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Are All the Components Branded? Prebuilt computers are often sold on the strength of major components such as the CPU and GPU. However, other components can have a major impact on both the performance and longevity of your computer. A good prebuilt PC should have details of the exact model for every component available. If the builder doesn’t disclose the brand and model of the power supply, motherboard, RAM, and other components, that’s a red flag....

Go ahead, right click a file and choose Send To from the menu. You should see something that looks like this: Changing the Send To Shortcuts To get to the SendTo folder, you’ll need to open up an Explorer window, and then paste in the following to the address bar. This is a special value that actually maps to the real folder, which is found in C:\Users<yourusername>\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo You should now see a bunch of shortcuts, which you can modify or delete as you see fit....

If you watch a lot of Netflix, Flix Plus provides a veritable Swiss Army knife of improvements to the entire browsing and watching experience. Read on as we highlight the myriad of reasons why it’s foolish to watch Netflix without it. What Is Flix Plus? Flix Plus is a Chrome extension that reworks the Netflix browser experience to create a more streamlined experience, provides customizable keyboard shortcuts, the ability to hide content you’re not interested in, automatically hidden spoiler images summary text and previews, and integrated movie ratings provided by IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes....

One of the best features PowerShell offers is the ability to remotely manage your Servers. It even lets you manage a bunch of them at once as well. Be sure to read the previous articles in the series: Learn How to Automate Windows with PowerShell Learning to Use Cmdlets in PowerShell Learning How to Use Objects in PowerShell Learning Formatting, Filtering and Comparing in PowerShell And stay tuned for the rest of the series all week....

There are many programs available for taking screenshots. If you’re looking for a free option, Greenshot is a great program that provides many useful features, such as cropping, annotations, highlights, and obfuscating (like the smudge tool in GIMP). You can capture a selected region, window, or full screen and then save and export your screenshots in various ways. You can even directly upload your images to websites like Flickr, Picasa, or Dropbox....

CCleaner just became worse. The popular system-cleaning tool now always runs in the background, nagging you and reporting anonymous data back to the company’s servers. We don’t recommend you upgrade to CCleaner 5.45. Here’s what you should use instead. We haven’t been huge fans of CCleaner for a while now. CCleaner nags you to run it because the paid subscription can automatically run itself—you’re paying to disable the nags. CCleaner has even been hacked to contain malware....

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary.” It’s a document specification that allows you to easily collect and organize web-based news and information from websites in a standardized format commonly called a feed, which is like a bookmark that actively updates itself. You can subscribe to RSS feeds using a tool called an RSS feed reader. There are many free feed readers available out there that allow you to follow your favorite websites without having to visit each one separately....

We recently showed you how to turn your Raspberry Pi into a 24/7 low-power downloading machine. Now we’re back to show you how to make the system almost completely hands off with awesome automation tools. Why Do I Want to Do This? If you’ve been following along with our Raspberry Pi download project, at this point in the process you have a full fledged BitTorrent/Usenet machine. That’s awesome, but it’s not fully automatic....

Windows 11 already sports a stylish design, but adding some personality to your PC might make you feel more at home. Luckily, it’s easy to personalize Windows 11 by adding color to the taskbar. Here’s how to do it. First, open the Settings app by pressing Windows+i on your keyboard. Or you can right-click the taskbar and select “Settings” in the menu that appears. In Settings, click “Personalization” in the sidebar, then select “Colors....

If you ever change your Wi-Fi password or the name of the network, you’ll also need to connect your Nest Secure security system to that new network. Luckily, it’s really easy. RELATED: How to Change the Alarm Delay for the Nest Secure A lot of Wi-Fi devices come with a setting where you can easily change the Wi-Fi network that it’s connected to. Other devices aren’t so simple, and you actually have to reset them just to connect them to a new Wi-Fi network....

If you choose to manually update your RSS feeds on demand, there is a way to do this without having to send and receive your email at the same time. You can create a special Send/Receive Group for your RSS feeds. NOTE: If you choose to not have your RSS feeds updated automatically, creating a separate Send/Receive Group for your RSS feeds is useful so you can update them when you want to....

Some Internet service providers have harsh restrictions on the amount of bandwidth you can use in a month, charging you extra if you go over your bandwidth cap. Other ISPs restrict traffic at certain hours — for example, offering unlimited bandwidth only at night. These caps can be frustrating in an age of high-quality streaming videos and services that depend on plentiful bandwidth. A few simple tips can help you make the most of that limited bandwidth if you can’t find a better ISP....

Maybe you, or someone in your family, is deaf. Maybe you’re watching a movie in another language. Or maybe you just plain can’t make some characters’ speech out because of their accent. Whatever the reason, sometimes you just need subtitles. For collections of media on your computer, that can get annoying: browsing sites like OpenSubtitles.org, downloading the appropriate file, and putting that file in the proper directory, renaming it to match your files…it’s a hassle....

Icons on the desktop make things look really cluttered, and Mac OS X has always embraced them for removable drives — but thankfully you can easily turn them off in the preferences page. Head to the menu bar, open up Preferences for Finder, and then look at the section for “Show these items on the desktop”. That External disks one is going to be the one you want — but note, when you mount a DMG file that is also considered an external disk as well....

Windows needs manufacturer-provided hardware drivers before your hardware will work. Linux and other operating systems also need hardware drivers before hardware will work — but hardware drivers are handled differently on Linux. The good news is that, if a device will work on Linux, it’ll probably “just work” out of the box. You may sometimes need to install drivers, but some hardware may just not work at all. How Hardware Drivers Work on Windows When you install Windows, you’ll need to install hardware drivers provided by the hardware’s manufacturer — motherboard chipset drivers, graphics card drivers, Wi-Fi drivers, and more....

Use the drivers Windows provides and you won’t have to worry about bloatware. If you do have to install the drivers provided by your manufacturer, here’s how to avoid all the heavy control panels and startup applications they include. These applications are sometimes useful, but they often aren’t. Install a few different driver packages and you may find your computer takes noticeably longer to boot and has quite the collection of system tray icons....

Apple’s new Photos application was released as part of a recent system update. By default, Photos creates its library in your Pictures folder, but it can be easily moved or newly created. There are any number of reasons you might want to create a new Photos library or move it to another location. We wanted to move our library because our “Pictures” folder (which is actually a special user folder) is located on our Dropbox....

If you’re having Wi-Fi or cellular issues that you just haven’t been able to resolve using other methods, iOS gives you the option to reset all your network settings. This sets just about everything back to the factory default, giving you a chance to start from scratch. Before diving in, it’s important to understand what resetting your network settings actually does. The reset restores just about every network-related setting on your device to the factory default....

It happens all the time, you find an article to read but then nature calls. Do you take your laptop with you? With site to phone you can share links between any browser and any smartphone with a single click. If you have Android you may be familiar with this functionality with Google’s Chrome to phone, or with webOS’ Neato! But what if you have an iPhone, Blackberry or Windows Phone 7 device?...

For almost everyone who made the upgrade, Windows 8 proved to be something of a disappointment for one reason or another. Windows 8.1 (or Windows Blue) was released to address many of the issues users had complained about, including reintroducing the ability to boot straight to the desktop. Being able to boot to the desktop rather than the Start screen is something that people have been clamoring for ever since the first preview versions of Windows 8 were unveiled....