How-To Geek

Have you ever wanted to monitor who’s logging into your computer and when? On Professional editions of Windows, you can enable logon auditing to have Windows track which user accounts log in and when.

Do you pin a lot of programs to your Windows 7 Taskbar and run a lot of programs at once? Between pinned programs and other programs running, your Taskbar can get crowded. There are a few ways you can reclaim the space on your Taskbar.

Some of the most powerful Windows features are only available in Professional or Enterprise editions of Windows. However, you don’t have to upgrade to Windows Professional to use these powerful features – use these free alternatives instead.

The Windows Task Manager is often used for troubleshooting – perhaps closing an application that isn’t working properly or monitoring system resource usage. However, there’s a lot more you can do with Windows 7’s Task Manager.

Clearing your browser cache is made easily accessible in the desktop version of Internet Explorer, however, in the Metro version it is a little bit more hidden. Read on to find out more.

Do you still launch programs on Windows by hunting down a desktop shortcut and double-clicking it? There are better ways – Windows has several built-in tricks for quickly launching applications.

Want to allow a standard user account to run an application as administrator without a UAC or password prompt? You can easily create a shortcut that uses the runas command with the /savecred switch, which saves the password.

Internet Explorer has a secret mode called InPrivate which is pretty much the same as Chrome’s incognito mode. It can be accessed on the desktop by right-clicking on the Internet Explorer icon on the taskbar, but how do you open an InPrivate tab in the Metro IE? Read on to find out.

This week’s edition of WIG is filled with news link goodness covering topics such as Windows 8 Pro downgrades to Windows 7 and Vista will be possible, the Ubuntu Live CD is now dead, Guild Wars 2 is suffering an ongoing password attack, and more.

Windows 8 includes a SmartScreen filter that prevents unknown and malicious programs from running. SmartScreen is part of Internet Explorer 8 and 9 – with Windows 8, it’s now integrated into the operating system.

Connect a USB stick to a Windows computer – even on Windows 8 – and Windows will ask if you want to speed up your system using ReadyBoost. But what exactly is ReadyBoost, and will it actually speed up your computer?

Windows 8 contains a completely revamped backup system. Windows 8’s File History replaces Windows 7’s Windows Backup – if you use Windows Backup and update to Windows 8, you’ll find quite a few differences.

Now that Windows 8 RTM has been out for a bit you may be wondering about all of the new keyboard shortcuts associated with the system. Yash Tolia from the MSDN blog has put together a super list of all the keyboard shortcuts ...

The Windows Event Viewer shows a log of application and system messages – errors, information messages, and warnings. Scammers have used the Event Viewer to deceive people – event a properly functioning system will have error messages here.

Do you have a computer that you don’t want other people accessing – perhaps a server? You can have Windows email you whenever someone logs into your computer (assuming it’s connected to the Internet), giving you peace of mind.

Searching in Windows 8 has changed significantly, in fact at first you might think that all most Metro apps “lack” a search function altogether. Read on to find out how you can use the search feature in almost any app in Windows 8.

While you can use the Windows Task Scheduler to schedule your own automatic tasks, Windows also uses it behind the scenes to perform many system tasks – defragmenting your hard disks when you’re not using your computer, for example.

By default, Windows 8 automatically sets the number of rows of tiles to fit your screen, depending on your monitor size and resolution. However, you can tell Windows 8 to display a certain number of rows of tiles at all times, despite the screen resolution.

Do you want your computer to automatically run a program, remind you about something, or even automatically send emails? Use the Task Scheduler included with Windows – its interface can be a bit intimidating, but it’s easy to use.

If you’ve ever purchased a computer with a hard disk capacity of 500 GB and opened Windows Explorer only to find that its capacity looked more like 440 GB, you may be wondering where all those gigabytes went.

If you find your Windows computer waking from sleep for no apparent reason, your computer is either being woken up by a hardware device – such as your mouse — or scheduled task set to wake your computer.

As usual, there’s yet another security hole in the Java Runtime Environment, and if you don’t disable your Java plugin, you’re at risk for being infected with malware. Here’s how to do it.

The C: drive is the default installation location for Windows, if you have a CD/DVD drive on your machine it’s likely the D: drive, and any additional drives fall in line after that. What about the A: and B: drives?

Printing has become an application aware feature in Metro applications. This makes the outcome of a print job different from application to application, but the question remains, how do you print?

Today we are going to show you a nifty new shortcut built into Windows 8 that lets you capture everything that’s on your screen–this is the first time that Windows has really included a built-in way to capture screenshots.