag and drop to change the position of icons on the toolbar.

What you cannot do is move them to another toolbar, or create a folder of sorts and move some of them inside.

If you are a Firefox user you probably know that you can pin tabs in the browser to make them sort-of permanent in it. A pinned tab is displayed on the left side of the tab bar, and instead of displaying the page title, it is only displayed with the site's favicon.

Pinned tabs cannot be closed using standard Firefox tab closing methods such as middle-clicking or clicking on the close button in the tab bar of the browser.

Quick Crypt looks on first glance just like many of the other file encryption tools for Windows. You can use it to encrypt files using 256-bit AES encryption, and also decrypt those files again at a later point in time.

It does however make available features that are not that common or available at all in other programs of its kind including an option to set expiration dates for encrypted files.

Note: Quick Crypt requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.5.

My main hard drive is a 120 Gigabyte Solid State Drive  -- Samsung 840 EVO -- which is sufficient for what I do on the computer. I do have a 3 Terabyte drive connected as well for extra storage.

The Solid State Drive usually has about 15 to 20 Gigabyte of free storage space, while the rest is occupied by Windows, applications, and user data generated by applications.

When I look at the space distribution on that drive, Windows is taking up about a third of the space of it followed by the users folder with 24% and the program files folder with roughly 9%.