- Press ⊞ WINDOWS + I to open settings
- Click on System in the sidebar
- Scroll down and select Multitasking
- Find Alt + Tab section and click on the drop-down menu
- Pick Open Windows Only
- Close settings
Over time Applications change, some for the better some for worse. Some of them even stop receiving updates and are old and vulnerable. Sometimes standards change and some file types are not used anymore. Software evolves along with technology and that is good.
Keeping old and useless applications inside your Windows is not so good. From various exploits to simply taking up space, maybe even slowing down OS it is always wise and good to clean your Windows from unwanted old applications.
In this article, we will be mentioning some relics of old and providing you with an explanation of why you should remove them from your system if by any chance you still have them on it.
Silverlight was meant to be a competitor for Adobe Flash, it is a WEB framework that enables rich media content inside your WEB browser. The issue is that it is not developed anymore and today's browsers do not support it.
The only browser that actually can support it is internet explorer which itself is not supported and how there is practically 0 content on today's modern WEB that will require Silverlight, it is safe and recommended to remove it.
Speaking of Adobe Flash, you should remove it as well. Flash has stopped receiving support as of January 2021 and browsers have dropped support for it and even blocked it due to security issues.
However, there still might be some local installation of Flash itself inside Windows along with the old Shockwave player that stopped receiving support in 2019. You should remove them both.
Now this one is tricky, by itself JAVA does not present any security issues since browsers do not support it anymore and the desktop version is not really slowing down your computer. This one has simply put just another media runtime that is not used and simply takes up space and resources.
However if you have some applications that you do use that rely on it (I can really just think of JAVA Minecraft at this point) leave it of course but in any other case, it is just purely not needed.
While we are at media runtime and stuff that just simply is not needed, Quicktime is one of them. Now this Apple Video player and codec is still pretty developed and active in Apple’s iOS environment, Windows version has not been updated since 2016 and it was discovered that it contains some critical vulnerabilities.
Uninstall it and if you need a player that could play MOV files, just use a VLC player that can play them without any separately installed codec.
This one, the same as CCleaner was once a good application, as a matter of fact, it was the best torrenting application. Sadly it has fallen from its grace very low, from getting tons of ads in its interface to findings in 2015 that code of torrent client was packed with a crypto miner that used system resources of an installed computer to mine crypto without user’s awareness.
You should uninstall this torrent client if you would like to get your PC back and not provide it for cryptocurrency mining for the company that developed it. Use qBittorrent or TIxati, open-source and free ones that have everything needed for any torrenting needs.
There are a lot of toolbars for browsers and extensions that are malicious in nature or simply not updated providing security issues. It is very advisable to remove this as soon as possible.
WinRAR has gained its large popularity solely for the reason that you could download it from the official site like shareware and use it forever. The license never expired and you could use it indefinitely. Sadly not much has been improved in the application itself and it is slowly falling out in its range of what it can do.
There are better open source and free options today like 7zip, PeaZip, ZIPvare, and more that are working the same as WinRAR if not even better.
Yes, applications that come bundled with Windows and with some laptops that include manufacturers made software for different tasks like its own specific media players, calculators, etc.
It is known that these applications are not better than their open-source rivals and there are too many of them including some that you will probably never use. It is the same as buying a new phone bundled with tons of applications that you do not need, did not ask for, and do not use. Delete all of them.
Considering Windows there are also some Store application like Candy Crush Saga demo and other are safe to remove if not needed.
That’s it, our advice for old and not needed applications so you can keep your PC safe and fast.
Code 42 Error is referred to as a Device Manager Error code. Before we explain what this code indicates, it is important to understand what ‘Device Manager’ is and its functions.
Device Manager is basically a Windows tool that helps manage devices attached to the system such as the Printer, Scanner and the USB Device. The Device Manager Error code 42 occurs when a duplicate device is detected.
Error Code 42 is displayed in the following format:
“Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware because there is a duplicate device already running in the system. Code 42”
Narrowing down to one particular cause for error code 42 is not virtually possible because it may be triggered due to many underlying reasons. These include:
No matter what the reason for this error code,, to avoid inconvenience and to ensure proper hardware performance, it is advisable to fix it right away without any delay.
If you’re not technically sound, the code 42 message display can panic you. But don’t worry, the error message sounds complex but it is quite easy to fix.
To resolve code 42 in a few minutes, simply try the methods given below. These methods are easy-to-perform, effective and more importantly require no technical expertise.
Code 42 can pop up due to some temporary glitch in the Device Manager. By simply restarting your PC, you can resolve this problem.
Therefore, first things first, restart your system. However, in case it doesn’t work out, try other methods.
Launch the troubleshooting wizard to find the underlying problem and resolve it accordingly. To do this, proceed with the following steps:
Another method to fix code 42 is to use the System Restore tool to restore your PC to its previous working state before the error popped up. To do this,
Creating backup manually can be time-consuming and a painstaking task. The best way to create backup and restore your PC to its normal state is to download DriverFIX.
It is a user-friendly device driver management software that helps create data backup automatically and simultaneously restores your PC back to its normal working state in a few seconds.
This software is compatible with all Windows versions.
Click here to download DriverFIX on your system to resolve error code 42.
‘HTMLayout.dll cannot be loaded to properly start GUI. Therefore process cannot continue’, ‘Htmlayout.dll not found’, ‘The file htmlayout.dll is missing’,and so on, then your system may be exposed to serious privacy and security threats.
Stable Diffusion is a machine learning model developed by Stability AI to generate digital images from natural language descriptions. The model can be used for different tasks like generating image-to-image translations guided by text prompts and upscaling images.
Unlike competing models like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion is open source and does not artificially limit the images it produces. Stable diffusion was trained on a subset of the LAION-Aesthetics V2 data set. It can run on most consumer hardware equipped with a modest GPU and was hailed by PC World as "the next killer app for your PC".
Since Stable Diffusion is run locally and not in the cloud, as mentioned there is no limit to the number of images that you can produce but in order to use it you will have to get down a little dirty with setting your PC environment for it since it is not really an application, it is a command line text based descriptor that will use python to generate your images, so there is no install nor GUI.
In this guide, we will show you how to both install and run Stable Diffusion on your local PC so you can start producing some cool images all by yourself.
Make no mistake, Stable Diffusion will not run on a potato PC, in order to harvest the power of AI-generated imagery this is what you will need:
For this tutorial, we are covering the installation and running of Stable Diffusion on Windows PC. The steps presented here are presented in a way that installation can be performed on any operating system but precise instructions will be for Windows OS.
The first thing to do is to install GIT. It is a tool that will let you easily maintain and install repos from the internet. to install it go to: https://git-scm.com/ and click on download. Follow the instructions for your version of the operating system. If you are a developer you are familiar with GIT and if you already have it installed you can skip this step.
One thing that is important when installing GIT locally is to select to use it via the command line (the second option that says "Git from the command line and also from 3rd-party software").
Now when we have GIT installed, next thing is to use Miniconda3 to install python and all required libraries that are needed. Get the installer at: https://docs.conda.io/en/latest/miniconda.html
Miniconda3 is basically an easy installer so you do not have to install tons of stuff manually from different websites and sources, it is nicely packaged in the installer that will take care of everything.
After the previous two steps, we are ready now to actually install Stable Diffusion. Go to https://huggingface.co/CompVis/stable-diffusion#model-access and install the latest library (as of the writing of this article currently it is stable-diffusion-v1-4-original, the last one on the right), the library is almost 5GB in size so be prepared for big download.
After installing stable diffusion's latest library it is time to update it to the newest version. You can download ZIP from GIT HUB https://github.com/CompVis/stable-diffusion
Once downloaded click on the Windows start button and type in Miniconda3 and click on open. Create a folder and name it how you want on a drive of your choice. For this example, we will install it all in disk C under folder AI_art, follow the instructions below but use your own names and destination instead. Do not close Minicoda3 after typing commands!!!
cd c:/
mkdir AI_art
cd AI_art
Extract GitHub files that you have downloaded into your new folder and get back to Minicoda3 and type the next commands:
cd C:\AI_art\stable-diffusion-main
conda env create -f environment.yaml
conda activate ldm
mkdir models\ldm\stable-diffusion-v1
Let the whole process finish, some files are large and it might take a while. After the whole process is finished and completed, copy the checkpoint file that you have downloaded into: C:\AI_art\stable-diffusion-main\models\ldm\stable-diffusion-v1
After the file is copied rename it to model.ckpt and you are finished.
The created environment is needed in order to actually use Stable Diffusion to create images. Each time you want to use it you will have to run it, so go into Miniconda3, and inside it type:
conda activate ldm
cd C:\AI_art\stable-diffusion-main
after we are inside the folder call the script with the parameters:
python scripts/txt2img.py --prompt "TXT DESCRIPTION OF IMAGE THAT YOU WANT TO CREATE" --plms --n_iter 5 --n_samples 1
and that's it, your image is created and it is located in C:\AI_art\stable-diffusion-main\outputs\txt2img-samples\samples