Tech tips articles

Wallpaper Week :: 3rd Edition A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is nature photography and amazing scenes. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

When the PlayStation 4 launched in 2013 its 500GB hard drive seemed like more than we could ever use, but the size of games has ballooned exponentially over the years. Upgrading your PS4 storage is not that difficult, so here's a quick guide to help users avoid headaches during the process. Grab your PS4, and let's get started.

Many hardcore computer users might consider themselves above learning new tricks, but there are always new ways to sharpen your skills on the PC and we bet that you will find at least one useful thing here that you didn't know before.

We've covered many ways that you can save space on your storage drives over the years and deleting duplicate files on your system could easily result in a sizable clean out if only a few large files are found. Although Windows doesn't provide a direct solution, there are many apps that can help, so here's a quick look at them.

We recently experienced an installation of Windows 10 with system files that were totally corrupt. After attempting typical repair options, we used a Windows 10 ISO to perform an in-place upgrade, reinstalling Windows 10 while preserving even the software you have installed.

Although the Start menu is supposed to be the fastest way to find local files, software and settings, Windows 10's search indexing service is far from the best. It is not uncommon that a simple query won't return any valid results, no matter how simple or precise your query is. Here's how you can turn things around.

Wallpaper Week 2nd Edition A great background can start your day off on a good mood, theme is retro wallpapers. Whether you are into abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

It's only a matter of time before you'll want to change your Windows wallpaper, however applying your own customizations to a copy of Windows 10 that hasn't been activated may not be so straightforward since Microsoft blocks access to the software's personalization settings without a valid product license.

Wallpaper Week 2nd Edition A great background can start your day off on a good mood, today's theme is nature photography and amazing scenes. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

Wallpaper Week 2nd Edition A great background can start your day off on a good mood. Whether you are into beautiful landscapes, minimalism, abstract illustrations, or eye-catching designs and patterns, with the kind of hours we spend looking at our computer and smartphone screens, why not make them a little prettier?

While tabs have been a core part of web browsers for more than a decade, Microsoft is finally in the process of introducing a tabbed interface to the File Explorer and other applications. But if you don't want to wait any longer, there are a few third-party tools that offer the feature by one means or another.

Tweaking Windows settings that are not available in standard menus will commonly require modifications to be made from the registry or Group Policy Editor (gpedit.msc). We regularly reference these throughout our tips, so we thought those of you on Windows Home will appreciate being able to use Gpedit like everyone else.

Microsoft slowly started to sneak advertisements into the Windows platform with Windows 8, and they've only crept up further in Windows 10. Thankfully it's easy to shut down most of these annoyances if you know where to look.

Do you keep a bootable USB drive handy? Since we only tend to keep a few USB drives available, we tend to overwrite the contents of Windows installation media and the like after a single use. Intending to save some time and effort on the next go-around, we sought methods to preserve an exact copy of bootable USB drives which could be restored from a backup file when needed.

Gigabytes are cheaper than ever but they can also be the sort of thing where the more you have, the more you tend to consume, and it doesn't take long for the terabytes to fly by if you spend a lot of time on your computer. If you're wanting to clean up your drive, this guide will serve you regardless of your current storage solution.

Windows 10's April 2018 Update (version 1803) brought various new features and removed some others, but also introduced a bug to many systems that caused an extra drive to be listed under "This PC." Most annoying of all, the bug causes Windows to display an error prompt about the drive being nearly full.

If you've ever looked for software that can convert audio and video files on Windows, you might know how hard it can be to find dedicated solutions that are free and function as advertised. What you may ignore however is that VLC is capable of converting your files as well as performing other tasks like recording your desktop, and more.

Although SSDs have steadily increased in capacity, so too have the size of game installs. Today's triple-A titles commonly occupy upwards of 20GB with many approaching or exceeding 60GB, especially after accounting for downloadable content. Here's how to move your games to a new faster drive.

Having a virtual machine on-hand can be useful for a variety of purposes, such as testing software or tweaks in a sandboxed environment that is separate from your primary operating system. A virtual machine can also help you to run older software that doesn't work with your new operating system, or simply exploring a new operating system altogether.

If you've been thinking about reinstalling Windows 10 because of stability issues, driver errors, malware infections, software bloat or any issues with your system, it may come as great news that Microsoft has built in a simple method of reinstalling the operating system without deleting your user settings or data.

Clipboard managers make it much easier to re-enter text or anything else that you've recently copied and pasted, adding an array of new capabilities to the default Windows clipboard. Although they differ in specific features, the typical clipboard manager automatically saves text, images and other items as they are copied to your clipboard, displaying them in a list-style GUI that makes it simple to re-copy or paste something later.

As what may be the most common way to store and share multiple files, the ZIP file format is used by essentially everyone online. With that said, there's a good chance you'll eventually come across one that has been corrupted, but everything's not lost.

It's becoming common knowledge that exposure to blue light can prevent your body from winding down properly before bed and making it more difficult to sleep. If you often work at night or simply like to read on a screen before going to sleep, this can be a game changer.

Have you ever been to a presentation, or worse, a high-profile company keynote, it gets started on an empty Windows desktop showing nothing but the Recycle Bin icon? Hideous. Preferring to keep our desktop clean, we remove the Recycle Bin icon from Windows 10 as one of the first tweaks to a fresh installation of the operating system.