How-To Geek

A few months ago, Microsoft released a new Windows 11 feature that provides a modern alternative to the good old System Restore. The feature is called point-in-time restore, and it should have already landed on your PC with a recent Windows update. Point-in-time restore can be useful because it creates a snapshot of your system every 24 hours, allowing easy recovery to a recent restore point.

What is a laptop if not a mini PC stuck in a folding prison? There may be a bit more to it than that, but when a laptop fails at its primary task of being a portable computer, it’s good to know that you can still get some life out of it as a static one.

HBO Max has no shortage of shows that everyone is into, but some of its best series are not exactly the household names that dominate every streaming conversation. Dig a little deeper into the platform's catalog, and you will find plenty of shows that deserve more attention than they get.

Your NAS is, at its core, kind of another PC. It has PC specs, and it runs a full operating system, but the way it's put together means it's optimized to do certain things betther than your PC.

Everyone is a PC newbie at some point, and there are so many mistakes to be made. One of the most annoying I've come across is installing your NVMe SSD in the wrong M.2 slot. Any beginner could do it, and if you don't know what kind of performance to expect from your machine, you might not even notice something's wrong.

While watching the endless episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation and The X-Files that I consumed on the old CRT of my youth, at the time I don’t recall ever thinking that it looked terrible. Compared to the pristine digital that the vast majority of today’s television is produced on, though, the difference is stark—it was softer, grainier, and there was way less detail. But that was never what the cameras actually saw.

By default, many self-hosted apps are only accessible over your home network. There are plenty of ways to provide remote access, and Tailscale is a popular option. It creates a secure private connection between your devices, even when they're on different networks, and plenty of self-hosted apps can benefit from remote access using Tailscale.

If you rarely feel the need to venture beyond PLA or PETG for your 3D printing needs, you’re not alone. These materials are cheap and easy to print, plus they avoid the downsides that come with many other 3D printing filaments.

When it comes to backups, it’s easy to think bigger is better—but I’ve started going smaller. I’m done with bulky spinning disks and rarely even reach for an external SSD. I’m now all about flash drives.

The Harrigan crime family returns for another explosive season in MobLand. The MobLand season 2 premiere is now streaming on Paramount+.

If you have an old Android phone or tablet lying unused in a drawer, you're wasting its potential. Old devices can work really well as dashboards. There are plenty of ways to use your Android device to display information in your home.

If you just bought a new impact driver or impact wrench you're going to love it, but the next thing you purchase is even more important. The most common mistake I see my friends and family make is grabbing a standard drill bit or a chrome socket they already own, simply because it fits the tool. But that convenience is dangerous and comes with serious risk.

Xerox PARC effectively created the paradigm of the GUI (Graphical User Interface) in the 1970s, with overlapping windows, icons, menus, and everything else a computer user today would easily recognize.

Mesh Wi-Fi gets pitched as the default fix for dead zones, but for many homes it's an expensive answer to a simple problem. Wired access points and a well-placed extender can often deliver faster, more stable coverage for less—though I will concede that mesh still earns its keep in some specific cases.

I'll admit: sometimes I get bogged down in Excel's power-user features, from Power Query and the Data Model to Python. But when I stop and think about the things that actually help me every day, it's often the little discoveries I picked up accidentally along the way. These are six Excel tricks I wish I'd stumbled upon earlier—and the best part is, each one takes seconds to learn.

If you spend any time cooking at home, you already know the frustration that comes with modern online recipe blogs. I battled with these sites for years, but paying for one app immediately made my life better. Downloading Paprika was the best decision I made for my daily kitchen routine.

The Ryobi brand was founded in Japan in 1943 and made its first power tool in 1968. Eventually, popularity grew thanks to die-cast products in the 80s, but everything changed in 1996 with the introduction of its first 18V cordless drill. It had a nickel-cadmium (NiCad) battery with a simple connector rail on a plastic housing. Three decades later, that design remains the same.

We're only midway through September, but as the final days of summer count down, Netflix is just getting ramped up. I cannot wait for the arrival of Party Down on September 22—it's the best comedy show you've never seen; it stars the brilliant Ken Marino, a pre-Severance Adam Scott, and other faces you'll recognize.

The first game with official DLSS 5 support, NBA 2K27, came out recently, and modders quickly took the DLSS 5 DLL file from the game and made it available to gamers around the world who own a newer NVIDIA GPU, allowing them to use DLSS 5 in a bunch of PC games with tools such as OptiScaler and DLSS 5 Swapper. While only the RTX 50 series is officially supported, at least for now, the two aforementioned utilities allow you to use DLSS 5 on older NVIDIA graphics cards as well.

From React Native to Kotlin Multiplatform, cross-platform frameworks are popular for their promise of “write once, run everywhere” software. Google’s Flutter is another such framework, with a few key differences.