Each week we dip into the Ask How-To Geek mailbox and answer your pressing questions. This week we’re looking at installing PDF printers, hiding accounts at the Windows Login Screen, and sharing a USB HDD between computers. Adding a PDF Printer Dear Looking, In your rant article on Style Sheets, you mention Print to PDF: “And of course, there’s loads of people that use print-to-PDF to save articles for later without wasting paper....

You have questions and we have answers; once a week we round up a handful of reader questions and share the answers with everyone. This week we’re looking at removing Windows 8 from a dual installation, understanding Linux file permissions, and disabling the Scan and Fix popup in Windows. How Can I Remove Windows 8? Dear Windows 7, I took Windows 8 for a spin. It was fun ‘n all but now I’m ready to nuke it and get ride of the boot loader so I can just boot straight into Windows 7 again....

Was Your iPhone Backed Up? If you have a recent backup for your iPhone, you’re in luck. There are two different types of backup you may have: an over-the-air cloud backup to iCloud, or a local backup on a Mac or PC. iCloud backups are the easiest to work with since they take care of themselves once they’ve been set up. You’ll need enough free iCloud storage for this to work, which for most people will involve paying for the 50GB ($0....

This week we’re looking at how you can score a free year of coding lessons, craft your own Grid-It gadget organizer, and how you can skip shredding sensitive documents if you’ve got a bucket on hand. Free Coding Lessons Samuel writes in with a tip to help fellow readers learn to code in the new year. He writes: We took the site for a spin, the first set of lessons gets you started working with basic JavaScript, and we have to say it looks like a great resource for a non-coder to get started learning to work with programming languages....

It’s time to dig into the tips box and share this week’s reader tips. Today we’re looking at the iPad as a digital picture frame, recycling media spindles as cable caddies, and CTRL+Click to open links in MS applications. Turn Your iPad into a Picture Frame in One Click How-To Geek reader Mark shares a tip on making your iPad useful while it’s sitting around charging: It is a nice touch, we agree....

Every week we dip into the tip box and share the tips you send in. This week we’re highlighting a great tip and the accompanying tutorial video that shows you how to pin any file to the Windows 7 taskbar. Robert Jasiński writes in with a clever way to pin any file you want to the task bar. By default if you drag a text document to the taskbar it will pin it to the Notepad executable—the same thing happens with any other file that has an association with an executable....

Running Windows 8 in VMware Chaotic Platypus writes in with this tip: Great tip off Chaotic, for those readers who are VirtualBox fans you can read our guide to setting up Windows 8 in VirtualBox here. I have the “Windows Developer Preview with developer tools English, 64-bit (x64)” running w/o any issues now. I was not able to get the same process to work with Workstation 7, but it works great in 8....

If you have a large amount of data you wish to burn to disc and it won’t fit on a single DVD or CD, you can make the process easier by using burning software that supports disc spanning. Here’s how to do it. Disc spanning allows you to burn large amounts of data without having to worry about organizing it into the right size so that it fits on each disc....

By this point, the act of plugging your phone in for a charge at night is about as mundane as brushing your teeth or showering… but what would you do if nothing came out the other side of the outlet? Our phones are only as good as the batteries they have installed in the back, so learning how to keep them alive and kicking without a reliable source of power is imperative for anyone in an emergency situation or otherwise....

Want to allow a standard user account to run an application as administrator without a UAC or password prompt? You can easily create a shortcut that uses the runas command with the /savecred switch, which saves the password. Note that using /savecred could be considered a security hole – a standard user will be able to use the runas /savecred command to run any command as administrator without entering a password....

Just like Netflix, Disney+ makes it easy to binge-watch a show by automatically playing the next episode when the first ends. If you don’t like this feature, you can turn Autoplay off alongside the app’s ability to play background videos on the landing page and throughout the app. Disable Autoplay on iPhone, iPad, and Android At launch, the Disney+ app doesn’t appear to display background videos on the homepage automatically....

Photoshop actions are extremely useful tools. They’re especially helpful if you’ve learned a bit of the program, but not enough to take on complicated edits yet. Actions can also seriously streamline your editing workflow and save you time. Here, we’ll go over how to download Photoshop actions once you buy them, how to install them, and how to use them. What Are Photoshop Actions? Photoshop actions are one-click sequences that allow you to automatically make complex edits in seconds....

If you want to try out the new Windows 8 but don’t have a CPU that supports virtualization, check out our guide on how to get all the goodness of Windows 8 along side Windows 7 by dual booting. The scenario: you are in a situation where you have Windows 7 installed and you really want to try out Windows 8, but your PC does not support virtualization and you don’t want to have to format since Windows 8 is still in pre-beta and the chances are that there are some things that are broken....

Ever need to record something on your computer exactly as it comes out of your speakers? Enabling “Stereo Mix” will let you do exactly that, and here’s how to do it. This will work on Windows 11, Windows 10, Windows 8, and Windows 7. Nowadays, most sound cards have the ability to record whatever is being output. The only hang-up is accessing that recording channel. Depending on your PC, the recording channel may be named “Stereo Mix,” while on other devices it will be called “What U Hear” or something very similar....

Unlike other tablets, the Nexus 7’s home screen is locked in portrait mode by default. If you’re using an app in landscape mode and hit the home button, you’ll have to flip your tablet around to read the home screen. Google thinks locking the home screen to portrait mode is a smart idea – and they may be right. But this is Android, and you’re free to disagree with Google and customize your device without any jailbreaking required....

The How-To Geek has won a Microsoft MVP award for the second year in a row, and it’s all thanks to you, our great readers that keep the site going. Join us for some mutual back-patting and some terrible photography of all the award stuff. Of course, if you’re familiar with the MVP award you’ll probably know that it’s actually for a single person, but in my opinion the award belongs to the entire How-To Geek community, without which this site would be nothing....

In today’s tutorial, we will start off by giving you an instruction on how to install VLC-Share, followed by configuring firewall and port forwarding, and we complete the tutorial with a walk through of VLC-Share features. Wallpaper available from our Naruto Customization set. Installing VLC-Share To start off, grab a copy of VLC-Share and install the required packages Install the FFMPEG, and the extra codecs for VLC. Enable the apache’s mod_rewrite...

If you’ve been using PCs for a while, you likely have an old hard drive (or three) from previous computers sitting around. If you ever need to get at the data on an old drive, there’s easy way to do so without mounting the drive inside your PC. Ahhh the hassle of old hard drives. There’s hardly a geek around, or even casual computer owner for that matter, that doesn’t have a few old drives squirreled away....

If you have been following How-To Geek for a while, you will probably have noticed that we are fans of the Win + R keyboard combo. You too can take advantage of it by adding your very own commands to it, here’s how. Creating a Custom Alias We will be needing a third party utility for this since Windows doesn’t allow us to do this out of the box, so head over to this developer’s website and grab a copy of the Win + R Alias Manager....

When you create a line graph in Excel, the lines are angled and have hard edges by default. You can easily change this to a curved graph with nice, smooth lines for a more polished look. We’ll walk you through the process step by step to convert your graph. In this example, we want to create a curved line graph from this data on cookie sales. Select and highlight the range A1:F2 and then click Insert > Line or Area Chart > Line....