How-To Geek

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

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.

BitTorrent consumes 12% of total Internet traffic in North America and 36% of total traffic in the Asia-Pacific region, according to a 2012 study. It’s so popular that the new “Copyright Alert System” targets BitTorrent traffic alone.

There are numerous applications which, when launched, result in a UAC (User Account Control) warning being displayed. There are reasons why this security measure is a good idea, but it can also be extremely irritating. ElevatedShortcut lets you create shortcuts that bypass the warning.

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?

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.

In this installation of Geek School, we look at how we can administer our machines remotely using Remote Assistance, Remote Desktop, Windows Remote Management also known as WinRM, and PowerShell.

If you use the Windows Administrative tools often, it’s helpful to have quicker access to them. We’ve shown you how to add them to the Start menu in Windows 7. Here’s how to add them to the Modern UI screen in Windows 8.

Keyboard shortcuts are an essential tool for dramatically speeding up everything you do on your computer. Geeks make extensive use of keyboard shortcuts, but every computer user can benefit from them.

There can be few computer users who do not have at least one social networking account – the likes of Facebook and Twitter are just so prevalent these days. But while it’s easy to sign up for an account, closing one down is not always so simple. Until now.

Whenever antivirus software is mentioned, someone always seems to chime up and say they don’t need an antivirus because they’re careful. This isn’t true. No matter how smart think you are, you can still benefit from an antivirus on Windows.

Most of you probably never even think about the Windows build number — after all, it’s not something you see very often, and it doesn’t matter. But it does hold an interesting secret since Windows Vista.

Come and join us as we make a the world a safer place using our Windows Firewall in this edition of Geek School.

If you open a lot of programs at one time in Windows, your desktop can get quite chaotic and messy. One of those many windows may be displaying private data, and it’s easy to lose track of it and accidentally leave it visible.

Install an app from Google Play and, while the installer takes the form of an APK files, you’re never given the opportunity to download the file directly. Using the APK Downloader extension for Chrome, you can download any APK you need so you have it as a backup.

In the last two articles, we looked at how to prepare your PC for network access. In this installment, we are going to look at wireless network configuration.

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.

The Libraries view is the default view when you open Windows Explorer in Windows 7 or File Explorer in Windows 8. If you want to open a different folder when you open Explorer, it’s easy to change in Windows 8, and we’ll show you how.

Last time we looked at the theory behind IP addresses, subnet masks and name resolution, and we ended the installment with a practical guide on how to change your network settings. This time we take that knowledge and extend it by introducing things like DHCP, Network Locations, Ping and much more.

Yesterday Dropbox released a new version of their desktop client that makes monitoring your account’s activity and sharing files easier than ever…all from a quick access menu. If you are an avid Dropbox user, then you will definitely want to grab a copy of the latest version!

In this guide we’ll take you through the steps to setup a folder on your Windows computer as an FTP repository, using a free program called FileZilla. FTP can be used to easily transfer a lot of files between computers; the FTP repository can be mapped to multiple computers across the Internet so that other people can access the directory right from Windows Explorer.

Google Chrome allows other programs on your computer to install system-wide Chrome extensions. Chrome even allows these extensions to prevent you from disabling or removing them via Chrome’s Extensions page.

How much of your life is recorded online? Spend a moment considering this and it’s likely to be a terrifying idea. You may not consider yourself the type of person to keep a journal, or even a blog, but over the years you have probably posted thousands of words on the likes of Facebook, Twitter and Google+.