How-To Geek

If you’re like most people, your Internet service provider hands you a single Internet Protocol address and your router shares it amongst all the connected devices in your home.

The XPS format is Microsoft’s alternative to PDF. It was introduced in Windows Vista, but never gained much traction. However, modern versions of Windows continue to include better support for XPS files than PDF files.

Taking photos with your Android phone is great, but there comes a time when you need to get those photos onto your computer. A little while back we took a look at SnapPea, a handy tool for managing phones and tablets from Windows; SnapPea Photos is a Chrome extension designed specifically with photo management in mind.

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Microsoft will be ending support for Windows XP on April 8, 2014 after 12 and a half years of supporting it. Microsoft has gone out of their way to extend support on several occasions, but the 2014 deadline looks like the final one.

Our latest edition of WIG is filled with news link coverage on topics such as Windows XP now has less than a year of extended support remaining, Dropbox is now offering business customers an IT-friendly version, the Social Media widget for WordPress has been injecting spam advertisements into sites, and more.

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Phones have improved dramatically in the last ten years. Modern smartphones seem like a technology from an alien civilization when placed next to the original cell phones. But battery life hasn’t improved. In fact, battery life feels like it’s getting worse.

The look and ‘mood’ of cities at night come in an infinite variety, but all have one thing in common…a unique and colorful beauty that begs to be captured in photos. Bring the ethereal beauty of urban night-life to your iPad with the first in our series of City Lights Wallpaper collections.

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While it does not happen often, every once in a while a security update to patch Windows causes more problems than it solves. Case in point, security update 2823324 that was a part of this month’s Patch Tuesday release for Windows 7. Some users have been experiencing endless rebooting or a failure of their system to restart after installing the update. To counteract the problem Microsoft has published a KB article to help get affected systems up and running again.

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

Have you upgraded to Windows 8 yet? We’ve published a lot of Windows 8 articles here at How-To Geek, and I’ve written many of them, but I haven’t. I still use Windows 7 on my PC.

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.

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites.

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The human eye is an amazing thing with all that it is capable of seeing and helping us process, but there are times where even it needs a ‘little help’ to fully visualize something. Enter the camera…a wonderful piece of technology that can do what the human eye can not in some instances. Bill Shribman presents some awesome examples of mysteries that cameras have been able to help us solve in this terrific TEDEd video.

You’ve probably heard that firewalls are an important security protection, but do you know why that is? Many people don’t, if references to firewalls in TV shows, movies, and other forms of popular media are any indication.

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.

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With the increasing focus on improving user account security, two-factor authentication has become a ‘must have’ feature for many popular online services. Following the lead of other companies Microsoft will soon join them in offering the feature to help better secure user accounts.

Do you find that you always type the same thing at the end of an email? If you answered yes, its time to get an email signature.

Are you one of those people that loves to see the screensaver come on when you get up from your computer? Here’s an easy way to make the screensaver show up as soon as you lock your PC.

Most Linux distributions come without support for MP3 audio, H.264 video, Flash content, and even commercial video DVDs. Patents, closed-source software, and even laws that make certain types of software illegal restrict what can be included in a Linux distribution.

Any parent will know that giving their children access to the internet is a double-edged sword. Access to the world’s biggest free library is invaluable, but there are plenty of unpleasant corners of the web that young eyes are best shielded from.  If you’re using Windows 8, Family Safety can be used to lock down your kids’ accounts.