Category: Windows 7

Internet Explorer 11 is being delivered through Automatic Updates in Windows 7. But if you do not want to update to Internet Explorer 11, then you can block the Internet Explorer 11 from being installed in Windows 7. This is done through a blocker toolkit available from the Microsoft. After you install this block kit, Internet Explorer 11 would be blocked in the Automatic Updates of Windows 7.

Here is the dilemma that I had to face a few months ago – my digital camera captures pictures only in the 16:9 aspect ratio, but my color printer prints photos only on a 4×6 inches glossy page. The photographs, that my printer was printing out, had white space left-out unprinted on sides because of the unmatched aspect ratio. Then I discovered JPEGCrops – a freeware program that can crop your JPEG images losslessly (without losing any fine details) to fit on a certain aspect ratio.

The disk cleanup utility in the latest version of Windows (Windows 8) comes with a feature to clean the installed Windows updates. This feature can clean hundreds of megabytes of the Windows updates downloaded over many months or years. If you are a Windows 7 user and are feeling left out, then you can install this feature as an add-on in the disk cleanup utility for Windows 7.

Adobe Flash Player is set to automatically update itself in Windows, which is a good thing. By default, it schedules itself to check for latest updates on the Adobe server every hour of the day in the background. Personally, I find this an overkill to continuously keep querying Adobe servers. After all, they release updates only once in a month. If you are like me and want to reduce the number of times Adobe Flash Player checks for updates, then you can follow these instructions.

Windows operating system and some other popular software regularly checks for updates from their respective servers. But other third party software stay un-updated for a long time. Now you can use the free Soft4Boost Update Checker software to automatically check the latest updates for all the installed software on your PC.

These days 3D images and movies are a craze. Every other movie is available in 3D vision that has to be watched with the special red-blue glasses. Newer digital cameras are coming with ability to capture pictures in 3D. But if you do not have a 3D camera, then you can use the free Z-Anaglyph program to convert two of your 2D pictures into one 3D picture.

After a few months of regular use, the free hard disk space seems to evaporate in thin air. We find ourselves scratching our head and wondering where all the hard disk space has gone. Now you no longer have to fumble in the darkness, the freeware Scanner can help you find out which folders on your hard disk are taking up a large portion of the hard disk space.

When you are using your computer for work in office or you are setting it up for your kids, then you may want to restrict the Internet access only to a few appropriate websites and block the rest of them. This way your office employees or kids would be able to access one or two websites and nothing else. It can be done very easily in Windows through the Parental Controls feature in Windows Vista, 7 and 8.

After some time of PC usage, Windows creates many files in different folders like thumbs.db, iconcache.db and so on. These files help some of the minor Windows functions but are not generally required and can amount up to many gigabytes of hard disk space. You can delete these files from your hard disk and claim all the space taken up by them. The freeware application PureRa can help you quickly clean all these files in a single click.

Adobe Flash Player is one of the most extensively used browser plugin in multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac, iOS and Android. If you are using and old version of Adobe Flash in Windows, then you may become vulnerable to many of the known security threats and should either uninstall Adobe Flash from all the browsers in Windows or you should update it. If you are looking forward to uninstalling Adobe Flash plugin in all the browsers in Windows then you can follow these instructions.