Why Are There So Many "Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables" Installed on My PC?

Did You Know? Sea otters are one of the few mammalian species that use tools; otters will frequently carry rocks in a pocket-like pouch behind their forelegs, which they use to crack open shellfish and clams. Geek Trivia Just Like Many Western Buildings Have No Formal 13th Floor, Many Chinese Buildings Have No? 8th Floor → 23rd Floor → 9th Floor → 4th Floor → Advertisement Free Tips and Tricks Guide: Microsoft Windows 10 -- Free Reference Card Use this reference to brush up on the basics and to find alternative methods to your favorite commands. This printable quick reference is yours to use, distribute, and share at your organization! Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. How to Reset Notepad to Its Default Settings on Windows Google Will Make a Custom Case for Your Nexus, But It’s Not That Great How to Monitor Your FPS in UWP Games on Windows 10 Why Are There So Many “Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables” Installed on My PC? How to Enable (and Troubleshoot) Remote Access to Your Plex Media Server How to Control Your Amazon Echo from Anywhere How to View a List of Extensions Installed in All Your Browsers Fix Slow-Loading Windows Icons by Increasing the Icon Cache How to Snap Apps and Multitask on Your Xbox One How to Remove the “Get Windows 10” Icon from Your System Tray (and Stop Those Upgrade Notifications) Geek Comic Today's Tech Term AV Killer An AV Killer (short for Anti-Virus Killer) is a malicious tool that is capable of disabling or removing virus protection programs on a user’s computer. An AV Killer may also have the capability to not only work its way around firewalls, but disable them as well. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. The elderly are way savvier with password security than millennials They may not be making passwords for a Vine account, but older users are much better about creating secure passwords and safeguarding them. [Quartz] How Zika Spiraled Out of Control The virus was a tiny, barely known annoyance. Scientists now think environmental changes made Zika explode into a global crisis [Scientific American] How Doom lived up to nearly a decade's worth of expectations Compared to other long-in-production games with high hopes, Doom manages to live up to (and perhaps exceed) the expectations of patient gamers who waited so long for it. [Polygon] Windows hardware specs going up for the first time since 2009 The Windows 10 Anniversary Update includes new RAM requirements. [ArsTechnica] Earth May Be Home to a Trillion Microbes According to a new estimate, there are about one trillion species of microbes on Earth, and 99.999 percent of them have yet to be discovered. [NYT] How to Reset Notepad to Its Default Settings on Windows Notepad is a basic but useful text editor that's been included in Windows in some form since the beginning. You've probably customized Notepad for the way you work, but now you want to reset Notepad to its default settings. No worries. It’s easy, and we'll show you how. Read This Article → Google Will Make a Custom Case for Your Nexus, But It’s Not That Great Everyone who uses a phone case wants something they actually like. So a customized phone case with the image of your choice sounds like a no brainer, right? That's exactly what Google is doing with "Live Cases," a new $35 product for the Nexus 6, Nexus 5X, and Nexus 6P that allows users to completely customize the look of their phone case with a photo or map. It’s…okay. Read This Article → How to Monitor Your FPS in UWP Games on Windows 10 Tools like FRAPS and NVIDIA’s ShadowPlay are great for monitoring your game performance on Windows, but they don’t work with Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform (UWP) games. Thankfully, a few tools will let you monitor your framerate and benchmark games made for Windows 10’s new application platform. Read This Article → Why Are There So Many “Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributables” Installed on My PC? If you’ve ever scrolled through your list of installed programs in Windows, wondering why there are so many versions of the Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable on there, you’re not alone. Join us as we take a look at what these things are and why there are so many installed on your PC. Read This Article → How to Enable (and Troubleshoot) Remote Access to Your Plex Media Server Plex Media Server’s remote access function is usually so smooth to set up that it’s practically magic. But if you’re having trouble accessing your movies from afar, we’re here to help. Read This Article → How to Control Your Amazon Echo from Anywhere If your Amazon Echo can’t hear you from the other room, or if you just want to control it when you’re away from home altogether, you can do so with a handy third-party app. Read This Article → How to View a List of Extensions Installed in All Your Browsers Installing extensions in web browsers can provide some very useful features. However, if you install a lot of extensions in multiple browsers, you might forget which you installed in which. We have an easy solution if you use Chrome, Firefox, and/or Internet Explorer. Read This Article → Fix Slow-Loading Windows Icons by Increasing the Icon Cache The icons for your files and programs are stored in a cache, so that Windows can display them quickly instead of having to load them from source files every time. If you’ve ever noticed that Windows Explorer loads icons slowly, especially when you first start your computer or open a folder with lots of files, increasing the size of the icon cache might help. Here’s how to do it with a simple Registry hack. Read This Article → How to Snap Apps and Multitask on Your Xbox One The Xbox One allows you to play a game and use an app–or just use two apps–at once. You just “Snap” an app to the right side of your screen. With Windows 10 apps debuting on the Xbox One this summer, Snap will only get more powerful and useful. Read This Article → How to Remove the “Get Windows 10” Icon from Your System Tray (and Stop Those Upgrade Notifications) Ever since Windows 10 came out, Windows 7 and 8 users have been bombarded with upgrade notifications, thanks to a little Windows icon in their system trays called GWX (“Get Windows 10”). Here is how to remove that icon and avoid the pushy notifications. Read This Article → Advertisement Free Tips and Tricks Guide: Microsoft Windows 10 -- Free Reference Card Use this reference to brush up on the basics and to find alternative methods to your favorite commands. This printable quick reference is yours to use, distribute, and share at your organization! Click here to download