How-To Geek

I’ve written plenty about squeezing the best performance out of a Windows computer, tuning startup apps, killing background junk, and making sure hardware isn’t getting in its own way. That kind of optimization matters, but it’s not the whole story. Lately, I’ve been thinking less about raw performance and more about how a computer feels to use. Not faster clocks or higher benchmark scores, but fewer interruptions, fewer repeated actions, and less time spent fighting the Windows UI.

There are a lot of apps out there, and some of them are even free. But those free ones often have ads, annoying features, features locked behind a paywall, and other nuisances. That's why I prefer free and open-source apps that respect me as a user. The following are some that I can't live without.

Dropping serious money on a new car is exciting, right up until it starts living at the dealership. If you’re spending $30,000 or more, you want something built on solid bones, with a proven engine, stable tech, and a track record that shows the bugs have already been worked out.

February is here, and, in addition to the anticipated—or dreaded—Day o’ Love festivities, it also brings with it the celebration of Black History Month. In this week’s recommendations, I omit the lovey-dovey stuff and present you with a hearty cultural mix of drama with special interest, action with gritty crime and biker gangs, and fantasy that includes a suspenseful, witchcraft-enhancing tale.

Modern pickup trucks are faster, more powerful, and more technologically advanced than ever, but one key feature has quietly disappeared along the way. Manual transmissions, once a defining part of the pickup truck experience, have been steadily phased out in favor of automatics and complex driver aids. For drivers who grew up shifting their own gears, that change has removed a level of involvement that today’s trucks simply can’t replicate.

It can be a full-time job keeping up with all the latest releases and trending movies and shows bombarding us on the daily. But sometimes you just want to watch a sure thing—something comforting and familiar.

We're all guilty of charging our phones, laptops, and other devices in public spaces. After all, what can you do when you've got no power and that's your only option? But those USB ports, while convenient, can be a danger to your devices.

The 2026 Winter Olympics are underway in the Italian regions of Milan and Cortina d'Ampezzo. For the next 17 days, the best athletes in the world will compete in popular winter sports, including skiing, snowboarding, curling, and figure skating. My favorite sport to watch is hockey, which will showcase some of the best NHL players in the world. The last time the United States won the gold medal in men's hockey was in 1980, and now that team is the subject of an incredible Netflix documentary, Miracle: The Boys of '80.

Portable SSDs are incredibly convenient, but are they as fast as the ones you can put inside your PC? The short answer is no, which is fine—they have their own use cases. But, if your portable SSD, often worth upwards of $100, is disappointingly slow, the drive itself may not be the cause.

If you have some smart home devices, and you have room for one more button in your Mac's menu bar, you might be interested in the new Itsyhome utility. It can help you control lights, cameras, and other smart home equipment in just a few clicks, with webhooks and Shortcuts support for advanced automations.

Affordable compact cars come and go, but one Japanese model has quietly dominated the reliability conversation for years. The Honda Civic remains a benchmark for durability and trouble-free ownership, even as competitors come and go. Its reputation for needing fewer repairs and delivering long-lasting performance makes it the go-to choice for drivers who want a dependable daily driver without frequent visits to the shop.

There are well over a hundred fonts to choose from when using Microsoft Word. While it's fun to experiment with them, it would take forever to try them all out. That's why I'm picking a handful of the best fonts to use with Word across various use cases, be it academia, design, or even coding.

If you’ve been eyeing one of those pricey mesh systems to improve your Wi-Fi but can’t justify the cost, here's some good news: there’s a good chance you don’t even need one. In many apartments and smaller homes, a single router can already provide all the coverage you could possibly need.

It's exhausting trying to find a truly effective productivity tool these days. The market is completely flooded, and you can't trust an advertisement to reflect reality; they're all just marketing hype. However, there are still apps that can do everything you need that don't cost you a monthly payment.

Excel's conditional formatting data bars seem easy to use, but they can cause more problems than they solve, creating a "rule rot" mess and causing a massive lag in large worksheets. Switching to the REPT function keeps your file size small and your performance snappy.

Plezy is a third-party Plex client for Windows, Mac, Linux, and mobile platforms with a sleek design and a few unique features. If you're annoyed with the official Plex apps, you should give Plezy a spin—especially after the most recent update.

2026 is flying by, with January already behind us. If you haven't yet managed to fulfill your New Year's resolution to do more with Home Assistant, there are still plenty of projects to get your teeth into.

I discovered Linux in high school and fell in love with the OS in college. I dreamed of getting a job writing about free software and making others aware of the amazing things they can do with their computer. But despite this dream coming true, I’m no longer the open source purist I once was. Now I prefer not really having to think of software at all.

Buying a car always reminds me how strange the whole process is. I’ve done it several times now, and every trip to the dealership still manages to surprise me. Not because of the cars themselves, but because of how much effort goes into nudging buyers toward features they didn’t walk in asking for. Some of it is subtle, some of it is straight-up upsell, and a lot of it hides behind words like premium, smart, or advanced. By the time you’re sitting at the salesperson’s desk signing paperwork, it’s easy to lose track of what you actually wanted versus what sounded good in the moment.

De-Googling makes sense. We're all handing every bit of our personal data to huge companies, and the most common one is typically Google—and it wouldn't be weird of you to think that's weird or creepy.