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In one word, the answer is a resounding “no.” While AtlasVPN isn’t all bad—there’s the occasional glimmer of a decent VPN service—AtlasVPN isn’t a very good VPN overall. The only thing that it really has that is worth highlighting is its free tier, and even that is eclipsed by plenty of other services, like Windscribe. Let’s see why that is. A Quick Look at AtlasVPN To figure out what makes AtlasVPN such a disappointing experience, let’s first go over what it can do and how it does it....

Nitro Enclaves are a new feature of AWS’s Nitro Hypervisor that manages EC2 instances. It allows you to provision a separate, isolated environment used for processing highly secure, often encrypted data. Data Processing in an Isolated Environment Nitro Enclaves is a new capability of EC2. Each Enclave needs an EC2 instance as its parent; you can think of it like an attachment, like an EBS drive, or accelerator card....

The latest version of system cleaning application CCleaner is out, with a lot of new changes under the hood like 64-bit support, cleaning HTML5 local storage, a drive wiper tool, and better support for Internet Explorer 9 and Google Chrome. Just in case you haven’t read them, make sure to check out our guide to creating a shortcut to run CCleaner silently, and how to setup CCleaner to automatically clean your PC on a schedule....

Unrequited Love The “relationship” between a loyal supporter and a company is essentially unrequited love. And just like romantic unrequited love, this dynamic often results in one side staunchly defending or completely ignoring the other’s faults. It’s an entirely one-sided relationship. The company gets exactly what it wants—our money, blind support, and free advertising—while we only get what it decides we should have. You are as much the product as the actual phone, tablet, laptop, etc....

Create Slide Show Launch Windows 7 Media Center and click on the Picture Library tile found under Pictures and Videos. In the Pictures Library, scroll across to slide shows and click on Create Slide show. Enter a name for the slide show and click Next. If you are using a Windows Media Center remote, click on the OK button to bring up the onscreen keyboard. Use the directional buttons to navigate across the keyboard and press OK to select each letter....

Getting Started First, make sure you have Windows Live Photo Gallery installed (link below). Live Photo Gallery is part of the Windows Live Essentials suite, you can select other programs to install along with it if you want. Make sure to uncheck setting your home page to MSN and setting your search provider as Bing if you don’t want them changed. Now, make sure you have pictures that will work good for a panorama....

Sometimes it can be nice to really make your computer fully personalized. Back in the ‘90’s, many of use enjoyed customizing Windows 95 and 98’s themes with colors, fonts, and more. These features are actually still in Windows 7, albeit slightly more hidden. Here’s how to change them. Right-click on your desktop, and select Personalize as you would to change your Aero theme. In the Personalization pane, click Window Color under the theme lists....

Note: Requires .Net Framework 3.5+. Setup When you download WriteMonkey you will need to unzip the following components, add them to a “Program Files” folder, and create a shortcut to the “WriteMonkey.exe” file. Ready for distraction free writing? WriteMonkey in Action When you start WriteMonkey up each time it will totally blank out the entire screen leaving you with just your writing to focus on. As you can see here your writing area is “outlined” at the four corners with small “dash-like” symbols....

Not all clear cases are created the same. Some options are prone to yellowing over time, while others do very little to keep your phone from getting scratched or dinged. Mkeke tackled both of these challenges head-on by developing a crystal clear case that looks great and offers military grade protection for when you need it most. Mkeke Cases Are Designed With Style and Protection in Mind Mkeke’s clear iPhone 14 Pro cases are comprised of flexible polycarbonate that’s precision molded so that all buttons, ports, speakers, and microphones line up perfectly....

The UGREEN Nexode Mini is a compact USB wall adapter with two USB Type-C ports, so you can plug in two phones, a phone and a tablet, or any other combination of devices. It can provide up to 45W of power if you only have one device connected, which is more than enough to rapidly charge most phones and tablets and charge an ultrabook. If you have two devices connected, the top port will provide 25W and the bottom will max out at 20W....

Why Do I Need to Be Added to the sudoers File? In Linux installations, the root user is the most highly-privileged user. They can perform any administrative task, access any file regardless of actually owns it, and they can create, manipulate, and even remove other users. This level of power is dangerous. If root makes a mistake, the results can be catastrophic. They have the ability to mount and unmount file systems, and to over-write them entirely....

Self-signed certificates are an easy way to perform testing and other less important tasks. Self-signed certificates do not have a trusted chain of certificates backing them up and are signed by the user who created it. If you trust the entity that signed the certificate then you can use it just as you would a properly validated one. If you need to create a self-signed certificate, one way you can do so is with PowerShell....

Search Commands Have you ever found yourself in a situation at work where a document has a deadline, and you’re spending too much time searching for commands and formatting features? If you are new to the Office 2007 Ribbon feature it can be extremely frustrating. That is where Search Commands from Microsoft Office Labs comes in. During installation you have the option to participate in the Office Labs Analytics. It’s completely up to you, but it can help in further development of this ongoing project....

Azure Logic Apps provide tools for automating workflows. The solution is intended to help build corporate workflows, which are as simple as IFTTT or Zapier, meaning you can chain triggering events, outputs, and inputs together to result in some outcome. So, if you want to monitor your website, you can do that. And that’s what we are going to do in this article. We will attempt to send out a return signal every quarter-hour to an endpoint....

System Restore is a Windows feature that can help fix certain types of crashes and other computer problems. Here’s how it works, how to set it up, and how to use it when things go awry. We’re going to be using Windows 11 in this article, but System Restore has been around a long time — and works pretty much the same way in each version of Windows. The instructions here are good for Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11, and you’ll encounter only minor differences throughout the process....

A lesser-known feature of Windows is the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). This is a service, primarily for programmers and system administrators, that works to transfer files to and from HTTP and SMB servers. Here are some of the incredibly useful features of this service: Handle Network Interruptions Pause and Resume, even from a Reboot Take into account Network Cost In this article, we explore how to use BITS in PowerShell to perform and control file transfer operations....

How does this work? Simple! All of the newer file formats in Office 2007 and Office 2010 are actually zip files containing XML and lots of folders, and they have all the media neatly embedded within that file. Viewing Images from Office 2007/2010 Files For our example, we’re using a Powerpoint file, as you can see here: Simply change the extension of the file to .zip (you may have to head into Organize –> Folder and search options to enable the display of file extensions)....

Note: VMware Player is available for Windows and Linux. Keep in mind that this is Beta Software and will occasionally be temperamental. Installing VMware Player The install process is not complicated, but relevant install windows are shown here. Also keep in mind that the entire process will take more than a few minutes to finish while everything is being installed. Note: During the install process you will not see the EULA for VMware Player....

The reason for getting rid of it as cited by the GIMP developers, is that GIMP is too professional a software to be included in regular desktop version of Ubuntu. And it takes up too much of space on the disk. Also, the fact that it’s too complicated for regular users. If you can’t live without it…let’s see how to install GIMP 2.7.1 on Lucid Lynx (Currently in Alpha). The new version of GIMP supports single window mode and we will also see how to enable this feature as well....

Like other true wireless earbuds, these connect to your phone or other devices via Bluetooth. The trick they have up their sleeve comes in the form of a USB-C dongle that adds 2.4GHz wireless connectivity to the device of your choice, dramatically lowering latency. Most true wireless earbuds aren’t the best choice for video or gaming, thanks to latency. Can the JBL Quantum TWS actually handle video and gaming as well as music?...