December 2015

PatchCleaner is a free program for the Windows operating system that can free up huge amounts of disk space by cleaning up the Windows Installer Directory.

The Microsoft Windows operating system stores installer and patch files in a hidden directory on the Windows partition.

The directory c:\Windows\Installer is a protected system folder that becomes only visible if you disable the "hide protected operating system files (Recommended)" option in the Folder options.

Mozilla announced last month that it wants to get rid of Thunderbird, the desktop email client that shares code with Firefox.

The details were a bit sketchy at the time, but the gist was that Mozilla wants to take away the burden from its engineers and free Thunderbird engineers from having to spent time adjusting the email client based on changes made to Firefox's core.

Microsoft's Get Windows 10 application is deployed on computer systems running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to advertise and push the new operating system as a free upgrade on those devices. It appears, that Microsoft has modified the app leaving the crucial option to decline the update behind in the dust.

A screenshot posted by PC World's Brad Chacos on Twitter highlights the new Get Windows 10 prompt.

The prompt displays whether the underlying computer is compatible, and advertises the advantages of the Windows 10 operating system.

Microsoft announced back in November 2015 that it would downgrade storage on its cloud hosting service OneDrive for nearly any customer of the service.

Paying customers, those subscribed to Office 365 would be limited to 1 Terabyte of storage and no longer be able to take advantage of the unlimited storage offer the company made available in the same yaer.

Back in the early days of the Internet, there was just a single cache for HTML files and static elements such as images but with the rise of HTML5 and modern web applications came new cache formats that modern web browsers use.

While it may make sense to use different locations for the cache from a developer point of view, it makes things difficult for privacy-conscious and technology-interested users who want to keep an eye on cache content and size.

AVG released the Android App Performance & Trends Report for Q3 2015 recently highlighting applications that impact the user experience on the operating system the most.

If your Android device is leaking battery juice like crazy, not performing as well anymore as it once did, or constantly download data to the device, then you may want to investigate the issue especially if things were better when you first got it.

AV Vulnerability Checker is a free program for Windows that determines whether antivirus software installed on the computer is vulnerable to exploitable constant Read-Write-Execute (RWX) addresses.

Vulnerabilities are bad, regardless whether they are found in the operating system or programs running on it. One of the worst kind affects security software, programs that are designed to protect the system from attacks.

Google changed the way multi-language spell checking works in Chrome 47. The company removed the option to switch between different spell checking languages in text input fields to enable simultaneous spell checking in multiple languages instead.

Microsoft announced earlier this year that it would end support for the Microsoft .Net Framework 4, 4.5 and 4.5.1 on January 12, 2016. End of support means that these .Net versions won't receive security updates, technical support or hotfixes anymore.

The discontinuation of support won't affect the following versions of the framework: 3.5, 4.5.2, 4.6 and 4.6.1.

Microsoft Edge is a bare-bones web browser that the company shipped with its Windows 10 operating system, and it seems that previous versions of Windows won't be supported by Edge.

Microsoft removed support for legacy features such as ActiveX or Browser Helper Objects in Edge, and built it around web standards.

Edge performs better than Internet Explorer in nearly any benchmark you throw at it, and while that is a step in the right direction, its poor set of features and settings give users less control over the browser.