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Once your computer finishes the boot process and you’re firmly inside the operating system buzzing along, is there anything left for the BIOS to do? 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 Indrek poses this BIOS related question: Indeed? What function does the BIOS have besides its critical role in the startup of the computer?...

A modern operations team will routinely spin up new services for each deploy. Container instances, databases, and networking equipment need to be available for deployments to succeed. GitOps defines the resources to provision as files that exist in a Git repository. This lets everyone on the team inspect and contribute to the infrastructure that will be provisioned. You can use CI pipelines to verify your configuration and ultimately push it out to your cloud platform....

Screen Tearing, Frame Rate, and Refresh Rate Screen tearing is the name given to unsightly visual artifacts that occur mostly in video games, but could happen anywhere there is a mismatch between the actual frame rate and a display’s refresh rate. A display’s refresh rate determines how many times every second that display updates. This starts at around 60Hz for most older televisions and office monitors, with higher refresh rate televisions of 120Hz and high refresh rate monitors of 144Hz and 240Hz becoming more common....

Image by VectorOpenStock. Several readers favorites PowerPoint alternatives to break out of the PP doldrums. Kaitlin writes: If you were reading down the comments thread and not quite sure if you wanted to check out Prezi, Dan’s passion for the presentation tool might push you over: On the hardware side of things, Mike is definitely a guy who has seen the horrors of the presentation wars and lived to talk about it:...

When you start your microwave, do you lose Wi-Fi signal on a nearby device? Wi-Fi and Microwaves both operate on a similar frequency, which can lead to interference. But why? And if that’s the case why doesn’t Wi-Fi cook you? Microwaves and Wi-Fi Use the Same Unlicensed Spectrum In 1947 the International Telecommunication Union established the ISM bands, short for Industrial, Scientific, and Medical. The goal was to define what devices would be allowed to run at certain bands of radio frequency so that they wouldn’t cause interference with other radio communication services....

The “Do Not Track” option is enabled by default in Windows 8’s Internet Explorer 10 and available in Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Google is even adding it to Chrome. There’s just one problem: it doesn’t actually prevent tracking. The Do Not Track check box can provide a false sense of security. While a few websites will pay attention to it, the vast majority of websites will ignore your preference....

Supply Chain Attacks Until very recently, if you were involved in cybersecurity and found yourself trying to explain supply chain attacks to someone you probably used the Stuxnet attack as an example. Now, you have any number of examples to choose from. Everyone has heard of the Solarwinds and Codecov attacks because they were headline-grabbing, sophisticated attacks with a wide reach. But these two examples are a drop in the ocean of attacks of this type....

Lock Screen Widgets Are New, So Here’s a Nudge Apple released iOS 16 on September 12, 2022, and it has a host of new features, including lock screen widgets. As of this writing, the feature is roughly a month old, so you can certainly be forgiven for not even being aware of lock screen widgets (let alone playing around with them). Even being aware of them, I’ll admit I didn’t pay them much attention....

Mastering the keyboard will not only increase your navigation speed but it can also help with wrist fatigue. Here are some lesser known OS X shortcuts to help you become a keyboard ninja. After our article last week covering keyboard shortcuts for Windows that you might be unaware of, we had lots of requests for the best OS X shortcuts as well, so we’ve compiled a list of shortcuts you may or may not be aware of....

This week we take a look at how to clone a hard disk for easy backup or duplication, resize stubbornly static windows, and create shortcuts for dozens of Windows functions. Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag and help readers solve their problems, sharing the useful solutions with you in the process. Read on to see our fixes for this week’s reader dilemmas. Clone a Disk for Easy Backups and Duplication...

Once a week we dump out our reader mailbag, answer reader questions, and share a few of them with you in the process. This week we’re looking at decoding Blue-Screen-of-Death codes, cleaning out a PC, and getting started with scripting. Decoding the Blue Screen Dear Blue Screening, Do you have any suggestions on how I might decode and/or fix the blue screen crashes I’ve been getting? The message is something like”IRQ not equal or less than”....

Once a week we dip into our reader mailbag to answer your pressing tech questions. This week we’re looking at deleting duplicate Windows Media Player entries, hotkey switching for right/left-handed mouse settings, and changing Word’s default font. Dealing with Duplicate Entries in Windows Media Player Dear Seeing Double, I’ve been a long time Windows Media Player user and have always had trouble with duplicate songs appearing in my library. When I upgraded to Windows 7 I even ended up with triple entries for many of the files!...

Note: some of these tips work in Microsoft Office or other applications, not necessarily directly in Windows. Dragging with the Right Mouse Button Drag and drop operations in Windows can seem to result in random behavior, however, its not random at all: Dragging a file from a volume (Drive Letter) to another location on the same volume will result in a move operation. Dragging a file from a drive to another drive will result in a copy operation....

Display the Full Path in the Windows Explorer Title Bar Press the Windows + E keyboard combination to open Windows Explorer and then switch over to the View tab. On the right-hand side click on options and then select Change folder and search options from the drop-down. When the Folder Options dialog opens, switch over to the View options. Here you will need to tick the Display the full path in the title bar check box....

Windows Explorer in Windows 7 has been significantly changed and improved since the days of Vista and XP. This article provides some of the more useful tips and tricks for getting the most out of Explorer. NOTE: Some of these tips require you to tweak the registry. Before doing so, be sure you back up the registry. We also recommend creating a restore point you can use to restore your system if something goes wrong....

As pointed out by C2 Productions on Twitter, the Canary channel of Chrome OS now has a feature flag for ‘Adaptive charging’. Once enabled from chrome://flags, a new settings switch is added to the Power menu in the Chrome OS settings. The description reads, “extends battery life by keeping your battery around 80%. Battery will fully charge before you typically disconnect from power.” The commit code for the feature reveals Adaptive charging on Chrome OS uses a machine learning model to ensure your battery reaches 100% just before you need it....

There’s no need to navigate your media center like it’s the 20th century anymore. The future is now and you can zip through your media and control XBMC with the touchscreen of your iOS device. Today we’re taking a look at how you can ditch the ol’ pushbutton remote and start browsing and interacting with your media via your iPhone or iPod Touch. You’ll find no shortage of remotes for their big brother the iPad, but we’re focusing on the small members of the family because of their traditional remote size....

When you have a long Word document containing a lot of different information pertaining to the same thing, it can be difficult to create a summary of the document. AutoSummarize is a feature in Word 2007 that scores the document by giving points to sentences that contain frequently used words. You can then use the highest scoring sentences to create the summary or use the Auto function. For this example I created a simple Word document using the =rand() trick....

Once a week we round up three reader tips to share; this week we’re looking at how to insert separators into Windows 7 jumplists (no software or hacks needed), a powerful file renaming app for Windows, and a clever way to make LED ice balls for parties. Inserting Separators Into Windows 7 Jumplists Oliver writes in with a clever jumplist tweak that requires no software or complicated edits: We love a tweak that doesn’t require any sort of heavy lifting or add-ons....

Once a week we dump out the tips box to share great reader tips with everyone; this week we’re looking at DIY iPad styluses, easy cable organizing, and how to hack your own dirt-cheap signal extending Wi-Fi antennas. Roll Your Own iPad Stylus With A Drafting Pencil Play Video Branden writes in with the following tip for creating a quick and dirty iPad stylus: We’ve got drafting pencils on hand; now all we need to do is go dig around in the workshop for conductive foam....