Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Gregory Moussat wants to know what’s going on behind the installer’s facade : What tool stands to replace InstallRite? Lots of “ professional” programs are so poorly documented that it’s difficult to find the proper way to configure them, update them, etc. InstallRite is a program which is able to take a “snapshot” before and after the installation of a program and then compare the snapshots....

How Do Heated Driveways Work? If you’ve never lived in a blustery cold climate before, there’s a good chance you’ve never even thought about heated driveways before. And if even if you do live in the land of the ice and snow, you might not have stopped to consider how the fancy luxury that is a heated driveway even works. There are two kinds of heated driveway designs on the market, and both take a design found inside homes and move that design outside....

If You Have a Goal: Use GoFundMe or Kickstarter Sometimes, the best way to raise money is on other platforms. This has a few benefits: You don’t need to handle payments yourself, you don’t need to set up a website if you don’t want to, and it gives you an easy external link to spread awareness. Plus, people on the platform itself can browse through trending fundraisers, which is more exposure for you....

Although iTunes usually does a good enough job backing up your data, the backups are encrypted and inaccessible save for totally restoring your system. What if you want to copy your saved games to a new device? Read on to find out how. When it comes to backing up your entire iOS device, iTunes does a pretty decent job and should your device be lost, stolen, or destroyed you’ll be happy to have those backups as a restoration point....

Linux’s command-line utilities can do anything, including perform benchmarks – but using a dedicated benchmarking program is a simpler and more foolproof process. These utilities allow you to perform reproducible tests across different systems and configurations. These Linux benchmarking tools aren’t as popular, well-known, or polished as their Windows equivalents, but they allow you to easily compare different systems and evaluate their performance. Hardinfo – CPU Benchmark Hardinfo isn’t installed by default on Ubuntu, but it’s available in the Ubuntu Software Center – just do a search for “hardinfo” and install the System Profiler and Benchmark application....

Note: this tutorial should work for any version of Windows, including Windows Server. Using WinPatrol There are most likely several utilities which provide this functionality, but we are going to discuss using the popular WinPatrol monitoring application which features a delay startup control. As you can probably guess, this function allows you to specify a certain amount of time to wait before opening the respective application. WinPatrol makes this process very easy....

Microsoft Office 2010 Starter edition is a free, ad-supported version of Office 2010 meant to be included on new PCs. It only includes Word and Excel with a subset of features—but it does let you make a portable version. Here’s how to do it. Update: looks like the link is dead. Note: The download link provided in the following article is not exactly a “Microsoft Approved” link and may stop working at any time....

Even if you don’t have much drawing talent, it’s surprisingly easy to create a photorealistic caricature from a photograph with good resolution and a few minutes in Photoshop. Grab an image and get ready to become a caricature artist! For the record, we’re using pictures of US presidents for our source material, but there’s no reason you can’t make your friends look goofy with this easy technique. A few minutes is all it takes to transform your photos....

When you ping a PC running Windows 8, by default it doesn’t reply to the echo request. This is caused by a firewall rule that blocks all incoming ICMP packets, but this can be changed quickly in the Advanced Firewall Settings instead of disabling the entire firewall. When you first ping a Windows 8 PC you might get a result like this. This is because the PC is not allowed to listen for ICMP Echo Request....

Have you ever had a file on a flash drive that you needed to use on a machine that is situated in another building or even halfway across the world? You can do that by plugging it into your local machine and then forwarding the drive through your remote session to that machine. Here’s how to do it. Press the Windows Key and R to bring up a run box, and type mstsc to launch the Remote Desktop Connection Dialog, or you can just search for Remote Desktop in the Start Menu....

Windows 10’s taskbar normally stretches across the bottom of the screen, but you can move it to the left or right side of the screen in a vertical orientation. It’s great for widescreen displays, giving your applications more vertical screen real estate. First, right click on the taskbar and locate the option called “Lock The Taskbar” in the list. If that option has a checkmark beside it, click on it....

If you’re using Linux, you don’t need VirtualBox or VMware to create virtual machines. You can use KVM — the kernel-based virtual machine — to run both Windows and Linux in virtual machines. You can use KVM directly or with other command-line tools, but the graphical Virtual Machine Manager (Virt-Manager) application will feel most familiar to people that have used other virtual machine programs. Installing KVM KVM only works if your CPU has hardware virtualization support — either Intel VT-x or AMD-V....

Getting Started Grafana’s available for self-hosting on your own hardware or as a managed SaaS platform called Grafana Cloud. We’re using Grafana Cloud in this tutorial because it supports quickstart integrations that connect to your data source and provide pre-built dashboard layouts for the most common metrics. Sign in to your Grafana account to begin. You can create a new Grafana Cloud account for free to store up to 10,000 metrics series and 50GB of logs....

Yesterday we showed you how to monitor and track your total bandwidth usage, today we’re back to show you how to keep tabs on individual applications and how much bandwidth they’re gobbling up. We’ve received several reader requests, both by email and in the aforementioned post about bandwidth tracking, for a good way to track the data consumption of individual applications. How-To Geek reader Oaken noted that he used NetWorx to track his total bandwidth usage but another application, NetBalancer, to keep tabs on individual applications....

What Is a CSV File? A Comma Separated Values file is a text file that holds tabulated data. CSV is a type of delimited data. As the name suggests, a comma “,” is used to separate each field of data—or value—from its neighbors. CSV is everywhere. If an application has import and export functions, it’ll almost always support CSV. CSV files are human-readable. You can look inside them with less, open them in any text editor, and move them from program to program....

No formatting means no line breaks, no different font sizes, no bolding and italics, and no hyperlinks. You won’t have to spend time removing formatting elements from your document. You’ll get just the text you copied as if you had typed it directly into the application you’re pasting it in. To paste without formatting, press Ctrl+Shift+V instead of Ctrl+V. This works in a wide variety of applications, including web browsers like Google Chrome....

So you want to launch a program with parameters, but you prefer to pin programs to the taskbar rather than have shortcuts everywhere? Read on to find out how you can achieve this in a few seconds. In our example we will use Google Chrome with the incognito switch, but this trick will work with any program that supports launch switches. Please also note that the switches will be different for every program....

Avidemux is an easy-to-use, open-source video editor for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. It’s ideal for basic video-editing tasks. Unlike more advanced programs, it doesn’t have a lot of complex features that get in the way. We’ve covered using Avidemux to quickly cut clips from a video file in the past, but there’s a lot more you can do with this application. You can download it for free....

You may have noticed a new, and ever-changing, little icon in the search box on Windows 10’s taskbar. That’s a “search highlight.” Here’s what it is and how to get rid of it. Why Is There a Little Icon In the Windows Search Bar? The icon is part of a new feature rolled out to Windows 10 and Windows 11 as part of an April 2022 update. The particular feature is called “Search Highlights” and it integrates a rotating set of icons into the right-hand side of the toolbar search bar....

You may not think of Word as a tool for designing web pages, and that’s okay—it’s really not very good at it, anyway. But, if you have an existing Word document that you need to turn into a web page for whatever reason, Word has you covered with some built-in tools. Note: We’re using Word 2016 in our examples for this article, but the ability to save a document as a web page (or HTML) has been available in many past versions of Word....