Category: Windows 8

If you have an inner artist inside you who always wanted to create great portraits, cartoon art and pencil sketches, then you can wake that artist up with the help of free FotoSketcher program. The FotoSketcher program allows you to quickly apply many of the professional quality effects in your pictures. It supports dozens of effects like pencil sketches, ink sketches, cartoon effects, oil paintings, vintage effects and more.

A virtual hard disk (VHD) is a file that is used as an image of a hard disk in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V machines. Usually you have to create a VHD through the Microsoft Virtual PC software, when you install an operating system in it. Some of the trial VHDs are also available for download from the Microsoft website. But if you want to create a VHD from your hard disk drives, then you can make use of the Disk2vhd software from Microsoft.

The PPTP protocol is utilized to create a VPN (virtual private network) in various operating systems including Windows 8. The benefits of using a PPTP VPN includes having a changed IP address and internet traffic encryption among others.

Its a thing of common knowledge that Linux has many powerful commands that put Windows command prompt to shame. Although Microsoft has come up with Powershell for Windows, but its still not in competition with Linux commands. If you want to make use of the powerful Linux commands in Windows, then you can use GoW (Gnu on Windows). It is a pack of hundreds of Linux commands that run inside Windows in the same manner as on a Linux machine.

Windows 8.1 comes with Internet Explorer 11 pre-installed, without giving you any options to choose a third party browser like Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera. This is partly because Internet Explorer is not only used as a web browser but its various components are also utilized by Windows itself. But if you do not like the Internet Explorer browser, then you can always remove it from Windows 8.1.

Over a period of time the clicking switch (the one that you press to left-click or right-click) of your mouse wears out and then it results in clicking multiple times each time you try to single click in Windows. This is because the switch is made of metal cantilever type spring and when this metal spring wears out, your switch starts to make unwanted clicks. To sort out this problem to a certain degree you can change the double-click speed of your mouse to be slower than usual in Windows.

The right-click menu in Windows (also known as the context-menu) offers you many features, options or actions when you click on a particular type of object in a folder or on the desktop. But there are still many other useful options that we may want to add to the context menu. The freeware Right Click Enhancer makes it very easy to add many useful features to the Right Click menu in windows.

There are many websites that can show you your Internet download and upload speed, but now Microsoft has come up with a Windows 8 app that can be used to check your network speed and other settings. It can show you your network download speed, upload speed, ping delay etc. It is a Windows 8 app so it can be installed both in the Windows 8 PC as well as your Windows 8 Phone.

Your PC becomes the home of many unwanted and completely useless files and folders after long time of use. For example, the browser cache in your web browser gets filled with so many files and cookies and many programs save their log files in your PC and so on. All these files are not necessary for the normal working of your computer and can be safely removed. The freeware application called KCleaner from KC Softwares can do this cleaning for you.

Windows 8, like its predecessors, displays notifications related to system security and other important matters to the user in the system tray. It can be about non-existent antivirus and anti-spyware, turned off firewall etc. Although these notifications are of vital nature and should not be ignored, yet they may annoy you while you are busy doing your work. Good news is that you can postpone such notifications in Windows 8 for a few hours if you are busy doing something else.