This is more complicated than it seems, too. You can’t just use a single method, as you could have Windows PCs, Macs, Android phones, iPhones and iPads, game consoles, smart TVs, and set-top streaming boxes all connected to your home router. Worse yet, many of these devices — laptops, smartphones, and tablets — won’t only use data on your home network. So you can’t even rely on a data usage meter that shows how much data you’ve downloaded on your laptop, as some of that will have taken place outside of your home on a different Wi-Fi network.

Different operating systems do have different tools that can help. GlassWire is a free and polished network-monitoring tool that will track data usage on all versions of Windows. On Windows 10 and 8, you could also set a specific connection as a “metered” connection and Windows will track data usage for it. This will change how Windows and some applications use the connection, however.

That’s where PC Decrapifier comes in. This pint-size wonder program scans your PC, brings up a checklist of the bloatware installed on your machine, and helps you wipe ’em all away in one fell swoop. Yay! A secondary screen lists all of your programs if you want to nuke even more. Ignore it, or just be careful to avoid erasing something important.

Key features

• Restore on Reboot
• Reset to Baseline on PC Start Up or Hard Reset
• One-Click Instant Updates
• VMWare Support
• Protects the MBR
• Works below Windows
• Mini OS Access
• Restore from unbootable Windows

Read more about all its benefits – a truly great piece of software to keep your PC safe from viruses, malware, problems and user errors!

Follow this link to download the program and get started.

It was was founded by John T. Haller, the developer behind numerous portable applications including “Portable Firefox” which started the portable software trend. We’ve been making software portable since March 2004. Today, our team stands at over 100 developers, translators, application packagers, designers and release testers. Their goal is to centralize the knowledge and development of portable software efforts and build a single, open platform which any software or hardware developer can use.

Some of my personal favourites are:

• Notepad++ Portable – A full-featured text editor with syntax highlighting
• XAMPP – Apache, mySQL, PHP, phpMyAdmin, etc in one package
• Sudoku Portable – the wildly popular and addictive puzzle game
• FileZilla Portable – the full-featured FTP client
• WinSCP Portable – SFTP, FTP and SCP client (if you have Kaspersky blocking you)
• Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition – the award-winning web browser that’s safe and secure
• VLC Media Player Portable – An easy to use media player that plays many formats
• 7-Zip Portable – File archiver and compressor

A complete list is found in the Portable App Directory.

Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates. Internet Explorer 11 is the last version of Internet Explorer, and will continue to receive security updates, compatibility fixes, and technical support on Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.

What does this mean?

It means you should take action. After January 12, 2016, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or technical support for older versions of Internet Explorer. Security updates patch vulnerabilities that may be exploited by malware, helping to keep users and their data safer. Regular security updates help protect computers from malicious attacks, so upgrading and staying current is important.

Microsoft Edge appears to be a decent upgrade from Microsoft. However, I would strongly encourage those who haven’t already done so to swap IE with either Firefox, Chrome or Opera.

Happy (and secure) surfing in 2016!

The Mobile Media Converter is a free audio and video converter for converting between popular desktop audio and video formats like MP3, Windows Media Audio (wma), Ogg Vorbis Audio (ogg), Wave Audio (wav), MPEG video, AVI, Windows Media Video (wmv), Flash Video (flv), QuickTime Video (mov) and commonly used mobile devices/phones formats like AMR and 3GA audio (amr) and 3GP video. iPod/iPhone and PSP compatible MP4 video are supported. Moreover, you can remove and add new formats or devices through the internet.

An integrated YouTube downloader is available for direct downloading and converting to any of these formats. Popular sites such as Dailymotion, Photobucket videos, blip.tv, Soundcloud and Youku are supported too. You can trim your clips for ringtone creation or any other purpose and crop your videos for removing up/down black bars or other unwanted parts of the image. Additionally, embedded subtitles can be encoded onto the video for watching movies or shows with subtitles on devices that does not supports them. Finally, a built-in DVD ripper is available to transform your own DVDs to any of the supported formats.

The program has a very easy-to-use and simple GUI (Graphical User Interface) that helps even the most amateur user. Most of the times, the only data that you must enter is the input file(s) or just drag ‘n’ drop the input file(s)! The 3GP and AMR formats are used by mobile phones for MMS, video and sound recordings, etc. Our Mobile AMR converter and Mobile 3GP converter have been replaced by Mobile Media Converter.

For more information and to download visit www.miksoft.net/mobileMediaConverter.php

Ninite installers always install the latest versions of apps regardless of when they were created. This means that after you install some apps with Ninite you can keep the installer .exe around and run it again every now and then to keep those apps updated.

Ninite checks app versions before downloading and installing software. So if you already have the latest version Ninite will just keep moving down your list of apps.

How Ninite Works

Ninite tries to behave exactly like a technical friend you’ve asked to install a few apps for you. This means that Ninite installers, regardless of when or where they were created:

• Say “No” to toolbars or other junk
• Always install the latest version of an app
• Install the right 32-bit or 64-bit version for a PC
• Install apps in the PC’s language
• Skip apps that are already up-to-date
• Upgrade an app if it’s out of date

They’ve put a ton of effort into making sure Ninite just does the right thing and that’s the big reason why people like using it so much.

You can get started with your personal or pro version (multi-PC / multi-user) version here: www.ninite.com

The PC Decrapifier is here to help! It’s a free tool for you to use that helps remove programs, unnecessary startup items and icons that can slow down your PC. It takes you step by step, giving you recommendations on what to remove, many of which can be removed unattended.

Visit the developers website and download the tool!

Read more at preview.windows.com.

Download the XSL2SQL converter here, install and enjoy

A New UI Design
Create a consistent experience across mobile and the web with material design, the new Google-wide standard.
Learn about material

A New Runtime
Test your apps and get them ready for ART (Android Runtime), the default runtime in the next release.
Learn about ART

Enhanced Notifications
Get control over where notifications appear, how they look, and how they sync to non-handheld devices.
Learn about notifications

Increased Efficiency
Project Volta is our effort to make the platform energy efficient and to give you more control over resource usage.
Learn about Project Volta

There are numerous toolbars which is designed to be below the address bar of your browser and give you easier access to certain functions.

Most of them are harmless and are often installed along with other programs. Some may even have a hint of benefit to it, and if you do not like them, you can easily remove them by right clicking on the menu bar and uncheck the left of the pop-up menu that appears.

But there are toolbars that are installed without having requested it, and that is primarily designed to spy on your web activity, presenting pop-up advertising at all hours, and send you to sites you have not had intentions to visit.

To remove them

The small free program Toolbar Cleaner has proven to be one of the easiest ways to remove unwanted toolbars. All you have to do is:

1. Download the program from toolbarcleaner.com.

2. Run the program. It will detect any toolbars automatically.

3. Select the toolbars you want to remove and press the remove button. The rest goes hopefully by itself.

Not only toolbars

Toolbar Cleaner does not remove toolbars, but also unwanted apps in Chrome and called Browser Helper Objects in Internet Explorer, which in some cases can take complete control of your browser. The program works against Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, and is completely free.

Every machine needs tune-ups, and that includes your PC. Without regular cleaning and updates, your system performance suffers, slowed down by hefty files and unwanted software. Fortunately, many good AND free programs can do the system spring cleaning for you. Here’s a roundup of our favorites.

CCleaner

CCleaner is the world’s most popular tool for cleaning your PC. Keep your privacy safe online, and make your computer faster and more secure. Downloaded over 1 BILLION times!

Revo Uninstaller

Revo Uninstaller is an alternate uninstallation utility for Windows. What it lacks in speed it makes up for in completion. Revo not only removes programs via default uninstallation, but it also performs a scan deeper than the stock Windows remover to uncover any renegade file crumbs left behind.

Should I Remove It?

Sometimes you have no idea whether you should remove a program or not. Should I Remove It is a good resource for determining which programs to remove, especially if you’re confused about “extra” bundles in the form of adware toolbars.

Autoruns

Autoruns is a comprehensive startup tool that lets you see every program, driver, extension, and so on that starts prior to booting your desktop environment. Use Autoruns to cut boot time, but be careful not to disable any system-critical start-ups. We recommend this app for those with a bit more experience.

3.8 brings together several of the features as plugins projects and while this isn’t our first rodeo, expect this to be more beta than usual. The headline things to test out in this release are:

• The new admin design, especially the responsive aspect of it. Try it out on different devices and browsers, see how it goes, especially the more complex pages like widgets or seldom-looked-at-places like Press This. Color schemes, which you can change on your profile, have also been spruced up.
• The dashboard homepage has been refreshed, poke and prod it.
• Choosing themes under Appearance is completely different, try to break it however possible.
• There’s a new default theme, Twenty Fourteen.
• Over 250 issues closed already.

Given how many things in the admin have changed it’s extra super duper important to test as many plugins and themes with admin pages against the new stuff. Also if you’re a developer consider how you can make your admin interface fit the MP6 aesthetic better.

As always, if you think you’ve found a bug, you can post to the Alpha/Beta area in the support forums. Or, if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on the WordPress Trac. There, you can also find a list of known bugs and everything we’ve fixed so far.

Download WordPress 3.8 Beta 1 (zip) or use the WordPress Beta Tester plugin (you’ll want “bleeding edge nightlies”).

As it turns out, email clients that use the Word 2007 rendering engine (ie. Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010) have inherited the Word 2007 image height limit of 18 inches.

This is nice to know if you’re working in Word, but how about when you’re designing for email? We ran a test and found out that Outlook ‘07 and Outlook ‘10 truncate the upper portion of all images higher than 1728px from the top-down. So, if your image is 250px longer than the 1728px limit, 250px will get lopped off the top. Take a look at the screenshots below to see this in action:

Outlook 2003 (and all other major email clients)

Outlook 2007 & Outlook 2010

You may be wondering, “Who adds images larger than 1728px high to their emails?” Well, sometimes it happens (images says more than a 1000 words and so on)… So before you warm up your scrollbar, don’t forget that Outlook has its limits.