How-To Geek

Is there a battle between HDMI and DisplayPort these days? Not really, not anymore. DisplayPort has traditionally been the easy recommendation for PC monitors, and modern DP 2.1 has beaten HDMI when it comes to bandwidth.

Excel has more than 500 built-in functions, but if you asked me which ones I use most often, I wouldn't need very long to answer. After nearly two decades of using Excel professionally, there's a small group I keep reaching for whenever I'm building or fixing a spreadsheet. Some have been around for years, while others are relatively new to modern Excel.

The Pebble Time 2 is the most fun I’ve ever had with a smartwatch. It’s not the prettiest. It’s not the most durable. It’s not even packed with the most features. But this smartwatch sparks so much joy and is so genuinely useful that I haven’t wanted to part with it from the moment I put it on.

It’s no secret that a good percentage of thefts are opportunistic in nature. Thieves target items that are easy to grab, so a good defense often boils down to making items less inviting.

Every morning, I open the same apps and then spend the next few minutes dragging, resizing, and rearranging them across my two monitors. By the afternoon, everything has shifted again. I was getting tired of rebuilding the same desktop layouts, so I went looking for a better way. Then I found an easy-to-use PowerToys tool: Workspaces.

For the past couple of years, I've done most of my published writing from my phone. I know how weird most people find this, so I thought I'd try a traditional desktop PC.

Most of us have an old bookshelf speaker, soundbar, or Bluetooth speaker lying around somewhere. They still sound good, the problem is that they're not very "smart."

I miss the good old days when you had to queue for a movie, lining up outside the theater and passing the Now Showing posters which would get you excited about what you were about to see. I wanted to build something similar for Jellyfin using a cheap ESP32 display.

Nvidia is slowly lifting the veil from the first PCs with its RTX Spark chip, and it's now clearer what they can do. I had the opportunity to demo several computers from Asus, Dell, Microsoft, and other brands at IFA 2026, and they promise to transform computing — although some big questions remain.

Four of the best series to watch on Netflix this weekend came to the service in a 50/50 split—two from the back end of August, and two newbies just dying to make an impact on the Netflix Top 10.

When someone new comes over, one of the first questions I get is why in the world I have a random laptop plugged into my router. Depending on how tech-savvy they are, my answer usually ranges from "Oh, it’s just for movies" to "This is my home server, and here's what it does." So, here’s why I actually keep a decade-old laptop running next to my router.

I'm forever creating dashboards in Excel, and while I get a lot of satisfaction from it, that's part of the problem. I end up going down a rabbit hole, adding more charts, and then wondering whether I left anything out. There's no handbook for creating a dashboard in Excel, as every dataset is different. So I decided to let Gemini do the decision-making for me.

Cassettes, CDs, even vinyls (despite their recent resurgence in popularity) — physical media that you can hold and confidently pronounce as yours has unfortunately become a rarity in the modern world. The digital landscape is one of temporary consumption and conditional ownership, and convenience alone can't make up for the downsides.

Do you have a fast internet connection, but your Windows PC often feels slower than it should? Have you already tried switching your DNS providers and other internet speed optimization hacks, but still no luck? Well, I’ve been in the same place you are — and after some digging around, I found that a few background apps and processes were causing the problem. Here’s how to find out if that’s happening on your PC and how to stop it for good.

Your desk is your command station, and no command station is complete without the right equipment. Make yours even better with an ESP32, some extra components, and these easy-to-follow build guides that add fun and useful toys and accessories to your desktop.

Anybody who has set up a new Windows PC for development knows the tedium—spending the first few hours installing tools, muting distractions, changing File Explorer settings, and configuring Linux support. Microsoft’s Project Zenith is designed to make that ritual obsolete. It is a ready-to-code Windows 11 experience that ships pre-configured instead of a blank-slate install.

SSD prices are higher than ever due to the ongoing NAND flash shortage, which makes both your existing NVMes and any future upgrades a serious investment. When you’re spending big money on a 4TB or 8TB drive, the last thing you want is heat quietly shortening its lifespan.

As I occasionally torture myself with checking GPU prices at various retailers, I'm well aware of the fact that GPUs are, indeed, still massively overpriced. Shocker.

Netflix has many award-winning movies hidden in its evolving library. You might find your new favorite watch from the platform's exhaustive collection. This week's picks span musical history, a defining horror, and a thrilling psychological drama.

I use a surprising number of little utilities every day, from cleaning up text and calculating dates to converting file sizes and working out percentages. But I got tired of opening different apps and websites for these simple tasks, so I wanted a single place to keep the tools I actually use.