How-To Geek

Microsoft's downfall in the 2000s and 2010s is well-known. The company's obsession with PCs left it blind to the rise of smartphones, reducing it to one player in a larger computing world. Windows still dominates the computer on your desk, but not the one in your pocket.

It can be tricky to get your head around the concept of an “immutable” operating system; if you don’t care too much for nuance, you can think of it as simply more secure and more stable.

If you're a PC gamer gearing up to start your college journey, you're looking at your desktop gaming tower and trying to decide whether it's a good idea to take it with you. If you're going to be living in the dormitories, you might want to think twice about that.

You don't have to spend sports-car money to get genuinely exciting performance, especially if you're willing to shop the used market. Depreciation has turned some overlooked performance cars into surprisingly affordable bargains, and one particularly unusual crossover now costs less than many basic new compact cars. Despite its practical shape, it packs enough power to deliver seriously quick acceleration and the kind of driving character that's increasingly rare.

While Windows, Mac, and maybe Linux are the dominant OSes today, there are others that never made it. Here are some of my favorite OSes that never had a chance in the marketplace.

As technology continues to evolve, I take privacy very seriously, especially given growing concerns about identity theft and data collection policies. My phone number is also part of that identity profile, which means yours is too. Sure, I can control which apps I download and who I give my number to, but many things require my smartphone's number.

I had higher hopes for the 2026 Genesis GV60 Performance AWD when the automaker recently loaned me one for a week here in Detroit. It was a sharp-looking vehicle that's for sure, finished in Uyuni White over a Sky Blue and Prussian interior, with all the hallmarks of a luxurious electric SUV listed on the window sticker.

Google Maps feels like an app that's perfectly suited to a phone, but with its growing number of features, it's becoming increasingly cluttered. I recently switched to using my laptop whenever I wanted to plot a route in Google Maps. It turns out it's so much better.

So you've finally got gigabit broadband and Ethernet and Wi-Fi to match. Just a few years ago, this would be an impossible dream, but it's becoming the norm for more and more people. Now, at last, you can stop worrying about how fast your home network is and relax—just kidding!

I'm sick of the poor quality, occasionally poor photos my phone's default camera app produces. While some of this is 100% a skill issue (I'm a hobbyist photographer at best), I sometimes feel like my photos just don't look as good as I'd like. So I tested a few camera apps to see which one took the best-quality photos.

Cadillac hasn't built a true one-off concept since the Cien debuted at the 2002 Detroit Auto Show, a drivable V12 supercar that hinted at where Cadillac's performance ambitions were headed, right up until the cost of its custom engine and a projected $200,000 price tag kept it from ever reaching production.

Nothing starts a conversation faster with high school or college kids than an addictive Netflix series. These shows will spark debates that should spread across campus. It's the kind of show where, if you don't watch, you'll feel completely left out. I felt that way when Stranger Things first premiered and it became a true word-of-mouth show.

I finally decided to jailbreak my Kindle and install KOReader. Doing so has given me access to features that aren't possible on a standard Kindle. I set up an automation that turns off my bedside light when I've finished reading, and I can't get enough of it.

Most people who use Excel on Android tried it once, decided it wasn't worth the hassle, and went back to their laptop. That's a reasonable conclusion if you haven't used it lately, but the mobile version has gotten a lot better. The features that used to make spreadsheet work on a phone feel like a punishment have gotten fixed. In fact, I don’t even mind using Microsoft Excel on my phone anymore.

I thought I had a good handle on what started when I turned on my Windows PC. Then I opened Microsoft's Autoruns and was surprised by how many more entries it showed me. So I decided to investigate them to see which ones actually mattered and how much they were using my PC's resources.

The Raspberry Pi 5 is a fairly capable SBC, but it doesn't make a great desktop—as soon as you start trying to multitask, browser tabs start to lag, and the entire system will struggle. Between a relatively low-power GPU, the limitations of a microSD card boot drive (which is the default unless you buy an M.2 hat), and a CPU that will readily thermally throttle without active cooling, it just isn't up to the job.

I bought my first cordless power tool over 20 years ago, and it was a shiny new Milwaukee V28 with a lithium-ion battery. Who remembers the V28 line? It was a big, expensive purchase, and over the years I've bought Milwaukee tools here and there, but eventually I got rid of them all and switched to Ryobi. Here's why.

When you're navigating from A to B, the last thing you want to do is constantly switch back and forth between different apps. Any time you spend off the Google Maps navigation screen is time when you could miss that crucial turn. Thankfully, Google Maps has some useful integrations that mean you don't need to keep flipping from app to app.

Whenever the discussion about physical media and its inevitable demise comes up, the argument that "discs rot and degrade" will inevitably raise its head.

As great as 3D printing is, you can often tell when an object has come off a print bed and not out of an injection mold. This mostly comes down to layer lines, an inescapable symptom of the filament deposition modeling process.