The past versions of Firefox brought a feature to it that a great deal of users didn't like because it changed the way tabs are handled in a window. Instead of just showing all tabs at once, Firefox now adds horizontal scrolling to the tab bar in order to prevent the tabs from becoming too ... Read more
One of the most unnecessary things that Windows 8 brings to desktop computers might be the lock screen you need to wipe away every time you start your machine - luckily it's also one of the things you can disable. To do so, open the Local Group Policy Editor (as shown here). Browse the left ... Read more
The default settings in the Unity desktop environment move a window's control panel away from the actual window up to the top panel of the screen - this is called 'global menu'. Since that is a major change of paradigm and might hinder your workflow if you decided to switch, here is how to reverse ... Read more
If you are one of those who like to deal with inserted DVDs, USB keys and other removable media yourself, the Autoplay feature of Windows will most likely do nothing but being clicked away by you. If you want to save yourself a pop-up and a click you can disable Autoplay. To do so, open ... Read more
Ubuntu's login manager, lightdm, offers a guest login option by default. Most of you won't use it anyway, so why keep it at all? You can disable that entry in the lightdm configuration file, which is /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. Open it from a terminal using sudo gedit /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf At the bottom of the file, insert following line: ... Read more
Users of AVG 2012 antivirus software will already have noticed the AVG Advisor pop-ups informing you about high memory usage of browsers (I usually get them from 300 MB RAM upwards) which come up relatively often and are quite annoying since your browser uses more memory the more tabs you open. But as in most ... Read more
After critical Updates, Windows often needs to restart the computer to apply all changes, which however might not be in the interest of the user. To prevent Windows from auto-restarting (may it be to reduce annoyance or to prevent Windows from stopping unattended running applications), you can use a simple but effective registry entry. To ... Read more
On Windows 7 it may happen that you are denied access to files that you regularly own and have permission to write to, even if you are logged in as administrator, perform the action as administrator or from an elevated command prompt or try to access it in safe mode. If this happens to you ... Read more
The Windows 7 Aero desktop theme can cost you quite a lot of performance, which is why you might consider disabling it. To do so, open the Control Panel and select Appearance and Personalization: Next go to Change the theme and scroll down to Windows Classic:
If you open a file with an extension that is unknown to Windows, it will react with the following prompt: I cannot remember to have used the web search a single time, that is why I disabled it long ago. One can accomplish that with a simple registry entry. Open your Windows Registry by entering ... Read more