Yes, some Android apps can be malicious — Apple, Microsoft, and the media seem happy to remind us about this. Take a few basic precautions and you can avoid these potentially dangerous apps. Google doesn’t manually approve apps like Apple does, but they do scan apps in the Google Play Store for malware. Permissions, reviews, and other reputation information can also tell us a lot. It’s Not In the Play Store RELATED: Does Your Android Phone Need an Antivirus App?...

The extremely useful Snap feature — introduced as “Aero Snap” in Windows 7 — is much-improved in Windows 10. Snap Assist, 2×2 snapping, and vertical snap features help make you more productive on the desktop. On the Windows 10 Technical Preview, “universal apps” run in windows on the desktop. Windows 8’s touch-optimized “Snap” feature is gone for now and is being merged with the desktop Snap feature so the Windows interface is more consistent....

Using a phone or tablet as a wireless keyboard or mouse isn’t a new idea. However, the downside to many solutions is that they require software on both ends. You need an app on your phone or tablet and a companion app on the receiving device. RELATED: How to Use Your Smartphone as a Mouse, Keyboard, and Remote Control for Your PC The method that we’ll show you only requires an app on your Android phone or tablet....

MacBooks offer quite a few multi-touch trackpad gestures. These gestures allow you to perform common actions more quickly — the trackpad isn’t for pointing and clicking. The same gestures will work on a Apple Magic Trackpad, too. We’re focusing on the default gestures here, although they can be customized — if you’ve already customized them, they’ll work differently. Clicking, Scrolling, Zooming, and Rotating You can perform a single-finger tap on your trackpad to left-click or a two-finger tap to right-click — no need to actually press down on the trackpad....

RCS is the upgraded version of SMS that’s available on many Android devices today. However, it’s still not universal, and that can cause some issues. If you’re switching phones, you may want to turn off RCS first. Like many things that have to do with Android, the RCS situation is a little messy. First, to take advantage of RCS features, you have to use a first-party app. There are tons of great third-party text messaging apps in the Play Store, but only official apps from Google, your carrier, and phone maker support RCS....

If your main language is not English, you may have set your PC’s input setting to something else. On Windows 7, this was a per application setting, however that changed on Windows 8. Set Windows 8 to Per-Application Input Language Mode On Windows 7, you could specify a different input language depending on what application you were using. This meant that you could have Microsoft Office open with the input language set to Russian and open a command prompt Windows with the input language to English....

It’s a tale as old as mobile technology time: buy a new phone or gadget, buy a new 12v car charger for it, repeat again next year. We’re here to give you some simple advice. Stop it. The days of device specific car chargers are over. Read on as we outline why you should switch and what products we recommend. Device Specific Chargers Are an Expensive Waste If you’ve been around the mobile gadget block a time or two you know the drill....

If all you do with your Android phone or tablet’s keyboard is tap out words, you are missing a lot of great features. There’s more to learn about a keyboard than you might expect. Of course, you can just type out words without paying attention to any of these features — but mastering them will help you type faster and save time while entering text. Voice Typing If your hands aren’t free — or you just feel like dictating — you can tap the microphone button on the keyboard and enter words just by speaking them....

With the Excel document open highlight the section of the document to search for duplicate entries. On The Ribbon click under the Home Tab is selected. In the Styles section click on Conditional Formatting \ Highlight Cells Rules \ Duplicate Values. This opens up the Duplicate Values dialog box where you can select how to format the cells with duplicate data. Now you will be able to easily find the cells that contain the duplicate data so you can change the values or delete them....

Why Does DRM Exist? Unlike a car or a television, digital code can be easily copied and shared. This results in copyright infringement and software piracy. When users can get a working copy of a digital product without paying for it, there’s the potential that the creators of that product lose potential sales. DRM is meant to make unauthorized copying of digital content harder, dissuade piracy, and protect the financial interests of the creator....

Americans Use NTSC; Everybody Else Uses PAL At an elementary level, NTSC is an analog TV color system used in North America, Central America, and parts of South America. PAL is an analog TV color system used in Europe, Australia, parts of Asia, parts of Africa, and parts of South America. The systems are incredibly similar, with the main difference being electrical consumption. In North America, electrical power is generated at 60 Hz....

When you are adding RAM to a computer, does it really matter if the sticks have unequal amounts of memory or do you always need them to have equal amounts of memory? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answers to a curious reader’s questions. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. Photo courtesy of redjar (Flickr)....

Many features that once required root have been added to Android over the years. However, many advanced tricks still require rooting your Android smartphone or tablet. In an ideal world, you wouldn’t have to root — rooting reduces your device’s security. That’s part of why CyanogenMod’s founder is looking at adding additional features to Cyanogenmod that would eliminate the need for root. Back Up and Restore App Data RELATED: How to Back Up and Restore Your Android Phone with Titanium Backup...

One of the great things about Linux is that you can do the same thing hundreds of different ways—even something as simple as generating a random password can be accomplished with dozens of different commands. Here’s 10 ways you can do it. We gathered all of these commands from Command-Line Fu and tested them out on our own Linux PC to make sure they work. You should be able to use at least some of these on Windows with Cygwin installed, though we didn’t test all of them—the last one definitely works though....

Vampire Survivors Play Video Part idle game, part action RPG, the horribly addictive Vampire Survivors took Steam by storm in late 2021 and since then its popularity has only grown. Visually, the game looks a bit drab but the core gameplay loop of earning XP and leveling up your character is what makes it so addictive. You only need to move your character in Vampire Survivors to take out hordes of enemies....

The Question SuperUser reader user31073 is curious whether he should really heed those short-password warnings: Are short random-character passwords really at risk? I always use passwords of 8 characters in length, which are not based on dictionary words, which consists of characters from the set A-Z, a-z, 0-9 I.e. I use password like sDvE98f1 How easy is it to crack such a password by brute-force? I.e. how fast. I know it heavily depends on the hardware but maybe someone could give me an estimate how long it would take to do this on a dual core with 2GHZ or whatever to have a frame of reference for the hardware....

Java tries to install the terrible Ask Toolbar and other obnoxious junk — sorry, “sponsored software” — when you install it. Worse yet, Java bundles this junkware with security updates. This registry hack tells Java to never install that stuff. If you do need Java installed (and you probably don’t), be sure to change this setting. It will protect you from Java’s junkware — at least until someone at Oracle realizes Ask Toolbar installations are down....

Web browser bookmarklets allow you to perform actions on the current page with just a click or tap. They’re a lightweight alternative to browser extensions. They even work on mobile browsers that don’t support traditional extensions. To use bookmarklets, all you need is a web browser that supports bookmarks — that’s it! Bookmarklets Explained Web pages you view in your browser use JavaScript code. That’s why web pages aren’t just static documents anymore — they’re dynamic....

By default, when you leave your iPhone or iPad unlocked, it will lock itself and turn off the display after one minute. This is great if you want to save battery life, but really annoying if you’re using it as a cookbook or other reference that you occasionally glance at. The good news is you can change how long it takes before Auto-Lock kicks in on your iPhone or iPad....

When you are just starting to learn about networks and how IP addresses work, it can all seem a bit overwhelming, but with a little bit of study you can understand how it all comes together. Today’s SuperUser Q&A post helps a confused reader learn about how IP addresses work for his Wi-Fi network. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites....