How-To Geek

Microsoft recently rolled out two-factor authentication for Windows Live accounts, and here’s how to enable it.

Snapshots are a massive time saver when you are testing settings and configuration for your Geek School testing. Read on to see how you can take advantage of them while following along with our articles.

Our Geek School articles can get pretty complicated, and there’s no reason to do a ton of crazy stuff on your own desktop PC. Instead, you can just VirtualBox like we do to create virtual machines for all of your testing. Here’s how to do it.

By default, when you use the save as… option to save e-mail messages and attachments in Outlook the items are saved in your My Documents folder. Here’s how to change that.

Sure, anybody can end a process from the Task Manager, but did you know you can also do it from the command line?

A few weeks ago, The Geek showed you how you can use the command prompt to find when your computer was started up last. In this last installation of Geek School for PowerShell, we are going to write a reusable PowerShell command to do the same thing.

As we move away from simply running commands and move into writing full blown scripts, you will need a temporary place to store data. This is where variables come in.

PowerShell offers two ways for you to extend the shell. You can either use snapins, which are binary only and developed in a fully-fledged programming language like C#, or you can use modules, which can be binary as well as script based.

PowerShell has four types of jobs – Background Jobs, Remote Jobs,WMI Jobs and Scheduled Jobs. Join us as we find out what they are and how we can use them.

The Windows Task Scheduler can automatically send email at a specific time or in response to a specific event, but its integrated email feature won’t work very well for most users.

Since PowerShell is based on the .Net Framework and incorporates various other technologies like WMI and CIM, there is always more than one way to accomplish the same thing. Come join us for this short post where we learn how to choose the best method to accomplish our tasks.

WMI and its newer brother CIM can both be used to manage the Windows machines in your environment. But do you know the difference between them? Join us as we take a look.

One of the best features PowerShell offers is the ability to remotely manage your Servers. It even lets you manage a bunch of them at once as well.

In this edition of Geek School, we look at formatting, filtering and comparing objects in the Pipeline.

Understanding objects is one of the fundamental concepts to “getting” PowerShell. Join us as we explore objects and how they make PowerShell better than any other shell out there today.

If you have used ipconfig or ping through the command prompt, you’re halfway to becoming a PowerShell ninja. So come on and join us as we discover cmdlets in this installation of Geek School.

There are plenty of articles about Google Reader alternatives, but did you know you can use your favorite email client to read your RSS feeds as well?

In this edition of Geek School, we will be helping you understand the powerful PowerShell scripting language that is built right into Windows, and is extremely useful to know in an IT environment.

In this installation of Geek School we take a look at our options for Backup and Recovery. This is an important one, so come on and join us.

In this installation of Geek School, we take a look at Folder Virtualization, SIDs and Permission, as well as the Encrypting File System.

Have you ever been in a situation where someone in your family hooked your phone or tablet up to the wireless and now you don’t know the password to connect your other devices?

In today’s edition of Geek School, we look at the tools we can use to monitor the performance and reliability of our computers.

If you followed our guide to encrypting your removable disks with Bit Locker, you will recall that we saved our recovery key to the cloud, which is a new feature in Windows 8. The first thing we need to do is go and retrieve that key, which can be done by heading over to this URL. At this point you will need to sign into your Microsoft account, the same one you signed into Windows 8 with.

In the last part of the series we looked at how you can manage and use your Windows computers from anywhere as long as you are on the same network. But what if you are not?

Whether you want to prevent your child from accessing Facebook or are simply sick of the advertisements that litter webpages, a custom hosts file can come in handy.