What's New

Video card driver packages ship with a truckload of programs and drivers of which only some are required to operate the card at maximum performance.

When it comes to Nvidia cards, it is recommended to update drivers regularly as they may improve the performance or stability of the video card.

Welcome to the September 2014 Microsoft update overview. It provides you with information about all security and non-security updates that Microsoft has released since August's patch day.

Microsoft released a total of four security bulletins this month fixing a total of 42 vulnerabilities in Microsoft Windows, Microsoft .NET Framework, Internet Explorer and Microsoft Lync Server.

One of the bulletins has the highest security rating critical while the remaining three the second highest rating of important.

Most smartphones come with software and drivers that you can install on your computer to allow connections between devices. These programs may allow you to browse folders and files on the smartphone or run important tasks such as backup jobs or data synchronization.

Some of these programs are rather outdated and are often fairly large when compared to third-party solutions. In addition to that, they are often limited to a specific mobile operating system and don't support others.

A cookie is a little snippet of data that websites can save to systems of users connecting to them. While web browsers ship with options to block cookies by default or prompt users for action, the default way of handling cookies is to allow them to be saved automatically.

Cookies are not necessarily bad as they can be used for a variety of legitimate purposes such as saving the logged in state of a user or site preferences without account.

I use keyboard shortcuts whenever possible in Firefox, Windows, and other programs as it is usually faster than clicking on buttons in the interface or using menus that are provided by the applications.

So, instead of clicking on the new tab button or using the menu for that, I press Ctrl-t as it is faster. I do use keyboard and mouse shortcuts as well, for instance Ctrl and the mouse wheel to zoom in and out instead of Ctrl+ or Ctrl-.

Whenever a popular Internet website announces changes, chance is high that a vocal part of its userbase, often not the majority,  criticizes some or even all of the changes.

Today MSN announced that it will launch a new version of its homepage in the near future inviting all users of it to take it for a test ride before the official switch is being made.

A prompt is displayed to visitors of the US MSN website that the new MSN is coming and that they can preview the new version right at that time with a click on the link.

If you are using Google Chrome's -- or any Chromium-based browser actually -- bookmarks toolbar you may have noticed that it does not provide you with many options.

You can add folders and pages to it and that is about it. While that may be sufficient for many users of the browser, others may say that lumping every bookmark together this way hurts the overview and makes it difficult to pick the right one.

If you look at other browsers, Firefox for example, you see that the browser supports separators as well which Chrome does not support out of the box.

Web browsers can use a lot of memory on a computer system. Once you start opening additional websites in tabs you will notice that memory usage is going up.

Firefox does a better job at that as Chrome at the time of writing but both can easily go up to 1 Gigabyte of memory usage and more.

High memory usage may not be an issue if the system you are working on has plenty of it. If it has 4, 8, 16 or even more Gigabytes of RAM, then you may never run into any memory related issues.

I bought a Chromecast some time ago just to see how it works and how useful it can be. I don't really watch a lot of TV but do watch Internet streams from time to time. While I do not have any issues watching it on the computer screen, I sometimes prefer to watch it on the larger TV screen instead, especially if I'm not the only one watching.

Mozilla has integrated Chromecast and Roku support to Firefox for Android. To be precise, the feature is enabled in the Nightly and Beta version of the mobile browser right now.

I'm currently researching video game listings on eBay for a new project that I'm writing a project plan for right now. The searches that I run are targeted and use several of the filters that the site makes available.

I may filter results by platform for instance or change the sorting order of the results to only display buy it now offers or items sorted by recency.

These filters are not saved by the site automatically so that you have to reapply them every time you want to run the same search again.

Depending on how you use your Windows PC and where videos that you want to play on it come from, you may have no troubles doing so or notice that some video or audio files won't play correctly on your system.

You may see a black screen when you load a video in your favorite media player, have no audio while the video plays fine, or notice other issues such as slow playback or files that cannot be played at all.

If you spend time on Twitter regularly, you may know that tweets by users that you don't follow may appear in your timeline.

This is the case when a message gets retweeted by a user that you follow and also when it is promoted (read commercial).

One of the options that you have to cope with this, other than to unfollow users who retweet messages that you don't want in your timeline, is to mute specific users on Twitter.

Direct connections between users are used by the Bittorrent protocol by default. This means that whenever you load a torrent in a client like uTorrent, seeders and users downloading the torrent as well connect to your device directly to transfer data.

Once you start to receive data your device is being used to deliver these parts to other users who download the torrent as well.

Microsoft introduced a sidebar for gadgets in the Windows Vista operating system, removed the sidebar restriction from it with the release of Windows 7, and pulled the whole thing with the release of Windows 8.

Windows users who want to display gadgets, or widgets as they are called this as well, need to use third-party solutions to do so.

One of the first that gets mentioned usually is Rainmeter, an excellent program offering many customization options.

Most web browsers ship with one or multiple dictionary files that are used to indicate spelling errors. These errors are usually indicated by a red line underneath the word and a right-click on it displays spelling suggestions and options such as adding a word to the dictionary to avoid future issues.

These dictionaries don't support automatic correction of words on the other hand which some users may prefer since it can save time.

If you misspell a word over and over, you may prefer auto correction to speed things up.