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Thunderbird has been around since 2003, but it has stalled in recent years due to dwindling interest from Mozilla and limited funds. However, the project is now making a resurgence, and it might be worth your time to try Thunderbird. Thunderbird is a cross-platform desktop email application, similar to Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail, with excellent support for accounts like Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail. It also has a built-in calendar and contacts book, which can also synchronize with cloud services (such as Google Calendar), and the app has limited support for live messaging....

Why You Might Need to Reset Winsock Winsock is an application programming interface (API) that works between applications, like a web browser, and underlying communication protocols, like TCP/IP. Winsock stores settings important to how those applications and communications interact in a database usually referred to as the Winsock Catalog. It is possible for the Winsock catalog to become corrupted by malware, or by accident. Regardless of how the corruption happens, applications on one PC will probably fail to connect to the internet....

You delete a file in Windows, it gets dumped into the Recycle Bin, and later you fish it back out. What exactly happens during that whole process? 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. The Question SuperUser reader Jonath0n is curious about the Recycle Bin: So what’s the story? How exactly does the Recycle Bin function as a sort of file purgatory?...

According to an old rule of thumb, your page file or swap should be “double your RAM” or “1.5x your RAM.” But do you really need a 32 GB page file or swap if you have 16 GB of RAM? You probably don’t need that much page file or swap space, which is a relief considering a modern computer might have a solid-state drive with very little space. The Purpose of the Page File or Swap Partition RELATED: What Is the Windows Page File, and Should You Disable It?...

A Gritty, Dark Fantasy World Created in Tension In Quake, you play as an unnamed protagonist (later called “Ranger“) who must travel through dimensional gates to defeat an alien named Quake that has invaded Earth. Like Doom before it, Quake is a first-person shooter game where you explore levels, solve minor puzzles, and obliterate every monster that you see—ideally in a shower of bloody “gibs.” Compared to the technicolor violence of Doom’s universe, Quake felt relatively bland and dark, graphically speaking, and its single-player campaign was no showstopper....

What Is a Command Line Argument, and Why Should You Care? Back in the days of MS-DOS and other text-based operating systems, you’d launch a game or application by typing its “executable” name. You could add special “arguments” after the executable’s name if you wanted to. For example, if you launched ID Software’s classic shooter DOOM with “doom -cdrom” it would allow you to run the game directly from the CD-ROM disc....

If you sign most of your emails the same way, you can easily specify a default signature to automatically insert into new email messages and replies and forwards. This can be done directly in the Signature editor in Outlook 2013. We recently showed you how to create a new signature. You can also create multiple signatures for each email account and define a different default signature for each account. When you change your sending account when composing a new email message, the signature would change automatically as well....

Most desktop Linux distributions are installed on PCs that were never built with Linux in mind. The hardware may not work perfectly with Linux—and if it doesn’t, the manufacturer won’t care. Some research now can save you a headache later. Laptops That Come With Linux It’s actually possible to buy a laptop that comes with Linux preinstalled. This is a good option if you’re serious about Linux and just want your hardware to work....

If someone has access to your Facebook account, they have a huge amount of your personal data, can probably log in to lots of other websites and services pretending to be you, and can even scam your friends. So you should keep it protected. Here’s how to change your Facebook password. RELATED: Your Passwords Are Terrible, and It’s Time to Do Something About It Facebook’s Password Requirements Most websites enforce minimum password standards....

If you have a bunch of user accounts on your Windows PC that you don’t need anymore, it may be time to clean them out. Today we’ll take a look at how to delete a user account in Windows. NOTE: If you’ve hidden the user account you want to delete, you will not be able to delete it because it’s completely hidden from everywhere. You must show the account again before deleting it....

Windows 10’s Focus Assist feature automatically hides notifications while you’re playing games or using other full-screen applications. But Cortana loves to announce that it’s silencing notifications. Here’s how to turn off those annoying Focus Assist notifications. Focus Assist is Windows 10’s Do Not Disturb mode. When enabled, it will automatically hide incoming notifications, so they don’t pop up and distract you while you’re playing a game, giving a presentation, or using any full-screen applications....

By default, the Nintendo Switch home screen shows you a basic battery icon. Tucked away in the system settings is an option to display a more precise battery percentage. Here’s how to enable it, and get a better idea of just how much game time you have left before you need to find a charger. To enable the battery indicator, select Settings from the home screen. Scroll down to the System section at the bottom of the list....

What Is 120 Hz Mode? Most displays update at 60 Hz, which means 60 screen refreshes every second. This is why frame rates were often capped at 60 frames per second on last-generation consoles. A display that supports 60 Hz, however, can only display a maximum of 60 frames per second. Since Microsoft’s newest consoles pack a lot of power, they’re able to render games at a much higher frame rate than even the Xbox One X....

Computer monitors are fairly simple, in use if not in actual construction: plug ’em in, turn ’em on, look at your computer stuff on the brighter part. But misleadingly easy as they might seem, there’s a lot of stuff going on inside that blank plastic case…and a lot of stuff that can go wrong. Unfortunately, most of that stuff requires either a certified repair or a complete replacement to fix....

When you hover your mouse pointer over a button in the taskbar, Windows shows you a preview of that window by default, but that preview is usually really small. Luckily with a quick registry hack, we can make those thumbnails bigger. The great thing about this tip is that it doesn’t require downloading some shifty utility from some website that you probably shouldn’t trust. And once you’re done, the thumbnails will stop being tiny and actually be useful....

There can be few computer users who do not have at least one social networking account – the likes of Facebook and Twitter are just so prevalent these days. But while it’s easy to sign up for an account, closing one down is not always so simple. Until now. We recently looked at how you can go about backing up the posts you have made and the photos you have uploaded to various social networks....

There are countless ways to copy files between computers, including great sync options like Dropbox, but if you just want to share one of your folders from your Mac to your Windows computer, you can do that easily. Of course, if you want to go the opposite way and mount a Windows share on your Mac, we’ve also got you covered. RELATED: How to Share Files Between Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs on a Network...

Notifications, be they texts, alarms, or social apps, aren’t anything new; they’re an accepted part of our mobile experience. Most can probably agree though, there’s a fine line between informative and annoying, which Facebook seems to have no problem completely ignoring. Before we delve into the particulars, let’s introduce the levels at which you can control notifications. First, you can administer to notifications per your account, meaning that certain types of notifications will behave consistently, no matter what device you use....

Set up your Xbox One’s TV integration and you can do more than just watch TV on your Xbox: you can also stream that live TV from your Xbox to a Windows 10 PC, Windows phone, iPhone, iPad, or Android device over your home network. There are two catches: First, this feature only works over your home network, so you can’t stream TV over the internet. Second, this only works with over-the-air TV, so you can’t stream live TV from a cable or satellite box....

If you’ve ever wanted to convert a video file, but weren’t sure what to use, then Handbrake might be the program for you. Today we’ll show you how to use it to convert video files into different formats. There are a lot of applications out there that purport to convert video files. They’ll advertise themselves as free and sport a flashy interface, but as we’re all too well aware, most of these programs are just plain crap....