How-To Geek

Does your PC run smoothly one moment and suddenly become unresponsive the next? It’s incredibly frustrating—and even worse, there's rarely a single clear cause. The slowdown could stem from software glitches, faulty drivers, overheating, or a mix of several factors. Here are the fixes you can try.

Anime can feel a little intimidating if you're not a diehard fan or if you don't immerse yourself in it every day. Netflix makes it pretty easy to get your feet wet (or dive right in) with the stunning genre, though, and buried among its seemingly endless rows of titles are some incredible stories.

When real life goes off the rails, the stories beat any scripted show or movie on Netflix. And a good documentary or series doesn't just talk at you, it drags you into the room (interrogation or otherwise) with the people at the center of the story, whether it's a true crime caper or behind the scenes with the stars and creators of our favorite movies.

Amazon is finally making a huge, consumer-friendly shift for e-book owners, announcing that you will be able to download your DRM-free Kindle books directly in EPUB and PDF formats. This comes after Amazon has tried for so long to prevent everyone from downloading its books.

The Raspberry Pi’s main claim to fame is being a whole computer on a single circuit board, complete with a capable ARM chip. But its biggest party trick is how expandable it is, with a handy 40-pin general-purpose input/output interface (or GPIO for short).

There was once a time when you could avoid buying a smart TV, but that’s no longer true. While convenient and packed with streaming apps, smart TVs are also filled with ads and tracking technology that monitors how you use your device, what you watch, and more.

Most people assume that deleting files and emptying the Recycle Bin permanently removes them—but that’s not true. Those “deleted” files still sit on your drive and can be restored with recovery tools. So how do you securely erase sensitive data? You can use sDelete, Microsoft’s tool to wipe data.

Android has matured into a pretty great operating system over the years. However, it’s far from perfect. I’ve used every modern mobile operating system as a daily driver, from webOS to Windows Phone, BlackBerry, Android, and iPhone. Here are the things that I think Android needs to copy from mobile operating systems of yesteryear.

Are you ready for more homelab projects to do? Because I know I am! This weekend, set your sights on saving money by canceling subscriptions, supercharging your coding experience, and overhauling your automation workflows.

Are you still using the built-in password manager from Google or Apple? If so, it’s time to leave your old password manager behind and move to something more universal and cross-platform.

If you ever wish that reading the system logs, optimizing music metadata, and checking battery health were easier on Linux, I've got recommendations. With your spare time this weekend, you may find an app that makes your Linux PC just a little bit more powerful.

This weekend on Paramount+ I've decided to mix together three totally different genres in the hopes that at least one of them will spark your interest for a good weekend binge.

If something breaks on a Windows PC in my family or circle of friends, I am usually the one who gets the call. Over the years I have become the default tech support guy, and that means I spend a lot of time hunting down strange errors, slowdowns, and the kind of odd behavior that rarely shows up in Microsoft’s help docs. I have written before about the tools I rely on to fix Windows, including a few standouts from the Sysinternals Suite that have saved me more times than I can count.

I love the array of fresh available content on Amazon Prime Video. This week, I bring you some personally verified gems in a very witty historical comedy, a modern-day dramedy set in Bristol, and one of television’s most bingeable psychological thrillers of this century—you know, the kind that creates the obsession where you’d rather finish a season than stop to sleep.

One usually visits a graveyard or cemetery to pay your respects, but also to remember the good times before you lost something special. That's me visiting the Google graveyard of dead products and services. When it's time to lay some flowers at the headstone of Google Reader, all I can remember is that the web used to be a much better place.

As we speed through December and the weather outside is frightful (for those of you in the Northern Hemisphere), now is the perfect time to hunker down and watch some quality entertainment on Netflix.

When I started using Microsoft Excel, my spreadsheets were a mess, and I wasted hours trying to make them look professional. If you're struggling with manual formatting, these six simple tips are the shortcuts I wish I had known from day one to clean up my data faster.

If you want the most satisfying typing experience and a decent gaming keyboard, you should opt for a mechanical.

As governments keep rethinking their rules around vehicle emissions, buyers are rethinking what they want to drive.

Notion has become integral to my daily workflow. During the week, there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not in Notion for at least a few hours, if not most of the workday. Here’s how Notion makes both my personal and professional life so much easier.