How-To Geek - For Geeks, By Geeks.

What Does CCleaner Do, and Should You Use It?

These days, it seems like every Windows user has heard about CCleaner. It’s widely recommended, online and offline—but this week, it acted as a piggyback for malware. The real question we should be asking is: do you really need CCleaner in the first place?

How to Snooze Notifications in Android Oreo

We get it; you’re busy. You can’t always respond to notifications right when they hit your phone, but you also don’t want to forget about them. Fortunately, in Android Oreo, you can snooze these notifications so they’ll pop up again later.

What Are Creative Commons Licenses?

Any creative work you do is covered by copyright. This means that if you write something, take a photo, record a song, paint a picture, or do anything that creates intellectual property, you get certain legal protections. The biggest protection is that other people aren’t able just to take your work and use it how they please. This is why services like Facebook have such complicated (and scary) Terms of Service.

12 Spoiler-Free Stardew Valley Tips and Tricks to Get You Started

One of the big things that makes Stardew Valley such a magical gaming experience is discovering everything for yourself, but that doesn’t mean that aren’t some spoiler-free tips and tricks to help you get started.

How to Reopen Closed Tabs on an iPhone or iPad

Modern mobile browsers allow you to reopen tabs you’ve recently closed, just like desktop browsers do. In Apple’s Safari browser for iPhone and iPad, the feature is a bit hidden—but it’s there. You can also reopen closed tabs in Google Chrome and other third-party browsers on an iPhone or iPad.

How to Add Favicons to Safari on macOS

We’ve been clear: Mac users should ditch Chrome for Safari. It offers much better battery life, better performance, and content filters are way better than ad blockers.

How to Start a Fundraiser After An Emergency Using Facebook

Facebook has several useful tools for disasters, including a way to let others know you’re safe, and find out if others are safe, too. You can even connect with people who need or are offering help, or donate to existing fundraisers. If you want to raise money for your own cause, you can set up a fundraiser through Facebook’s Safety Check.

How to Save Google’s WEBP Images As JPEG or PNG

Google’s new WEBP image format is pretty cool: its unique compression systems can display images at approximately two thirds the size of the same image rendered in JPEG or PNG format.

CCleaner Was Hacked: What You Need to Know

CCleaner, the incredibly popular PC maintenance utility, has been hacked to include malware. Here’s how to tell if you were affected, and what you should do.

How to Make Windows 10’s Taskbar Clock Display Seconds

Windows 10’s taskbar clock can display the precise time down to the second. This feature requires a registry hack to enable, and only works on Windows 10. Windows 7 users will instead need a third-party utility like T-Clock Redux to do this instead.

How to Boost Your Mouse Pointing Accuracy in Windows

From Enhance Pointer Precision to DPI and pointer speed, there are a lot of options that affect how your mouse pointer moves in Windows. The below tips will help you move your mouse pointer more accurately—and even allow you to move it pixel by pixel.

The Best Ways to Control All Your Smarthome Devices from One Place

The more smarthome products you pile onto your house, the more complicated it gets to integrate all of them together and seamlessly control them. If you’re in this situation, here are the best ways you can control all of your smarthome devices.

How to Make Sure a File Is Safe Before Downloading It

If you’re concerned a file might be malicious, you don’t need to download it and rely on your antivirus. You can scan the file for malware with over 60 antivirus engines before you download it—all with one single tool.

How to Manually and Automatically Shut Down and Restart Your Synology NAS

There’s more than one way to shutdown and restart your Synology NAS, including physical interaction with the NAS, software, and scheduled events. Let’s look at all three methods now.

How to Use Your Ecobee Smart Thermostat with Alexa

Controlling your smart thermostat remotely from your phone is cool and all, but don’t forget that you can also make it even easier on yourself and control it with your voice using Alexa. Here’s how to set it up.

Stupid Geek Tricks: Convince Your Friends You’re a Hollywood-Style Hacker with These Tools

Hacking in the movies is crazy exciting: fingers fly across the keyboard, and the screen is an ever flashing array of cryptic characters. It’s all so…interesting. Real hacking, sadly, isn’t that intense. However illegal what you’re doing may be, you’re still just someone sitting at a computer. Most the time you’re just trying to get people to use a fake Google sign-in page.

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The Iceland Word For Computer Literally Translates To?

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Is It Worth Upgrading to the iPhone 8 or iPhone X?

As summer turns to autumn, the leaves turn brown and the new iPhone is announced. At How-To Geek, we don’t get outside much, so we’re obviously more interested in the new iPhones than whatever trees are doing. Apple introduces the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and the iPhone X. We’re not going to address the profoundly weird start to the keynote, so the big question is: should you upgrade?

Equifax Got Hacked: How to Stop Identity Thieves from Opening Accounts in Your Name

Everybody is getting hacked left and right. Anthem lost 80 million records in 2015. The US government got hacked and lost personal data for millions, all the way down to fingerprint data. Now Equifax, a credit bureau, got hacked. So how can you protect yourself from criminals opening accounts in your name?

Should You Get an “Ultra HD” 4K TV?

Walk through any electronics showroom and most TVs you see will be some form of “Ultra HD” 4K. There are plenty of models available, and they’re cheaper than ever. But should you buy one?

What’s the Best Antivirus for Windows 10? (Is Windows Defender Good Enough?)

Windows 10 won’t hassle you to install an antivirus like Windows 7 did. Since Windows 8, Windows now includes a built-in antivirus called Windows Defender (which used to be available separately as Microsoft Security Essentials). But is it really the best for protecting your PC–or even just good enough?

18 Things You May Not Have Known Google Photos Can Do

Google Photos may seem like a simple image hosting service, but it’s actually quite powerful. Google Photos bridges the gap between cloud storage, image hosting, and image sharing services, giving stiff competition to Flickr, iCloud, Dropbox, and OneDrive.

Wi-Fi Security: Should You Use WPA2-AES, WPA2-TKIP, or Both?

Many routers provide WPA2-PSK (TKIP), WPA2-PSK (AES), and WPA2-PSK (TKIP/AES) as options. Choose the wrong one, though, and you’ll have a slower, less-secure network.

How to Fix Windows Update When It Gets Stuck

Windows Update is supposed to work silently in the background, but it may refuse to continue if it can’t install an individual update.

10 Handy Uses for Your Old iPad or Android Tablet

Tablet sales are slumping at the moment, probably as a result of big smartphones and convertible laptops chip away at a tablet’s usefulness. But if you have one or more tablets at home gathering dust while you happily poke away at your giant smartphone, there are probably some good ways to put them to use rather than selling them or recycling them. Here are a few ideas.

How to Change Microsoft Edge to Search Google Instead of Bing

Microsoft’s new Edge browser uses Bing as its default search engine, but if you prefer something else you can change that. Edge can use any search engine that supports OpenSearch as its default.

How to Turn Your Windows PC Into a Wi-Fi Hotspot

Windows can turn your PC into a wireless hotspot, allowing it to share its wired or wireless Internet connection with other wireless devices. But how you set it up that depends on what version of Windows you’re running. Here’s how it all works.

Did You Know

Broadcast television audiences have declined by a staggering 50 percent since 2002, but that doesn’t mean we’ve abandoned the medium; screen time has stayed stable as a result of streaming video sources like YouTube and Netflix.

Daily Tech Term

Form Factor (Computing)

In computing, form factor refers to the specifications of the motherboard and encompasses the physical size, mounting hole pattern, power supply type, the back-panel ports, and other design parameters.

The most common motherboard form factor size is ATX (Advanced Technology eXtended), which was developed by Intel in 1995 and still going strong. ATX boards are large, offer many expansion slots and room for onboard graphics and other perks, and fit well in the majority of modern computer tower cases.

There are over two dozen form factor sizes, but the majority of them are used for specific applications like embedded and server systems. Other commonly used form factor sizes besides ATX include microATX (popular for small form factor builds like compact and low-power home servers and media center computers) and Nano/Pico ITX boards (tiny boards used for low-power/silent media center builds and other embedded computer applications).

For more information on the differences between motherboard form factor sizes as well as what options to look for when motherboard shopping, check out our guide to picking the right motherboard for your custom PC.