What's New

Windows Update works for the most part pretty reliable. It is an automated system of Microsoft's Windows operating system that handles the downloading and installing of updates for the operating system.

At best, it is a silent service that runs in the background; it may ask you to restart the PC every now and then though as that is still required for many updates.

When you run into issues though with updates, you may spend hours or even days figuring out what is going wrong.

Winaero Tweaker 0.9 is the most recent version of the comprehensive tweaking software for Microsoft's Windows operating system.

We reviewed Winaero Tweaker for the first time back in 2015 when its initial public version was released. It was a bit light on content back then, but Sergey Tkachenko, the developer of the program, pushed out updates ever since that first release that improved the program manifold.

Firefox 57 was released this week, and with it came changes to the browser's New Tab Page, and a new library icon in the browser's main toolbar.

Mozilla added a highlights section to the New Tab Page and the library icon menu of Firefox. While highlights is not the dominant change in Firefox 57, far from it, it is a highly visible change.

Highlights lists web pages that you have visited in the past. Mozilla describes it in the following way: "find your way back to interesting things you've recently visited or bookmarked".

Nvidia released a new version of the company's driver for graphics card; the new Nvidia Geforce driver 388.31 WHQL brings Game Ready profiles for Star Wars Battlefront 2, some fixes, but it also introduces some new issues.

As always when it comes to new drivers for Nvidia hardware, make sure you only install the part of the Nvidia driver that you require. Once done, remove any bits of Telemetry on the system as well.

Users of Mozilla Firefox's Send file sharing service and Firefox experiment may protect files with passwords in the latest iteration of the service.

The organization launched Firefox Send back in July of 2011 as one of three new Test Pilot experiments (the other two were Voice and Fill Notes).

CompuServe was the first major online service provider in the United States before AOL took over the company's position. AOL acquired CompuServe eventually, and shut down most of the other company's operations.

CompuServe stopped providing Internet Provider Services for instance, and popular services such as OurWorld Web pages were taken offline as a consequence.

The CompuServe forums on the other hand remained a thing, albeit not as popular as the forums during the golden age of the service.

Mozilla released a major new version of the organization's Firefox web browser on November 14, 2017. The new version of Firefox promises better performance and stability, came with a theme refresh, and dropped the legacy add-on system on top of all that.

Firefox Pioneer is a feature of SHIELD, a system that Mozilla implemented in Firefox to test new features and changes on a subset of Firefox users.

Firefox Pioneer is an opt-in feature of SHIELD. It is offered as a browser extension for the Firefox browser that users need to install.

Microsoft released security updates for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, and other company products on the November 2017 Patch Day.

This guide provides end users and system administrators with information on all security and non-security updates, and security advisories that Microsoft released since the October 2017 Patch Day.

It offers an Excel spreadsheet that lists all security updates released for Microsoft products, information on operating system distribution, download information, and other information related to the updates.

SDelete is a free command line utility by Microsoft's Sysinternals team that you may use to delete files and free disk space securely.

While you can delete any file on a hard drive connected to a machine running Windows using Explorer, the command line or other means, deleting files this way won't remove the data immediately from the drive.

Without going into too many details, what happens is that Windows removes reference to the data on the hard drive, and makes the space the file occupies on the hard drive available again for write operations.

Mozilla Firefox 57 will be released today; we have reviewed the new version of the web browser yesterday already. The new version comes with light and shadow; light, because it is faster and more responsive across the board, and shadow, because it dropped the old add-on system which Mozilla now calls legacy extensions.

Mozilla plans to release Firefox 57.0 to the stable channel on November 14, 2017. The new version of the web browser is a major release as it introduces big changes to the browser's performance, interface, and add-on compatibility.

In short: the new version of Firefox is a lot faster than previous versions, replaces the Australis interface introduced in Firefox 29 with the new Photon interface, and drops support for the legacy add-on system to focus on WebExtensions.

Custom CSS for Fx is a collection of CSS styles for Firefox 57 and newer by the author of the popular Firefox add-on Classic Theme Restorer.

Firefox 57 won't support Classic Theme Restorer or any other interface changing extensions or themes anymore because of the switch to a WebExtensions exclusive system. The new WebExtensions system prevents changes to the browser's user interface by not providing APIs to extensions developers.

DMEX is a free program for Microsoft Windows operating systems that adds a large number of new features and improvements to Windows Explorer.

The application is a rewrite of DMEXMenu and DMEXBar which added similar functionality to Explorer. We reviewed DMEXBar back in 2006, so check this out if you want to know more about it.

DMEX needs to be installed before it can be used, and you may disable some of the functionality the program offers during installation if you don't need it.

Progate is a -- currently free- web service that teaches you various programming, scripting and other computer related skills.

The service was established in 2014 in Tokyo, Japan, and has been made available in English in October 2017.

You need to sign up for an account to start using the service, but the email that you enter is not verified right now, and there are not any costs as well.