Nevertheless, as many PC builders have noted, building a desktop today is pretty much like assembling an adult LEGO set with wires. It can also be a gut-wrenching experience, though, since real money’s on the line. Screwing up a $500 CPU is going to kill your soul and your wallet. Still, if you’ve done your research and you’re organized, spending an hour (or six) putting together a desktop PC can be a rewarding experience....
Want a Start menu on your Windows 8 desktop? While Microsoft no longer includes the Start button, opting instead for a click in a hidden corner and a new Start screen, there are quite a few Start menu replacements you can choose from. You can try living without the Start button and customizing your Start screen — it’s very possible to get by without the Start button and some people seem to prefer the new interface — but you have a choice....
Ever have one of those days where programs just aren’t cooperating? You try terminating a program, but it doesn’t respond? PowerShell can give you some extra fire power on those days. How Do I Stop A Program In PowerShell? 1. The long command name stop-process can be shortened to kill. 2. If you know the numeric process that you’re wanting to stop, you can enter it. However, like most Window’s users, we know the name of the program we want to stop, so entering the name would be more convenient....
Once a week we round up some of the great reader questions we get in the Ask How-To Geek mailbox and share the solutions with everyone. This week we’re looking at how to export your Google Web History, importing Evernote notebooks to OneNote, and recovering product keys. How Can I Export My Google Web History? Dear Web History, I saw your article about how to delete your Google Web History before Google consolidates services....
Cord cutting is picking up steam. Forecasters are predicting a 33 percent increase in people dropping their cable subscription this year over last—faster than analysts predicted. You might think this is all about the money, and that’s certainly a big factor. Cable TV bills, after the first year lock-in deals expire, can easily climb above $100 a month. Replacing a cable subscription with Netflix, which costs $14 a month at most, is a quick way to save a little money....
Seeing Called setState() on an Unmounted Component in your console is one of the most frequent issues faced by newcomers to React. When you’re working with class components, you can easily create situations where you encounter this error. Updating the state of components that have been removed from the DOM usually signals your application has a memory leak. This wastes your user’s hardware resources and will cause a gradual performance reduction if left unchecked....
How-To Geek reader Andrew wrote in with the following tip detailing how you can turn Google Docs into a slimmed down and personalized version of Google Music. He writes: Guide to playing music on Google Docs The recent announcement of Google Music is great news, but it’s only available if you live in the US. There is another way to stream your music from Google. It is not as visually impressive as Google Music but sounds just as good....
The Quick Launch Bar is a handy tool for quickly and easily launching applications. However, if you’ve put a lot of shortcuts on the Quick Launch Bar, it can get quite cluttered and you cannot rearrange the shortcuts or sort them into groups. By default, the Quick Launch Bar is hidden in Windows 7. However, you can easily add the Quick Launch Bar to the Taskbar. We’ve previously written about a free tool that creates a launcher in the Windows system tray that is similar to the Quick Launch Bar....
Drive Encryption is a wonderful feature. You can be confident that your data is safe, even if your device is lost or stolen. But if you lose your encryption key, you’ll never be able to access your data. Here’s how you can back up your encryption key somewhere safe. What Is Encryption? Encryption is a means of obfuscating data such that it is unreadable without the proper key to “unlock” it....
Nearly every component of Windows 8 can be customized to suit your needs, some settings however are buried deep into the registry. How to Change the Color of the Sign In Screen in Windows 8 Note: This hack only affects the screen where you have to choose a user, not the screen where it asks for your password. Press the Win + R keyboard combination to open a run box, then type regedit and hit enter....
We’ve previously shown you how to modify the icon on an .EXE file, but if you’ve tried this you might find out that some apps and programs give you an error that says “This file has a non-standard resource layout… it has probably been compressed with an “EXE compressor”. Here’s how to fix it. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to decompress such files and I’ll show you another program you can use to modify the icons....
You can now control your iPad with a mouse, and it does much more than just simulate taps and scrolling. If your mouse has extra buttons, you can customize them to perform powerful actions in a single click. Connecting a Mouse to Your iPad If you haven’t yet connected a mouse to your iPad, keep in mind it will only work on iPadOS 13 and up. So, if you want to use a mouse, update your iPad to the latest version of iPadOS....
How to Trim Videos on an iPhone or iPad Trimming a video is one of the most basic edits you can perform. While you can trim before you share in some apps, like Instagram, you can also easily do this in the Photos app. Follow these steps to trim your video: Select the video you want to trim. Tap “Edit” in the bottom-right corner. You should now see a Play button and the video’s timeline....
The Windows Firewall is powerful, but it doesn’t offer an easy-to-use interface for its advanced features. Windows Firewall Notifier fills the holes in the built-in Windows Firewall, offering easy management of outbound connections and a console that displays network activity. Windows Firewall Notifier is a lightweight application that works in tandem with the built-in Windows Firewall. It doesn’t add a lot of features that already exist in Windows or take up system resources by running in the background....
When you have a large sheet full of data, using the Google Sheets filter and sort features can help you find what you need. If you use color to make data pop, you can filter or sort using that color. It doesn’t matter if you’ve added color manually or set up a conditional formatting rule. You can use both the filter and sort features based on the colors in your sheet....
When you sync your iPhone or iPad with iTunes, it creates a backup on your computer in case you lose your device–or get a new one. The problem is, they take up a lot of space. If you need to purge some old iTunes backups of your iOS devices to free up disk space, transfer the backups to a new computer, or put them in deep storage, you can–as long as you know where to look....
GitLab’s Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines are a popular way to automate builds, tests, and releases each time you push code to your repository. Pipelines run concurrently and consist of sequential stages; each stage can include multiple jobs that run in parallel during the stage. The maximum concurrency of both parallel jobs and cross-instance pipelines depends on your server configuration. Jobs are run by GitLab Runner instances. Runners operate as isolated processes that receive new jobs from their controlling GitLab server....
In years past, automating network drive creation required the use of primitive batch files, luckily for us you can now do it through PowerShell. Note: this tutorial expects that you are using PowerShell 3.0. How to Map Network Drives Using PowerShell Prior to the PowerShell era, we could map networks drives using a batch file that contained a net use command: To do it in PowerShell, press the Win + R keyboard combination to bring up a run box, then type powershell and hit enter....
Facebook Messenger is one of Facebook’s better features. You might not realize that you can customize the nicknames, colors, and the “Like” emoji of any of your Facebook Messenger Chats. RELATED: Facebook’s News Feed Algorithm Is Completely Busted This might seem like a bit of a gimmick, but it’s actually really useful if you’ve got a few different group chats going, or want to make sure you can’t accidentally message the wrong person....
iOS’ autocomplete skills are a wonderful convenience until they become overstuffed with old entries. Is an old, outdated phone number or email address showing up in the list? Removing them from your contacts won’t remove them from the autocomplete list–you have to do that separately. Imagine you’re on your iPhone and you need to dash off a quick e-mail. First you normally open Mail and start a new message, then type a few letters of the recipient’s name....
