Category: Windows 8

When you power on your Windows PC, the first thing it does is play the startup sound. If you forget to turn down the volume before shutting down your PC, then it is going to play a loud startup sound as your switch it on. This may become especially awkward at work as you would be distracting everyone by playing your loud volume sound. A solution for this problem is to use free Auto Mute program which automatically turns off your system sound at events like shutdown, startup and logon.

The WebDAV protocol makes it very easy to access a readable and writable medium, e.g., a network drive. Some of the cloud storage servers, like the Yandex Disk, allow you to access the online storage through the WebDAV protocol. Using this protocol you can access your network drive in Windows just like you would use any other hard disk drive. But before you can access the network drive through WebDAV, you have to setup the WebDAV account in your computer.

When you are looking for a software, you find so many and you want to try them all out before you can pick the one that suits your requirements. During this trying out period, you end up installing dozens of applications on your system – all of which leave behind unwanted files and registry entries in your PC. If you want to try the software without having to install them, then you can use the Zero Install software.

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.