How to completely disable Web Search in Windows 10

Microsoft has integrated web search from Windows 8.1, in addition to the native search available in previous Windowseditions. Thus when you search for anything on your Windows computer, if you’re connected to web, web search results are displayed automatically. This is also continued with Windows 10, and here Cortana – the voice assistant leads the flag.

Now, some users may be okay with fact that web results are displaying additionally even when they don’t looked forward for them. However, some other community of users may not be convinced with this fact. The reason behind this could be unnecessary data consumption by your system in order to fetch web search results. Thus, if you also belongs to latter community of users, you may want to disable web search results completely from being displayed in Windows 10.

Here is what you need to do:

Disable Web Search in Windows 10

1. In Windows 8.1 or later; Pro & Enterprise Editions, press Windows Key + R combination, type put gpedit.msc in Rundialog box and hit Enter to open the Local Group Policy Editor.

2. In the left pane of Local Group Policy Editor window, navigate here:

Computer Configuration -> Administrative Templates -> Windows Components -> Search

3. Moving on, in the right of above shown window and scroll down to look for Settings named Do not allow web searchand Don’t search the web or display web results in Search. Both of these are Not Configured by default. Double click on any one of them:

4. Finally in the above shown window, select Enabled and click Apply followed by OK. Enable the other Setting in similar way. Close Local Group Policy Editor now. Reboot the machine to make changes effective. After restarting the machine, you’ll find that web search results are no longer displayed. In case, if you later want to get web search results, simply restore both policies to Not Configured status.

Glary Disk Cleaner: Free disk cleaning tool for Windows

There are already so many free junk file cleaners available for Windows – the most popular of them being CCleaner. So why then are we again covering another one? Because life is all about having options, and Windows ecosystem offers so many freeware options that one has to check them out and see what suits you the best.

Glary Disk Cleaner comes to from the well-known Glarysoft house. It offers a handy way to clean up your hard disk. It can scan your PC thoroughly and locate the temporary, unused and unwanted files cluttered on your hard disk and delete them in no time. Although Windows has its built-in disk cleanup utility, but sometimes you may feel the need to use a third party app.

Glary Disk Cleaner

Glary Disk Cleaner is a simple tool which takes no time to download and install 0n your PC. The program has a very user-friendly interface and even a novice computer user can use it without any hurdles. You can choose to run the program right after its quick installation. It simply scans the hard disk of your computer, locates the temporary files and removes them.

Glary Disk Cleaner starts scanning your PC immediately after you launch the program and gives you a quick list of files stored on your PC. You can either select the files and remove them manually or choose to delete them all in one go.

The Disk Cleaner checks the Windows, your web browsers as well as the applications installed on your PC and locates all the temporary and unused files including temporary files, cache, system log files, error report files, invalid and broken shortcuts, browsers cache and much more.

The list of files also display the path, size and format of files located giving you and option to check the file before you delete it. You can view the file in its folder, check its Properties and exclude from the removal list if required.

I don’t know if it was the size of my hard drive or the lesser number of temporary files stored on my PC, but the program actually took just a few seconds to scan my PC. Usually when a PC is under scanning, the CPU usage increases which tends to slow down the PC for the time being. But there is nothing to worry about when using this freeware.

The program is very simple and effective and I didn’t find any noteworthy issue in the program. It scanned the PC quickly and also deleted the files in no time. In short, it did is job! It is a pretty decent piece of software from the makers of  Glary Utilities and can help you keep your system clean.

You can download it here.

Sputnik: Best free desktop RSS Feed Reader for Windows

Nowadays, many people prefer to read their daily news on tablets and computers via different RSS feed readers, as they can consolidate all the news in one place. You can certainly start using Feedly, Flipboard, etc. those work great as a feed reader. However, if your days start with a Windows PC and ends with the same, here is a free desktop RSS Reader, that assists users to read their most favorite blogs right from the desktop. Sputnik is probably the finest desktop client to read RSS feed. It is free and portable!

Sputnik – Free Desktop RSS Feed Reader

Sputnik comes with nearly all the popular features of a typical RSS reader like Feedly. It is even possible to import feeds to this client in a click. To begin using this software, you will need either the website address or its Feed URL or exported feed file, which you can get from any third party RSS reader.

If you have this URL or file, you are ready to start using it. After opening Sputnik, unzip it and double-click on the file to open up. Right after opening it, you will see the following screen:

You can add your favorite sites manually or you can import feeds from any exported file. To add a site, click on Add feedbutton and enter your site URL or feed URL. If you want to import feed from file, just click on the Import feed from file.

If you add site, it will be added immediately. However, if you import file, it will take a couple of seconds to be added. After being added, your reader will look like this:

In the left hand side, you will get all the added sites and in the right hand side, you will get the latest articles. You can maximize your window and start reading. The next article will be placed at the end of one article. You can also click on any particular site to read particular news only. If you want to read the same news in your browser, click on the article title.

To add more sites, just click on Add feed button.

After that, write down the desired site URL or RSS feed URL. You can also select a category to categorize your sites.

Finally, hit the Done button. Your site will be added instantly.

Sputnik settings and keyboard shortcuts

You can change the number of articles that you would like to display on a single page. You can also delete articles which are older than particular time.

This desktop client also has some useful keyboard shortcuts, which can help you navigate through numerous sites:

• Right Click: Mark current article as read and jump to next article.
• Space bar: Same as right click.
• Up/Down Arrow: Scroll up and down
• Left/Right Arrow: Next and previous article
• Ctrl + Left/Right Arrow: Jump to next or previous page
• Enter: Mark a category as read.

Sputnik can help you to get rid of a cluttered RSS feed reader. You can easily read various websites right from desktop. You can download it from here. The development of this freeware has however been discontinued now.

Easy Context Menu freeware lets you add Program or Icon to Right Click Menu

The Right-Click Context Menu in Windows, offers useful options. Although, Windows does not let you add or remove anything from context menu via any UI, you can use a third-party software like Easy Context Menu to customize it. We already have freeware like the Right Click Extender or Context Menu Editor, that let you add or remove context menu items. Today let us have a look at this free tool.

Easy Context Menu for Windows

Easy Context Menu (Earlier Bluelife Context Menu) is a context menu editor that helps users to add any installed application to the context menu or any image or icon to the context menu item.

The download package consists of 2 files. If you are using 32-bit Windows, click on EcMenu.exe and if you have 64-bit Windows, click on EcMenu_x64.exe. You don’t have to install it since this is a portable software.

All the preset items that you can add, are categorized in various sections such as Tools, System Tools, Turn Off Options etc. A very useful feature of this tool is that you can add different items to the context menu for different locations. For instance, you can add a set of tools to the desktop context menu and a different set of apps to the This PC context menu. Similarly, you can also add or remove options from the Folder Context Menu, File Context Menu, EXE File Context Menu and so on.

Add preset program, tool and option to Context Menu

To add any preset app, tool or power option to the Context Menu, just make a tick in corresponding box and apply your changes. The very first button with the mouse icon refers to Apply Changes.

Context Menu Cleaner

The fourth button with mouse icon refers to Context Menu Cleaner.

Context Menu Cleaner will let you remove any added program from the right-click menu.

To remove an item, just remove the tick-mark from the corresponding box.

Easy Context Menu List Editor

By default, Easy Context Menu will allow you to add only those programs, tools and options, what are already included in the list. However, you can also add your own favorite program to the context menu, by using the List Editor. You can add image, audio or any other item to the context menu.

To do so, click on List Editor button, which is the third button from the left. Next, click on Add New and selectApplication Files(*.*) from the drop-down menu. Next select the desired program file. It is also possible to rename the file, change its location in context menu, let Windows open the file with administrator privilege and more. One all is done, click on Save Changes. Your item will be added to the context menu.

Delete all programs from Context Menu

Suppose, you do not want to use the selected options in the context menu and wish to delete whatever you have added. At such times, just click on Uninstall All – the second button with the mouse icon.

You can read more about Easy Context Menu and download it from its home page.

FireFTP: Free FTP / SFTP Client for Firefox browser

FireFTP is a popular, free, secure, cross-platform FTP/SFTP addon available for Mozilla Firefox browser, which provides an easy and intuitive way to access FTP or SFTP servers. It is one of the top extensions available for Mozilla Firefox with over 616,601 users downloading it. Today we are reviewing FireFTP version 2.0.23 and will show you how to use FireFTP in Firefox.

FireFTP for Firefox

You can manually surf the available add-ons available in the firefox browser and install them or visit this link using your Firefox browser and then click on “Add to Firefox” to add it.

Clicking on the “Add to Firefox” button will open up a prompt, where it asks if you want toe install the addon. Click on “Install“.

When you are done, it prompts you to restart the browser. Restart the browser and you are now ready to use it.

Features of FireFTP

• FireFTP is absolutely free with cross-platform support. Works on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.
• It is Secure as it has support for SSL/TLS/SFTP providing encryption to combat fraud.
• Synchronization support is great as it keeps directories in sync while navigating.
• Directory Comparison feature compares directory content including sub-directories.
• It is Available in more than 20 languages and supports UTF8 character encoding.
• It automatically reconnects and resumes file transfers in the case of network interruption.
• Supports Search/Filtering,Export/Import accounts,Remote Editing,File Hashing: Generate hashes of files (MD5, various SHA’s),Drag & Drop.
• It has built-in integrity checks of transfers (XMD5, XSHA1)
• File Compression using Mode Z,timestamp Synchronization, Proxy and FXP support,Advanced properties like CHMOD, recursive CHMOD, thumbnails etc, IPv6 support are the other important features.

How to use FireFTP in Firefox

Launching FireFTP is easy, as it is integrated directly into the browser. Head over to browser menu and find the Developeroption. Expand the Developer option to find the option as shown below in the picture.

Click on the FireFTP option to launch the window in the browser. You can also launch it by navigating to this link using address bar: chrome://fireftp/content/fireftp.xul

That should open up the FireFTP interface with local file explorer. You may click on the images to see the larger versions.

In order to login to your server using FireFTP, Click on the “Create account” option which opens up a new dialogue asking for the credentials for your server. Fill in the required details like Hostname, port number, username, password etc and proceed. You can also save the details with a desired profile name for future use.

On successful login you should be able to view your server files in the right hand side of the FireFTP window.

It is so simple! If you are looking for a light-weight free FTP client, you can start using FireFTP. We hope this tutorial helped you in getting started with this FTP client.

5 Powerful and Most Useful Excel Features you need to know

Microsoft Excel is the most useful and easy tool for business analysts. It has large number of useful formulas, features and bundles of interactive charts. But, most of us are not known of all of them and there are some more features which are powerful and easy to use to make our work simpler. You might not have noticed some of the useful Excel 2013 features like Sparklines, Slicers, Conditional Formatting and other formulas which add value to your work. In this article, I will take you through them and will give you an idea on what are those and how to use them.

Most Useful Excel Features

Among many Excel features, there are some hidden features which are easy to use and you many not know all of them. Without any further delay, we will look at 5 such Excel features.

Sparklines

Sparklines were first introduced in Excel 2010 and are used to represent visualizations for the trend across the data in a row. It fits in a single Excel cell and saves the space on the worksheet. This is a cool feature and is very easy to use. Calculating the trend for row data and placing the visualization in the single excel is really a great feature to use.

In order to create your own Sparklines, select the range of data. Click insert on the ribbon and select the type ofSparklines (Line, Column or Win/Loss). Next, enter the range of the target where you want to show the Sparklines. For more information on how to create Sparklines, visit Office Blogs.

Conditional Formatting

Conditional Formatting is a well known feature of Excel. It is used to visually present the data based on the conditions met. It is also useful to create heat maps. This would be helpful to find the interesting patterns by exploring the data effectively.

To create the heat map, select the data and head over to the ribbon. Under Home, click Conditional Formatting and then click Color Scales. Now, pick the color scale. You can even set the color scale by editing the formatting rule. For more information on Conditional Formatting, visit Office Support.

SMALL and LARGE Functions

We all know about MAX and MIN functions. They give you the maximum and minimum values of the selected data respectively. But, in order to find the 1st, 2nd, 3rd or nth largest or smallest value of the selected range if data, we can make use of LARGE and SMALL functions respectively.

In this example, in order to find the top two products for each month, we made use of MATCH and INDEX functions along with LARGE and SMALL functions. For more information, visit SMALL and LARGE functions.

Remove Duplicates

Do not blame me for mentioning this feature in this list. It is very important to get rid of redundant data from the available huge amount of data. It is one of the best ways for cleaning and organizing the data and so thought of having it in this list of powerful Excel features. Removing Duplicates feature was introduced from Excel 2007 and is helpful to remove duplicates which is the most important problem which we face.

To remove duplicates, select the data and head over to the ribbon. Under Data, click the Remove Duplicates button and what you see the data without duplicates. For more information on how to Find and Remove Duplicates, visit Office.com.

Slicers

Slicers act as visual filters. It helps you to visualize the subset of data as a connected chart or as a raw data. For example, if you want to show the trend of sales of various products, then you can create the interactive sales trend chart using Slicers. Based on the product you select, respective chart is shown. Slicers were first introduced in Excel 2010 and enhanced a lot in Excel 2013.

In Excel 2013, if you want to add Slicer to your charts, select the data range and click on insert > Slicer. Now, select the part of the data you want to use as a filter. In the image above, Product column is used as a filter. How here for more information on how to use Slicers.

For more details on these features and to download the example workbook, visit Office Blogs

Screen To GIF: Free software to create animated GIF Image within seconds

GIF image is highly sought file format amongst tech bloggers, who often write on how-to guides, as well as meme makers. Hence today we will look at a free yet extremely helpful software named Screen To GIF that helps you produce high-quality animated GIF image within a few moments.

Create GIF image using Screen To GIF

ScreenToGIF is probably the simplest way to record your screen and turn them into a GIF image or motioned image. This particular tool includes a number of handy features and tools, that will assist you in editing the GIF image before finishing.

To start with, download portable ScreenToGIF on your Windows PC. This is a portable software as well. After downloading this portable GIF image creator software, just unzip the file and double-click on it to open. You will see a window as follows:

The very first thing that must be set is to change the aspect ratio or the window size depending on your requirement. The default size of  484×209 is comparatively small for most.

Once you have et the default image size, you can start recording your screen by clicking on the Record button. To stop the recording, simply click on Stop button. Right after recording the screen, you will get a window that looks something like the subsequent picture:

Now, you have a whole bunch of options to edit the image before finalizing. You can add the following to your image, after recording:

• Add text
• Add quick caption
• Add image frame or title frame
• Edit frames
• Change animation speed
• Crop image
• Use transitions
• Add border around image
• Export specific image frame (More information are written below)
• Delete selected image frame (More information are written below)
• Use filter: Blur, Sepia, Gray Style

Get a still image from GIF image

Apart from creating the GIF image, you can also export a still image from the recording. ScreenToGIF helps users to change the frame number that will be captured in each second. If you have set a huge number, you will get more frames or images. This is what “Export specific image frame” means.

ScreenToGIF Settings

Screen To GIF doesn’t come with a huge number of settings. Instead, it has fewer but very useful features.

• Use custom GIF encoding or paint.NET encoding
• Change loop – use custom loop
• Show or hide mouse cursor
• Show or hide mouse clicks
• Use hotkeys to start and stop recording (F7 – Record/Pause & F8 – Stop)
• Change aspect ratio
• Change number of frames to be captured in a single second

Download Screen To GIF from here and start creating quality GIF images on your Windows PC.

How Old Do I Look website from Microsoft

Everyone wants to know – Do I look younger or older than I actually am? Well for all those who have this question, there is now a website that can guess you age and your gender from any photograph.

How Old Do I Look

Microsoft recently released a Face detection API. Based on this API, it took a couple of developers just a day to put this website together. This website allows users to upload their photograph. The API then tries to guess the age and gender of any faces recognized in that picture.

Face APIs are a part of Microsoft Project Oxford, which provides state-of-the-art algorithms to process face images, including gender, age, recognition, alignment and other application-level features.

The key components of this website are:

1. Extracting the gender and age of the people in these pictures.
2. Obtaining real-time insights on the data extracted above.
3. Creating real-time dashboards to view the above results.

We also got real-time insights to learn more about how people were using this tool. For instance, we assumed that folks would not want to upload their own pictures but would prefer to select from pre-canned images such as what they found online. But we what we found out was that over half the pictures analyzed were of people who had uploaded their own images, said Microsoft.

The results were not bad too. The website put my age at 47, whereas I am a couple of years older than that.

Go visit how-old.net and see what it has to say about you. Let us know if it guessed correctly about you.

Uranium Backup Free review & download

There are plenty of free backup tools available. Even the default backup tool that comes with Windows 8.1 is good enough to let you take different backup sets of the data you want. You also get to choose between overwriting backup sets and incremental backup sets. However, most people prefer third-party backup tools as they offer more functionality. This review of Uranium Backup Free checks out it features and ease of use.

Uranium Backup Free review

The download and installation was easy. There are no third-party apps that are bundled into the installation, as of date, so you need not worry about it installing toolbars and other browser add-ons. It is just the Uranium backup program that is installed.

Once installed, you can access it from the System Tray by right-clicking on its icon or by clicking on the desktop icon. In both the cases, the first thing you have to do is to create backup sets and set destinations for the backup sets.

Too many restrictions

Unfortunately, the free version has plenty of restrictions. One that I would like to mention in particular is that it won’t support incremental backups. This means that every time you run the backup using Uranium, you will be creating a different backup set or you will be overwriting the previous backup depending upon the folders you chose.

Though the image above shows you plenty of destinations to back up, all except the first are available only in the paid versions. With the free version, you can only select a place on your network or on an external hard disk drive for backing up the data. You cannot even use the DVD burner with the free version. Now, that is way too much of a limiting factor, that may make people away from using Uranium. As it is, people nowadays prefer to back up their data to cloud instead of DVDs, etc. If that option is present but cannot be used in the Uranium Backup Free, people are sure to be frustrated.

In short, the free version of Uranium backup tool will serve only those users who like to create a full backup of their data and copy it to external hard disk drives. There is no point in backing up data to the same hard disk drive even if it is a different drive letter as the hard disk is the same and if it crashes, all the drives on it will be inaccessible.

The application is good only for users using external hard disk drives for backing up data. For others who would like to back up to cloud etc,  Microsoft, Amazon and Google are the answers (for free backups). If they want to go paid, IDrive, ADrive, Mozy etc are better as they offer backups directly to the clouds.

Using Uranium

Assuming that you are one of the group that prefers local hard disk backups to external storage on network or USB connected hard disk drives (or even on a desktop with two hard disk drives), you have to first create a data set that needs to be backed up. This, you can do by selecting Create Data Set option in the File menu. You will get a dialog box that will let you browse and select the backup folders and files using check boxes. Once you are done, selecting the files to be backed up, you have specify the destination folder.

To specify the destination folder, click on the first option under the lower section of the right side of the Uranium window. It says “Click here to add a destination folder for this backup“. You can see it in the image above.

Clicking on any other option will ask you if you wish to upgrade.

Anyway, once you are done with creating backup sets and setting destination for it, you can run the first backup manually by clicking on “Run selected backups” in the File menu. Some of the best things about Uranium are that it compresses the backup files and folders before copying them to backup destination and it offers encryption for the backed up files. But I did not see any option to set up scheduled backups or incremental backups. This means it overwrites the previous backup set whenever you run the backup set manually. The only method available to avoid overwriting is to select a different destination (folder) before you manually run the backup using the Uranium interface or the system tray icon.

Verdict

Uranium Backup Free is a good choice if you back up your data locally to some other hard drive connected to your computer. The paid version has options to back up to cloud but the free one doesn’t.

Encryption is present, so you can be sure about secure backup. You can save configurations using a password in the Settings menu. Beyond that, it is simply a tool offering minimal features. If you wish to back up to cloud, either purchase the Pro version or use one of the tools mentioned above. You can download Uranium from their website.

There are some other good free Imaging, Backup and Recovery Software available on the Internet. Moreover, there are also some free online backup tools that you might want to consider if you wish to back up to cloud and if your backup needs are small. Besides this, you may also use Microsoft OneDrive or Google Drive for backing up, although they are more of sync nature. That is, if you delete a file or folder from the local disk, it will be deleted from the cloud storage too. An advantage is that instead of deleting them forever, the deleted items are moved to folders called Deleted Items or Trash and they stay there until you empty them manually or if they exceed the quota of Trash (in Google Drive). They can be used as backup in case you want the latest version of your backup sets on the cloud.

AnyDesk: Best Free TeamViewer Alternative

If you are working as a team, this is impossible that you haven’t heard about TeamViewer. If you are looking for aTeamViewer alternative, then this free software called AnyDesk may interest you. This fast remote desktop software has DeskRT, a new video codec at its core.

AnyDesk review

As AnyDesk is a free portable software. If you want to use it for a long time, you can consider installing this using its installer.

To get started, at first, download AnyDesk on both the PCs. Next double-click on the executable file to open it. You will get a window that looks like the following picture:

Teamviewer alternative

A unique code will be appear on your screen. You can find this type of code, only if the software is not installed. Otherwise, you will get the unique with the Computer name.

Now, just enter this unique code of one PC in another PC’s AnyDesk window – under Remote Desk tab and hit theConnect button.

That means, if you have two PCs called “A” & “B” and you want to access “A” from “B”, just copy the code from “A” and paste it on “B”.

After hitting the Connect button, you will get the Windows Firewall popup for this new connection. Just allow it to access AnyDesk.

At the same time, you will get a confirmation pop-up on the second PC that you want to access from your primary PC.

You can hit the Accept button or consider checking few options. The options are as follows,

• Allow to hear sound
• Allow to take control
• Allow to use clipboard
• Allow to block keyboard and mouse

If you remove the tick mark from corresponding option, the feature will be unavailable. Otherwise, the main PC owner will be able to access everything.

Chat with Friends using AnyDesk

AnyDesk allows users to chat with the connected PC owner. Just click on Chat button from the primary PC and write down your message.

The message will appear on the second PC.

AnyDesk also provides some other options after connecting. You will see the following options on your screen:

• Change view mode (full screen, original, shrink, stretch)
• Quality: best audio/video quality, balanced, optimized, according to connection speed/data speed
• Show/hide remote cursor
• Allow/prevent mouse and keyboard control
• Take snapshot.

Considering all things, AnyDesk is really a useful tool. You can download AnyDesk from here. As of now, you can use AnyDesk to connect with only Windows PC’s.