Every task has a beginning and an end. It’s when you combine a series of tasks, you get a project. Projects can be simple or complex. But the planning has to be foolproof. So a little bit of knowledge on project management can take you a long way even if you aren’t involved with business projects.
Life is the biggest project of them all. So try these project management templates to visualize the efforts needed from start to finish. Set schedules. Use them to present your plans to others. And yes—meet your goals.
Dropbox was just another place for cloud storage. Today, it is a more collaborative suite that is taking on Google Drive and Microsoft Office. Dropbox Paper might be minimalistic, but the simplicity works in its favor as it gives you this clean project planning template that includes a timeline.
It’s just right for creative projects. You can define all team goals, delegate key tasks with a to-do checklist, gather feedback, and curate every project asset with a shared Dropbox. Resources like images and videos can be added to the interactive project timeline.
Gantt charts can be complicated, so the colorful timeline gives you a far easier way to visualize your project. You can also zoom into a “week view” or zoom out for a bird’s eye look at your approaching deadlines.
Hubspot develops products for digital marketers. Most of them are paid products, but Hubspot is also a rich resource for all kinds of free templates you can use for running inbound campaigns. These pre-made templates ensure everyone follows the same process and best practices without needing to reinvent the wheel.
Hubspot offers 6 free editable templates for project management. It includes a simple checklist, a Gantt chart template for your project schedules, a process documentation templates for laying down the SOPs, and more. You can download them in PDF or as an Excel file. Fill out a brief form to unlock access to the documents.
Google Docs (or Google Sheets) is one of the more flexible tools to create templates of every kind. It may not be the most aesthetically pleasing out of the tin unless you start customizing it. This specific free template saves you all the trouble. You just have to get on with planning your project.
The template is made up of three core areas. Timing, To-Dos, and Resources. The first tab called Cockpit gives you an overview of your entire project. The template is designed for collaboration.
For instance, the To-Do tab displays how the tasks are shared, the current status of each task, and their relative priority. The entire project and its assets can be managed from Google Drive.
Maybe, you have a small team and a modest project. You can do away massive spreadsheets and complicated Gantt charts. A simple progress tracker can help you stay on the straight and narrow path. And you can create it anywhere. For instance, a shared Evernote notebook could be a good medium.
The Project Goals template is well-suited for any personal project. It is also easy to grasp. Each objective is benchmarked against three key results. You can measure progress by inserting more rows for milestones and tracking the progress with 10% increments.
You might need to present a project plan to your bosses or a client. And that can also be at the very last minute. Sounds daunting? It will be less so if you have a few Microsoft PowerPoint presentation templates lying around. Glide has a useful pack that’s available for free and tailored for all types of presentations.
There are 80 different templates in the presentation pack. The slides are professional done and avoid bling. Start with a cover slide template and go on to others that cover pricing tables, charts, agendas, CTAs, and more. You can insert your own branded images instead of using the placeholder images.
In short, the slides are completely customizable. Also, no attribution is required.
Searching for more free PowerPoint templates? 24Slides has a good collection of templates perfect for project planning too.
Tweak Templates for Maximum Benefits
Templates are easy to find. But they don’t have to result in a cookie cutter approach. The best online templates are editable and customizable. So make use of this benefit and tweak them to fit your needs and not the other way around.
And if you are still searching for nicely designed templates for your next project, take a right and stop at these Excel project management templates.
TikTok, the user-generated video sharing app from Chinese publisher Bytedance that has been a global runaway success, has stumbled hard in one of the world’s biggest mobile markets, India, over illicit content in its app.
Today, the country’s main digital communications regulator, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, ordered both Apple and Google to remove the app from its app stores, per a request from High Court in Madras after the latter investigated and determined that the app — which has hundreds of millions of users, including minors — was encouraging pornography and other illicit content.
This is the second time in two months that TikTok’s content has been dinged by regulators, after the app was fined $5.7 million by the FTC in the US over violating child protection policies.
The order in India does not impact the 120 million users in the country who already have the app downloaded, or those on Android who might download it from a source outside of Google’s official Android store. But it’s a strong strike against TikTok that will impede its growth, harm its reputation, and potentially pave the way for further sanctions or fines against the app in India (and elsewhere taking India’s lead).
TikTok has issued no less than three different statements — each subsequently less aggressive — as it scrambles to respond to the order.
“We welcome the decision of the Madras High Court to appoint Arvind Datar as Amicus Curae (independent counsel) to the court,” the statement from TikTok reads. “We have faith in the Indian judicial system and we are optimistic about an outcome that would be well received by over 120 million monthly active users in India, who continue using TikTok to showcase their creativity and capture moments that matter in their everyday lives.”
(A previous version of the statement from TikTok was less ‘welcoming’ of the decision and instead highlighted how TikTok was making increased efforts to police its content without outside involvement. It noted that it had removed more than 6 million videos that violated its terms of use and community guidelines, following a review of content generated by users in India. That alone speaks to the actual size of the problem.)
On top of prohibiting downloads, the High Court also directed the regulator to bar media companies from broadcasting any videos — illicit or otherwise — made with or posted on TikTok. Bytedance has been working to try to appeal the orders, but the Supreme Court, where the appeal was heard, upheld it.
This is not the first time that TikTok has faced government backlash over the content that it hosts on its platform. In the US, two months ago, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that the app violated children’s privacy laws and fined it $5.7 million, and through a forced app updated, required all users to verify that they were over 13, or otherwise be redirected to a more restricted experience. Musically, TikTok’s predecessor, had also faced similar regulatory violations.
More generally the problems that TikTok is facing right now are not unfamiliar ones. Social media apps, relying on user-generated content as both the engine of their growth and the fuel for that engine, have long been problematic when it comes to illicit content. The companies that create and run these apps have argued that they are not responsible for what people produce on the platform, as long as it fits within its terms of use, but that has left a large gap where content is not policed as well as it should be. On the other hand, as these platforms rely on growth and scale for their business models, some have argued that this has made them less inclined to proactively police their platforms to bar the illicit content in the first place.
Facebook is pulling away from its ambitions to provide peer-to-peer money transfers via Messenger in Europe. Today, the company announced that it would be discontinuing the service — which let individuals send money to each other — in the two countries in the region where it had rolled it out, the UK and France on June 15 of this year. It appears that for now, the service will remain active in the US, where Facebook holds a number of money transmitter licenses.
It’s not shutting down payments altogether in Europe: it will continue to let people make charitable donations through Facebook itself.
“On 15 June 2019, we will discontinue P2P services on Messenger or through Facebook messages for all residents in the UK and France,” the company noted in a short statement on its main help page for the payments service. “While you won’t be able to exchange money with friends and family, you’ll still be able to complete other transactions through Facebook, such as making donations to charitable organisations.”
Facebook has also started sending out notices to those who were using the service in the two countries. It’s never been clear just how many of them there were.
After getting a license at the end of 2016, Facebook made its first foray into P2P payments in Europe for people over the age of 18 in November 2017, taking on the likes of PayPal and others in the remittance world.
The move was long in the making: there had been rumors of Facebook developing social payments, and even acquiring a startup to help make it happen, for years before this as the market for remittances and people using social networks to make financial transactions to each other started to take off.
In particular, in developing markets, where transfer fees for services like Western Union are high and the amount of people holding bank accounts is low, remittances using mobile handsets have become a key way for people to send money to each other, either because they’re supporting family or to pay each other for a service or goods. Mobile — and Facebook’s supremacy in social graphs and messaging with the likes of WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram all a part of the Facebook stable — made it a natural fit for something like this.
But in the end, the launch of P2P payments in France and the UK was a baby step — you could never transfer money to international recipients, and new countries were never added — that never grew up. The company reported in its last quarterly results in January that payments and other services generated just $274 million in the quarter, compared to $16.64 billion in advertising. Europe accounted for a measly $64 million of that.
Facebook does not explain why it decided to pull back on the strategy, but apart from question marks over just how popular the service actually was, there have other developments at the company and the wider payments space in Europe that could potentially have been factors.
Come September 14 of this year, there will be a new payment directive put in place across Europe called Strong Customer Authentication, requiring extra checks to be made for a user’s identity in any online transaction. It’s not clear how and if Facebook was preparing for this change.
Perhaps more interestingly, the company is reportedly working on a cryptocurrency that would allow for people on its messaging networks to send money to each other. If such a product really does get rolled out, it may be that Facebook would use that to become its primary P2P payment mechanism.
We have contacted Facebook and will update this post as we learn more.
Between Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive and iCloud Drive, consumer cloud storage is a crowded space. And yet, a small Swiss company called pCloud has managed to attract over 9 million users over the past five years. The company recently reached profitability with a team of 32 people.
If you’re familiar with Dropbox, pCloud won’t surprise you. The service lets you backup and sync files across your devices. You get 10GB for free and you can pay for more storage and features.
Unlike Dropbox or OneDrive, pCloud acts more like an external hard drive. When you install the app on your computer, everything stays in the cloud by default. On macOS, the company uses Fuse to create a new virtual hard drive in the Finder.
If you right click on a folder, you can choose to download it on your computer for offline access. It creates a new folder on your local hard drive that remains in sync with your pCloud account. Similarly, you can add existing folders to pCloud from the settings panel. These folders will remain permanently in sync as long as you keep the app running on your computer.
pCloud also supports LAN syncing, which means that if you have multiple devices on the same Wi-Fi network, they’ll transfer files using your local network instead of the internet. Dropbox also has this feature.
On mobile, you can access your files using the mobile app. Like many competitors, pCloud also lets you automatically back up your camera roll to your pCloud account.
Now le’s talk about security. Just like other cloud storage services, pCloud doesn’t encrypt your files by default — pCloud uses encryption on files while they’re in transit though. When you sync a file using pCloud, the company can theoretically retrieve that file. If you’re serious about privacy, you shouldn’t use cloud storage services at all.
But pCloud also offers an optional add-on called pCloud Crypto. This feature lets you create a secret folder that you can unlock with a password. When you add a file to this folder, it is encrypted on your device and then sent to pCloud’s server. If you don’t have that password, you can’t unlock the file. It means that pCloud and authorities can’t retrieve those files without you.
When it comes to pricing, pCloud costs $3.99 per month for 500GB of storage and $7.99 per month for 2TB of storage. pCloud Crypto costs an additional $4.99 per month. You can also buy lifetime subscriptions for $175 for 500GB, $350 for 2TB and $125 for Crypto. This is expensive, but it could convince some users who are not into subscriptions.
Even though it seems incredibly complicated to compete with Microsoft, Google, Apple and Dropbox, I’m glad to see that it’s still possible to build an alternative product with some differentiating features. pCloud will probably never be as big as Dropbox, but it is an interesting company to follow.
Twitch has launched its first original game. It’s called Twitch Sings, and, as the name suggests, it’s a karaoke game. While Twitch Sings is free to play on PC, Twitch hopes you’ll stream yourself singing along to one of the thousands of songs available.
Since launching in 2011 as a spinoff of Justin.tv, Twitch has become the biggest video game streaming site in the world. And what better way to cement its position than to develop its own video games made with streamers in mind. Starting with Twitch Sings.
Twitch Sings Is for Wannabe Pop Stars Everywhere
Twitch Sings is a karaoke game in the mold of SingStar and Lips. You choose a song, and then sing it at the top of your lungs to the best of your ability. Twitch Sings is free to play on PC, with thousands of songs covering a range of decades and genres.
Twitch Sings streams songs from the cloud, which means you have to be online to play the game. However, broadcasting yourself singing is entirely optional. And if you decide to start streaming you can opt to only show an avatar on a stage.
For those who do want to broadcast themselves singing, there are additional features including a co-op mode, virtual standing ovations, and voting on which song to sing next. The audience can also challenge the streamer to sing without lyrics or sing in a silly voice.
You’ll be judged on how well you’re singing, and be awarded XP and coins as a result. XP levels up your profile, and you can use the coins to purchase items for your avatar. Twitch Sings is available to download on Windows right now using Twitch’s own installer.
Twitch Sings Lets You Stream Yourself Singing
Twitch Sings is the perfect fit for Twitch. Streamers get to show off to their viewers, whether by singing brilliantly or by making people laugh, and viewers get to watch people play a game that has literally been built with streaming in mind.
Twitch Sings is also another way of helping streamers and viewers connect. Which is a good idea when streamers are nothing without an audience. And Twitch Sings comes hot on the heels of Squad Stream, which lets streamers broadcast live together.
One of the advantages of using WordPress is its sheer flexibility. It’s not just for posts and pages: custom post types can extend the core features to virtually anything.
Let’s take a look today at what you could do with custom post types, as well as a quick practical example of how to create an event listing using a custom post type called Event.
Note: This tutorial should be considered for educational purposes only, so you can learn the code used to create custom post types. If you actually want a great events listing plugin for your WordPress site, try The Events Calendar, which is well developed and free.
What Are Custom Post Types in WordPress?
Typically, a WordPress site consists of two types of content: dated blog posts, and static pages. Most of us who have set up a WordPress blog are familiar with the fact that pages should be used for things like “About me” or “Contact information”, while regular posts go to your blog.
But beyond that, what if you want to add another special kind of content that doesn’t really fit into the chronological order of the blog and certainly isn’t static? That’s where custom post types come in.
A fairly common request for club or group sites is to have some kind of events calendar. One solution that could be applied is to create a separate Events category of posts. The problem with this is they’ll be displayed in the main blog timeline, and we really ought to separate the two concepts entirely.
For that purpose, let’s create a new post type called event, which will have its own separate section of the admin interface.
How to Create a Custom Post Type in WordPress
We’ll do this by adjusting your theme files directly. You could achieve the same effect through a plugin, but to demonstrate the concept and practice it’s just easier to write them directly. If you’re not comfortable doing this, consider using the My Custom Functions plugin, which allows you to add code non-destructively.
Open up your theme’s functions.php file, stored in the theme folder inside wp-content/themes; or use the My Custom Functions plugin, which you’ll find at Settings > PHP Inserter. At the end of the file, add this code:
Be sure to do this before the closing php (?>) tag, if there is one in your functions.php file.
Take a while to read over the code. It’s declaring some properties (like labels for the interface), and how the URLs (rewrites) should be handled, as well as what features this post-type supports. You can, for instance, add a custom field to your custom post type with the supports property.
In this case, we’ve declared our event type to support thumbnails, a content editor for the event description, an event title, and custom fields. We’ve also added has_archive, so that navigating to the events page will bring up an archive of all events, similar to a blog.
That’s it, now if you save your theme and reload your blog, assuming you don’t have any errors you should now see a new events section on your admin sidebar. Yay!
Add some example events now.
Then since this is an event, create a custom field called date to indicate when the event will occur. Use mm/dd/yyyy format.
Note that we need to use custom fields to specify the actual date of the event rather than the date of the post, because the date of the post represents when the notice is published. Since you’d presumably be adding events that will occur in the future, setting the publishing date to the actual event date would be useless.
If you try to view the event at this point, you may get a 404 error. This is because WordPress needs to regenerate your Permalink URL structure to account for this new post type. Head over to the Settings > Permalinks page, and hit save again.
You should now be able to view the individual event post. Note that the first part of the URL, after your domain name, is /events/. We chose this in this line of code:
'rewrite' => array("slug" => "events"),
Customize the Events Listing Page
Now that you have all these fantastic events in your blog, it would be nice to actually list them somewhere. For that, we will create a special page template, so you can then add that page to your regular menu items alongside About or Contact.
Since we already specified that the Event post type should have an archive, you can go ahead and see what the default is by visiting /events/. On the standard Twenty-Seventeen theme on my test site, I got this:
Customizing this output is going to depend on what theme you’re using, and covering the entire WordPress templating system is well out of the scope of this article. However, for the sake of this tutorial, I’ll assume you’re using Twenty-Seventeen.
Start by creating a copy of archive.php, and rename it to archive-events.php. This is a standard naming convention that means WordPress will automatically use this template to display the archive for the events post type.
Upon examining the file, the Twenty-Seventeen authors have provided a post format mechanism, which is too complex for our needs:
/*
* Include the Post-Format-specific template for the content.
* If you want to override this in a child theme, then include a file
* called content-___.php (where ___ is the Post Format name) and that will be used instead.
*/
get_template_part( 'template-parts/post/content', get_post_format() );
Note: A child theme is recommended since any updates to the original theme will overwrite your changes. This WordPress support article describes the process of creating a child theme for Twenty-Seventeen. For brevity, I’m just going to work on the original theme and not care if my work is lost in a later update.
Cut that entire block out, and paste in the following instead. This is just a simplified copy of what’s in those post format templates, for the sake of learning:
If you save and preview the Events page again, you’ll notice it now has dates. But they’re wrong. They’re currently showing the publish date instead of the event date. As a last step, let’s change that to the actual date the event will be held. Find the bit that generates the time, twenty_seventeen_time_link(), and replace it with the following:
date('l jS F Y',strtotime(get_post_meta(get_the_ID(), 'date', true)))
This is getting the date from the post meta field we set, then using the PHP date() function to format it to something more readable.
Next steps?
If you’re unhappy with your current web host, we highly recommend using a managed WordPress host like WP Engine, which we ourselves use for our sister sites. Otherwise, InMotion Hosting offers affordable plans, which are even cheaper with our special discount when you use this link.
Then, note that when we created the event post type, we coded support for featured thumbnails already. Use our guide to featured images and post thumbnails to grab and display a featured image on the events listing archive.
Making Windows 10 perform faster isn’t hard. You just need a few simple tips and tricks. This article covers several methods for improving the speed and performance of Windows 10.
The Main Focus Areas to Make Windows 10 Faster
There are three umbrella categories of optimizing Windows 10’s performance:
Operating system tweaks
Software enhancements
App replacement or removal
While hardware upgrades also work, like buying more RAM or investing in an SSD, but those cost money, so I’m going to skip them. Let’s start with the most effective ways to speed up Windows 10 and then cover the other options out there.
Windows 10 Operating System Speed Tweaks
1. Turn On Game Mode
The latest version of Windows 10, the Creators Update, adds a new feature known as Game Mode. There’s no way to perpetually run in Game Mode, unfortunately, but you can activate it with a simple key combination of the Windows Key + G. However, you must first enable Game Mode.
To enable Game Mode (it’s only available in Windows 10 Creators Update) open Settings > Gaming and choose Game Mode. Tap the toggle switch below Game Mode. It’s only supposed to be used for games, but you can activate it whenever you need to get a little burst of speed. It’s particularly useful if you have a lot of background apps that are dragging down a resource-intensive program.
Unfortunately, Game Mode only improves gaming performance by a few percentage points.
Even so, some of you will experience a greater performance boost than others. The reduced number of background apps may improve your performance where no other tricks would help. In theory, Game Mode can function within any application that uses GPU acceleration. So if you want to try it out in Adobe Premiere, give it a try.
2. Turn Off Visual Effects
Windows offers a really easy way to shut off all visual enhancements.
Simply navigate to System > Advanced system settings
Choose Advanced from the tabs above.
Under Performance, choose Settings.
Left-click on the radio button for Adjust for best performance to shut off all visual effects.
I have visual effects disabled on a few systems and it seems to make a big impact, particularly on older computers. On the downside, things won’t look as nice. I advise leaving Smooth edges of screen fonts enabled as it helps when reading text.
3. Speed Up Your Processor
Windows has three, or more, predefined settings for how your processor ramps up its frequency. The three defaults are Balanced, High performance, and Power saver. Sometimes manufacturers also include custom plans here.
You are almost always better off on a laptop using Balanced or Power saver, but High performance can make Windows faster by trading battery endurance for power. Because it consumes the most amount of power it’s also more appropriate for desktops.
You can alter your settings by navigating to Power Options in the Control Panel.
4. Turn Off Auto-Starting Programs
About half of the programs that I install try to run silently in the background. That’s fine for just a handful of programs, but the impact on performance is cumulative. If your computer has enough programs set to run at startup, the entire system will get bogged down.
Getting rid of non-essential startup software is absolutely essential for performance. Fortunately, Windows makes it easy to remove most auto-starters.
To remove automatically starting apps take the following actions:
Press the key combination of Ctrl + Alt + Delete to enter Windows Task Manager.
Choose Task Manager from the menu that pops up.
Select the Startup tab from the top of the screen.
From the Startup tab, you can eliminate most auto-starting applications. The majority of apps out there don’t need to run in the background, unless they came preinstalled with your computer (and even these are oftentimes bloatware).
One of the biggest causes of slow internet speeds isn’t your provider. It’s your Wi-Fi connection. Thanks to common issues like channel congestion and overlapping Wi-Fi signals, it can be difficult getting a stable signal if you live in an apartment complex.
Fortunately, most routers offer two features that can improve your connection’s speed and stability:
A direct wired connection
Change your router’s channel.
Configuring a wired connection is simple: just buy an Ethernet cable.
First, use a Wi-Fi analyzer tool to determine which channels work best for your computer, and second, go into your router’s settings to change the channel.
Check out a great video on how to do it:
6. Manage Windows Update for Performance
Change Active Hours
Windows Update, believe it or not, hogs resources when it runs in the background. You can configure it to run only at specific times—such as when the device isn’t in operation—which means no more restarts while you’re in the middle of some important task.
To configure Windows Update to run only at specific hours:
Type Windows Update settings into the Windows Search Bar and run the configuration utility.
Under the heading Update settings, choose Change active hours.
You can change the active hours on this menu by clicking on Change Active Hours. I advise changing it a time period when the computer is on but unused.
Note: This setting only limits the times during which Windows will install updates automatically. Windows Update will still download updates during those hours.
Set Your Internet Connection to Metered
If you have a limited bandwidth Wi-Fi connection, Windows Update can significantly impact your internet performance by downloading updates in the background.
You can prevent this by setting your connection to metered; this will disable Windows Update, though some security patches may still download.
Open Windows Settings (Windows Key + I)
Go to Network & Internet > Wi-Fi.
Select the network you’re currently connected to and under Metered connection > Set as metered connection turn the switch On.
Note: This only works with Wi-Fi networks, though a hack for applying this setting to Ethernet connections does exist.
7. Turn Off Windows 10’s Search Indexing Feature
When you search for a file, Windows doesn’t scan every directory on your computer if you have Indexing enabled. Indexing creates a text manifest of the items stored on your computer. It dramatically improves file search speed.
On my 2013 computer, I don’t turn Indexing off. There’s little benefit. Even on a modern computer, turning off Windows 10’s Indexing feature will signficantly slow down searches of your storage drive for very little performance gains on newer computers.
On the other hand, if you own a very old computer, turning off Search Indexing will help your system’s performance.
To turn off Windows 10’s Search Index tool:
Type Index into the Windows Search Tool and left-click Indexing Options.
Left-click Modify at the bottom of the menu and uncheck the boxes for all of the options listed here.
8. Storage Analyzers and Disk Cleaning Can Speed Up Windows
Both Solid State Drives (SSDs) and Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) slow down when overloaded with data. Both drive technologies like to sit around 50% capacity for optimal performance but anything around 25% free capacity is fine.
One of the best apps for cleaning up an overloaded disk is WinDirStat. WinDirStat is both completely free, open source, and available in both installed and portable versions.
Out of all the apps out there that claim to improve performance, no program does it better than a RAM drive. A RAM drive program creates a virtual drive using physical RAM, which is obscenely fast. Users then move parts of essential software to the RAM disk, which results in large gains in speed.
However, I advise RAM drive usage only for those who want to improve the performance of a single application. The most important examples of software that benefit from RAM disks are Photoshop, browsers, and video editing software.
I’ll demonstrate how to combine a RAM disk with the Chrome Browser. I recommend that you have at least 1GB of RAM free. In my opinion, users should have at least 8GB of RAM for a 64-bit system and at least 4GB of RAM on a 32-bit system. But you can get away with less.
A lot of RAM drive software exist. My favorite is not free: SoftPerfect RAM Disk.
However, if you just want to get your feet wet, give DataRAM’s RamDisk a try. The free version is limited to 1GB in size. But if you own an AMD-based system, you get a 4GB maximum instead.
How to Configure a RAM drive
Setting up a RAM disk just requires downloading and installing the software. After running the software, you need to configure it with the following options:
Choose the maximum RAM disk size, which is around 1GB. You can use any size but a smaller capacity limits its utility.
Check the box for Set Disk Label. That way, you can identify the disk in the next step.
Then choose Start RAMDisk.
Configure your browser to read and write cache files to and from the RAM disk.
Right-click on your browser shortcut and choose Properties from the context menu. Windows 10 makes it easier than ever to access a browser shortcut. You can do it directly from the Taskbar.
From Properties, choose the Shortcut tab. Then within the Target: text input field, append the following code to the end of the text, where “R” is your own RAM disk drive letter:
--disk-cache-dir=R:\
The complete line of code should look something like this:
Your own code may differ, depending on Chrome’s configuration.
Finally, choose OK and restart your browser. From now on, Chrome will read and write cache files to the RAM disk.
While Christian Bonilla believes RAM drives to be infeasible, I disagree. But he does make a few good points. One of the biggest shortcomings is that they can make your computer shut down slower. And because they run in the background, older computers might not handle the additional overhead very well.
We’ve written to death on the subject of malware scanners for good reason: most performance problems originate with malicious programs running wild in the background. Some of the better free malware scanners out there include Malwarebytes, SuperAntiSpyware, and ClamWin.
The Windows registry has all the settings for Windows and other programs. Installing software changes the registry. However, sometimes when a program is uninstalled, it fails to remove those changes. Over time, thousands upon thousands of registry modifications slow system performance. A registry cleaner removes those changes and other leftovers from uninstalled programs.
However, in my opinion, registry cleaners cause more problems than they solve. While you might see a tiny amount of performance improvement, for the most part, you’re likely to see glitchy OS behavior after running a registry cleaner.
The best program out there for cleaning your registry is CCleaner. However, Piriform, the maker of CCleaner, suffered a security breach which allowed hackers to slip malicious code into two versions of CCleaner. The threat is over, fortunately.
We’ve written about how to use CCleaner before, so I won’t bore you with the specifics on how to use it.
12. Speed Up Windows 10 By Removing Bad Apps
A lot of users install horrible software, thinking that they need it. Most of the time, it’s a Potentially Unwanted Program (PUP) that slows your computer down.
Some of the worst offenders include PDF readers, music and video players, browsers, and BitTorrent software. Fortunately, lots of great alternatives exist. The process is simple. First, uninstall the software and, second, install a better program.
Here are a few alternatives you can consider.
Sumatra PDF Reader
VLC Video Player
Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox
QBittorrent
PDF Reader Replacement: Sumatra PDF
Lots of internet users believe that Adobe Acrobat PDF Reader is the only program capable of reading PDF files. That’s a myth. Because Adobe Acrobat can spread malware, you might want an alternative.
Sumatra PDF Reader is a better alternative to Adobe. I recommend Sumatra to everyone. Not only is it open source, but it also reads comic books (CBZ or CBR files), blocks potentially malignant scripts, and runs on older systems.
All modern browsers can read PDF files. You may not even need a dedicated PDF reader.
VLC Player is one of the three media players ever made.
You could make the argument that better music players are out there. But for video, few can top VLC. On top of that, it is open source, supports keyboard shortcuts, plays almost any video file, and costs nothing.
Chrome is perhaps the fastest alternative to Microsoft’s Edge or Internet Explorer browsers. It comes in both the standard 32-bit and 64-bit variations. Google even makes an open source version of Chrome, called Chromium.
Overall, Chrome offers everything that Edge doesn’t: extensibility, security, and speed. If you use the internet often, Chrome ranks among the first apps you should install. However, Firefox offers the same degree of extensibility and it’s 100% open source.
Also: Check out the Windows-optimized browser based on Firefox: Pale Moon. Pale Moon works with many Firefox extensions and comes with 64-bit versions.
For those of you using a horrible, malware-like BitTorrent client, there is hope. Check out the open-source qBittorrent. Unlike the cross-platform BitTorrent client Deluge, it receives regular updates. On top of that, qBittorrent is more fully featured and includes all the extras of its competitors, without the crazy malware infections.
The latest version of Windows comes with a ridiculous number of preinstalled apps—not all are useful. Remove them with this excellent guide on debloating Windows 10.
In most cases, removing the software does nothing. Most of the apps are actually placeholders that install themselves upon activation. If you’re not concerned about Microsoft’s bloatware, though, you might want to consider an in-place repair.
In-place repair is most useful for when you want to return your computer to a like-new condition, without reinstalling all of your applications. The in-place repair merely refreshes Windows’s core operating system files.
To perform an in-place repair, perform the following actions:
The computer then downloads a copy of Windows 10, which can take several hours. After it finishes, the Media Creation Tool reinstalls Windows 10 on top of itself. If your system has been crippled by malware, or through some other kind of damage to the core OS files, an in-place repair can patch Windows 10, restoring it to a fresher state.
For more information on the process, here’s a video:
14. Remove Windows 10’s Default Apps
Unfortunately, an in-place upgrade replaces or restores all of Windows 10’s baked-in bloatware (if you removed them). Fortunately, a few apps make debloating Windows easier than ever. My favorite of these is Windows 10 Default App Remover 1.2.
Windows 10 Default App Remover 1.2 can uninstall the default Windows 10 applications. On top of that, its publisher has provided the source code for the application.
To de-crap your computer, simply tap on the app you want to remove. For example, if Solitaire gets on your nerves, just left-click on it in the user interface and you’ll receive a prompt asking whether you intend on removing the app. Confirming this removes the application. The amazing thing is that 10AppsManager allows users to reinstall removed software.
The app received a clean report from Norton Safeweb and VirusTotal so it is likely not a source of malware.
Download: Windows 10 Default App Remover 1.2 for Windows (Free)
What’s the Best Windows 10 Speed Hack?
The best and cheapest speed optimization tip for most users is the in-place repair. If you don’t mind losing some of your installed programs, a factory reset is another great option. The biggest cause of any slowdown is badly-written programs. And removing or optimizing that software generally resolves most performance issues.
Desktop wallpapers are nice to look at, but they can be a little static. It’s time to end all of that and set a video wallpaper instead.
Several tools are available for this, each with slightly differing results. But whatever your platform you should find one that works for you.
First, Select a Video for Your Desktop Background
Before you get started setting a video as a desktop background, you need to spend a few moments considering which video clip you wish to use.
Different types of videos are suitable for different purposes. For example, if you just want to enjoy your favorite movie while you work or browse the web, simply choose a video of a suitable length.
If, however, you really want an eye-catching desktop background, then selecting a shorter clip would be more appropriate, especially if it’s something that will be striking when looped. Video clips and GIFs can both be used.
Here are three ways to set a video as your desktop wallpaper, on Windows 10, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS.
1. Set a Video Background on Windows With PUSH Video Wallpaper
We reckon that the video wallpaper app gives the best results, and it’s easy to use. On the downside, it’s not free (costing around $10 to buy). However, you do get a free trial.
Begin by heading to the site and downloading PUSH Video Wallpaper. Run the .EXE file to install, and then launch the app. Instantaneously, your desktop background will be transformed as the app runs, displaying a demo video clip on a loop.
To change this:
Open the PUSH Video Wallpaper item from the taskbar.
Click the + symbol to browse for a new clip.
Select this to set a background.
For short clips use the loop tool in the controls.
Other controls include a shuffle button, the option to change video intervals, and a volume/mute button. This could prove useful for controlling audio levels when you might prefer to be working. Playlists of videos for a video wallpaper can also be created.
The result is a smooth, full screen desktop video wallpaper background, with app windows and icons sitting in the foreground. PUSH Video Wallpaper is a great option to set a video as your Windows desktop background.
Another way creating a desktop background video is thanks to that most versatile of desktop media players, the VLC media player. Available from VideoLAN.org, the VLC media player is available for all operating systems.
In theory, this method will work on various Windows, macOS, Linux, even ChromeOS, BSD variants, and Solaris.
How to Create a Desktop Background Video Using VLC
Setting up VLC Media Player to play videos as a desktop is straightforward. In older versions, however, you’ll need to:
Open Tools > Preferences > Videos and set the Show Settings box to All.
Next, look for the Output setting and select DirectX (DirectDraw) video output in the drop-down menu.
Click Save, then exit VLC and browse to the video clip you want to use as a background
Right-click the clip and play it in VLC media player.
As it plays, right-click on the player window and choose Video > Set as Wallpaper. Alternatively, click Video > Set as Wallpaper from the menu.
Once you’re done with the video, maximize VLC media player, open Video and click DirectX Wallpaper again to remove the check. Then exit the program.
However, for more recent versions of VLC media player, simply right-click the video and select Video > Set as wallpaper.
However, the VLC solution may not suit you. Although the video goes into full-screen mode and you can still access your Windows toolbar and Start button, desktop icons and shortcuts are missing.
It’s more of a modified full-screen mode than a desktop background.
Alt-Tab through the open apps and place them on top of the video.
The video then becomes the background. Note that again in this scenario, it is not a true desktop background as there are no desktop icons and shortcuts. Hit Esc to exit the full-screen view.
Take Your Desktop Theming to the Next Level
You probably know of various ways to customize your desktop, from simply changing the background picture to moving the taskbar. But adding a video as the desktop background is the final stage of customization.
If you haven’t tried it already, now is surely the time. You have three options:
PUSH Video Wallpaper for Windows.
VLC Media Player for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS.
YouTube for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS.
VLC is probably the best solution for this, which should come as no surprise given how versatile it is as a media player. And if you’re not already a member of the VLC fanclub, here are some more awesome VLC features you should know about.
Activity Monitor is the Mac equivalent of the Windows Task Manager. It displays a variety of resources in use on your system in real-time. These include processes, disk activity, memory usage, and more to provide a sort of dashboard into what’s going on in your Mac.
We’ll show you how to read and use Activity Monitor. You’ll also learn how CPU, RAM, and disk activity can affect your Mac’s performance over time.
How to Open Activity Monitor on Mac
The Activity Monitor app lives in Applications > Utilities. Navigate to this folder and double-click the icon to launch the app.
However, you can get to this (or any Mac app) much faster using Spotlight search. Press Cmd + Space to open Spotlight. Then type in the first few letters of the app and press Return.
You may find it convenient to pin Activity Monitor in your Dock. Right-click the app icon and choose Options > Keep in Dock. You can even monitor vital parameters right from the Dock. Choose View > Dock Icon and select Show CPU Usage or History.
Basics of Activity Monitor
The main window of the app is the principal process monitor. It displays a list of both open apps and system processes. Some apps are easy to spot, while others are system-level processes essential for running macOS.
Click the column header at the top to arrange the processes in either ascending or descending order. On the upper-right, there is a Search Filter box which lets you search for a specific process.
The five category tabs at the top of the window (CPU,Memory,Energy,Disk, and Network) focus on specific kinds of data. They’re the primary system monitor indicators and gives you a lot of valuable information for troubleshooting purposes. Each pane shows real-time stats and graphs of resource usage over time.
By default, Activity Monitor shows only processes running for the currently logged-in user. To change this, choose View > All Processes. You can also adjust the number of statistics shown in the columns and the update frequency.
Monitor CPU With Activity Monitor
The CPU tab shows how every process uses your computer’s processor. You’ll see what percentage of the total CPU a process is using (% CPU), how long it’s been active (CPU Time), number of times a process awoke from the sleep state (Idle Wake Ups), and more.
At the bottom, you’ll also see the percentage and graph of your CPU used by the System (red) and User (blue).
List processes by %CPU
To see which processes are consuming excessive resources, choose View > All Processes and click on the % CPU column to sort them by usage. Some processes may occasionally display high CPU usage, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate a problem. For example:
The mds and mdworker processes associated with Spotlight might show frequent CPU spikes during indexing. This is perfectly normal for a new or recently formatted Mac. The process will end automatically when done.
The kernel_task process uses a large amount of CPU. It helps manage your Mac’s temperature by limiting CPU access to processes that use the CPU intensely. It’s common to see this consume more CPU over time. Thankfully, you can fix “kernel_task” high CPU usage on your Mac.
A web browser may show high CPU usage while rendering too many tabs or displaying multimedia content like video.
Quit Rogue Processes
If an app is acting weird, becomes unresponsive, or crashes, then your best option is to force-quit the app. In Activity Monitor, you may see problematic processes in red text with the phrase Not Responding.
To terminate the process, select the app and choose View > Quit Process. Or click the X button at the top of the toolbar to quit the process.
If Activity Monitor is not working for some reason, then try these alternative steps:
Press and hold Cmd + Option + Esc. Choose the app you want to quit in the Force Quit Applications dialog box and click Force Quit.
Open the Terminal app. Type >ps -ax then press Return to list all the running process along with PID (Process Identification) number. To force quit an app, type >kill <PID number>.
Note: You should never force-quit system processes, or ignore processes that run as root. Instead, find out the probable cause by looking at logs or restarting your Mac to see if the problem vanishes.
The Memory Tab in Activity Monitor
The Memory tab displays how much RAM your Mac is using. Along with the CPU, it’s a chief performance indicator of your Mac. At the bottom of the window, you’ll see a real-time memory graph with values that can help you diagnose performance issues.
The Memory Used value is the total amount of memory used by all apps and system processes. It’s divided into the following:
Wired Memory: Processes that must stay in memory. They can’t be compressed or paged out.
App Memory: Memory allocated to all app processes.
Compressed: macOS includes software-based memory compression to increase performance and reduce energy use. Your Mac compresses the content used by less active processes to free up space for more active ones.
Check If Your Mac Needs More RAM
The Memory Pressure graph shows the present state of memory resource usage through different colors. Green means sufficient memory resources are available, while Red means your Mac has run out of memory and needs more RAM to operate efficiently.
The borderline Yellow is a warning sign. Check to see if an app is using up memory and causing the memory pressure to increase. If that’s the case, then quit the app.
View Cached Files Memory Usage
Cached Files is another useful parameter. This tells you how much memory is presently used by apps, but available for other apps to take. For example, if you quit Apple Mail after using it for a while, its data will become part of the memory used by cached files.
If you re-launch the Mail app, it’ll launch faster. But if another app needs RAM, macOS will dynamically remove cached data and allocate it to other apps.
If Cached Files is consuming a lot of memory, don’t fret about it. As long as memory pressure is green, it shouldn’t be a concern. You might need more RAM in the future, but before that, check out some common mistakes that slow down your Mac.
The Swap Used and Compression Entries
These two parameters tell how much active process data was swapped out to startup drive or compressed to save space. Compression is preferred to swapping because it makes more room for memory and doesn’t slow down your Mac.
A low number for Swap Used is acceptable, but a high number indicates that your Mac doesn’t have enough real memory to meet the application demands.
Review Energy Usage With Activity Monitor
Every MacBook user has a valid concern about battery life; you probably want your laptop to run for as long as possible. The Energy pane of Activity Monitor is your Mac’s resource monitor. It shows overall energy use and power used by each app.
You’ll see the Energy Impact of running apps, along with the Avg Energy Impact of each app over the last eight hours or when your Mac booted up, whichever is shorter. The App Nap feature allows your Mac to put inactive apps to sleep—this field tells you which apps support this and whether it is preventing your Mac from going to sleep or not.
Implications of Energy Usage
The more energy a particular app uses, the lower your battery life becomes. At the most basic level, you must check the Avg Energy Impact column to see which apps use the most energy over time. Quit those apps if you don’t need them.
For web browsers, you don’t have to quit the entire app. Click the triangle next to the browser to expand the list of child processes. Find the one with the highest energy impact, then force-quit that process.
The Disk pane shows the amount of data each process has read from or written to the disk. It denotes the number of times your Mac accessed the drive to read (read IO) and write (write IO) data. The color blue shows the number of reads/sec while red indicates the number of writes/sec.
Implications of Disk Activity
Having enough RAM is essential for performance, but free space on your startup drive is critical for system stability. Pay close attention to the number of reads or writes and observe how your system accesses the read or write data.
If disk activity is high, does it correlate with the CPU usage? Some apps or processes can cause both heavy disk activity and CPU usage, like when you convert video or edit RAW photos. And if your Mac is short on RAM, you’ll see frequent spikes in disk activity due to swapping.
Using the Network Tab in Activity Monitor
The Network pane shows how much data your Mac is sending or receiving over your network. At the bottom, you’ll see network usage in packets and the amount transferred (in red) and received (in blue).
Implications of Network Activity
In the Activity Monitor, you can quickly identify apps that transmit lots of data. Some processes naturally generate a lot of network activity, but others using the network a lot might not make much sense. Determining which external resource each process is connecting to is a huge pain.
If you’re curious to see what data packets are passing through which processes, use the Little Snitch app to monitor network traffic on a per-app basis.
Generate a System Diagnostics Report
Activity Monitor can also help you generate a report about the status of your Mac. You can save the report and send it to a friend or Apple support for troubleshooting purposes.
To do this, choose View > System Diagnostics. Wait for a while for this to complete.
Benchmark Your Mac
Activity Monitor the stock macOS task manager. By running this tool and following the advice we’ve covered here, you can work out why your Mac is slow and what each parameter means to your overall system health.
If you just added new RAM or performance isn’t up to par, you can analyze your system performance with a series of tests. Have a look at these benchmark apps to measure your Mac’s performance.
On the same day that she became a Pulitzer Prize finalist for her work bringing the Cambridge Analytica scandal to light, journalist Carole Cadwalladr took the stage at TED to “address you directly, the gods of Silicon Valley.”
Cadwalladr began her talk by recounting a trip she took after the Brexit referendum, back to her hometown in South Wales.
She recalled feeling “a weird sense of unreality” walking around a town filled with new infrastructure funded by the European Union, while being told by residents that the EU had done nothing for them. Similarly, she said they told her about the dangers of immigration, even though they lived in a town with “one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country.”
Cadwalladr said she began to understand where those sentiments were coming from after her story ran, and someone contacted her about seeing scary, misleading ads about Turkey and Turkish immigration on Facebook. Cadwalladr, however, couldn’t see those ads, because she wasn’t targeted, and Facebook offered no general archive of all ads that had run on the platform.
Meanwhile, Cadwalladr said her interest in these issues led her to Christopher Wylie, whose whistleblowing about Cambridge Analytica’s use of Facebook user data helped prompt broader scrutiny of the social network’s privacy practices.
Cadwalladr described Wylie as “extraordinarily brave,” particularly since Cambridge Analytica repeatedly threatened them with legal action. The final threat, she said, came a day before publication, and it came from Facebook itself.
“It said that if we published, they would sue us,” Cadwalladr said. “We did it anyway. Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history on that, and you are on the wrong side of history in this.”
The “this” in question is what she characterized as a failure by the social media platforms to fully reckon with the extent to which they’ve become tools for the spread of lies and misinformation. For example, she pointed to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s refusal thus far to appear before parliaments around the world that have asked him to testify.
Calling out executives like Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet/Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey (who’s scheduled to take the stage tomorrow morning), Cadwalladr insisted that the stakes could not be higher.
“This technology you have invented has been amazing, but now it’s a crime scene, and you have the evidence,” she said. “It is not enough to say that you will do better in the future, because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the past.”
She went on to declare that the Brexit vote demonstrates that “liberal democracy is broken.”
“This is not democracy,” Cadwalladr said. “Spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash from God knows where — it’s subversion, and you are accessories to it.”
And for those of us who don’t run giant technology platforms, she added, “My question to everybody else is: Is this what we want? To let them get away with it, and to sit back and play with our phones as this darkness falls?”
