What's New

When you delete huge folders in Windows, you will notice that the process takes quite a bit of time to complete.

I keep backup folders of Ghacks locally on a platter-based drive, and these folders come close to 30 Gigabytes in size with more than 140,000 files and 350 folders.

When I need to delete them again, it takes a long time if I run the delete operation in Windows Explorer. First thing that happens is that Windows runs calculations which in itself may take a very long time to complete.

Luminar is a popular photo editor for Apple Mac OS X devices. The company Macphun has released a beta version of Luminar for Windows that brings most features of the Mac software to Windows devices.

Luminar is offered as a beta version currently. You can only download it after you enter an email address on the developer website, and need to use the activation code that is sent to the email address to register the software.

Considering that the Mac version is commercial, it seems very likely that the Windows version will also be commercial and not free.

Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC is an error message that Windows 10 may throw during the update to a newer version of the operating system.

Microsoft moved away from the classic service pack / new version of Windows update scheme of the past to Windows as a Service with the company's Windows 10 operating system.

Windows as a Service pushes out feature updates frequently to Windows 10 systems that administrators and users need to install for continued support.

Microsoft and LinkedIn announced today the release of the new LinkedIn application for Microsoft's Windows 10 operating system.

The app, which will be rolled out gradually until the end of the month to the Windows 10 population is LinkedIn's first application for Windows 10.

The company announced earlier that it made the decision to retire the Windows Phone application.

Media Player Classic Home Cinema, or short MPC-HC, is a popular open source media player for Microsoft Windows devices.

The program is available as a 32-bit and 64-bit version for Windows, and may be installed or run as a portable program.

MPC-HC is a fork of the Media Player Classic application for Windows. The player interface looks similar to that of Windows Media Player 6.4, a legacy version of the built-in media player for Windows, but similarities between the two programs end there.

Texmaker 5.0, a new version of the crossplatform LaTeX editor for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, has been released on July 17, 2017.

The new version comes with a new interface, high DPI support for Texmaker on Windows and Linux, and other improvements.

Windows and Linux users should not confuse Texmaker, a LaTeX editor, with TextMaker, a word processor that is developed by SoftMaker and part of the company's Office suite. The programs are not related in any way.

Canvas Defender is a free add-on for Firefox and Chrome that manipulates the canvas fingerprint to protect against canvas fingerprinting.

Canvas Fingerprinting uses the HTML5 Canvas element. The Canvas element may be used to draw graphics on a web page, and it is supported by all major web browsers.

The fingerprinting makes use of the fact that the canvas output is often not identical when it is rendered in different browsers. This is not always the case, and that's why Canvas fingerprinting is often used alongside other tracking methods.

Royal RSS Reader is a free portable program for Windows that is a basic and compact program for reading RSS feeds on the desktop.

While RSS feeds are still practicably found on most sites on the Internet, RSS reading seems to have taken a backseat in the eyes of companies in favor or notification systems and messaging applications.

Still, if you want to read RSS feeds, you can do so in pretty much any browser directly, by using online services, apps, or desktop programs.

Linux, or GNU/Linux, is has grown in popularity exponentially over the course of the past ten years or so, and with that and the rise of users switching from Windows; there are a lot of questions that get asked.

This article, is simply a number of these questions, and the answers associated with them.

Feel free to post questions about Linux that you are curious about in the comment section below.

Fotowall 1.0 is a software program for Windows and Linux that you may use to create original pictures by using the creative tools it offers.

Jack Wallen reviewed an early version of the program back in 2010 for Linux, and focused in it on the creation of unique wallpapers.

uBlock Origin is a popular cross-browser content blocker that is seen by many as one of the most efficient extensions of its kind.

The browser extension is available for Firefox and Chromium based browsers, as well as Microsoft Edge. Basically, what that means is that you can install it in virtually any browser out there right now -- with the exception of Internet Explorer.

The most recent WhatsApp update for Android and iOS enables the sending of any file type to other users of the messaging service.

File attachments were limited to a selection of files up until now. This meant that you could not send any file type not supported officially to other users of WhatsApp.

This was a clear disadvantage in comparison to messaging services like Telegram or Skype which supported the sending of any file types for a long time.

The most recent update to WhatsApp introduces the functionality, but it may not be clear right away how it is used.

Microsoft Windows ships with a set of so-called optional features that users may enable or disable using the "turn Windows features on or off" control panel applet.

This works well for the most part, but requires that you open the Control Panel on the operating system unless you load the Features window directly by typing optionalfeatures in Start.

While that is sufficient most of the time, administrators may use PowerShell as well to manage optional features of the Windows operating system.

If you follow tech news or my site, you have probably stumbled upon the Firefox uses Google Analytics controversy by now.

Let me refresh your memory if you have not. A user of Firefox discovered that Mozilla Firefox connects to Google Analytics when users of the browser load the Get Add-ons page of about:addons.

That page displays a remote web page on Mozilla's website when loaded, and that's where the Google Analytics connection comes into play.

Pale Moon 27.4 has been released by the team responsible for the web browser, and is now available for direct download and automatic update.

The new version of the browser introduces new features and changes to it; existing users may notice that most of the media streaming issues that some experienced should be fixed in this release  for instance.

Since Pale Moon 27.4 fixes several security issues as well, it is highly recommended to update the browser to the latest version as soon as possible to address those.