How to Recover From a Bad GPU Driver Update
NVIDIA and AMD send out new drivers for their current graphics cards at roughly monthly intervals. These often improve performance, especially on the latest AAA games…except when they don’t.
Thanks to Bitcoin, Buying a PC Is Better Than Building One (for Now)
High-end graphics cards are in super high demand right now. Not because of a sudden bloom of PC gamers, but because they’re the most efficient way of adding number-crunching power to cryptocurrency mining “rigs.” This makes …
How to Create the Ultimate USB Key Ring to Solve Any Computer Problem
If you’re “the computer guy” (or girl) to your friends and family, you’re probably asked to diagnose and fix their problems on a regular basis. If you can’t stand to tell them to leave you alone, you might as well embrace you…
How to Make LibreOffice Writer Templates
Templates let you configure all the relevant settings you want pre-applied to documents—font settings, margins and tabs, boilerplate text, and so on. You just open the template and save it under a new name to get a jump sta…
What Are Samsung’s MicroLED TVs, and How Are They Different from OLED?
At the top of the television market, you have two big players: Samsung and LG. Sure, there are other brands making high-end sets, and competition among budget TVs is fierce and varied. But it’s safe to say that the two South …
How to Add Sideheads and Pull Quotes to Microsoft Word Documents
Sideheads (where a document’s subheads appear out to the side of the text) and pull quotes are really just two specific uses for text boxes in Microsoft Word. Here’s how to set them up.
Is Now a Good Time to Buy a New NVIDIA or AMD Graphics Card?
A few years ago, people were predicting the death of PC gaming as we know it. Those people are feasting on an abundance of humble pie, as PC games remain a cornerstone of the industry: digital delivery gives us more variety t…
How to Overclock Your Intel Processor and Speed Up Your PC
Your computer is fast. Unbelievably fast, at least compared to the PC you had ten or twenty years ago. But it could always be a little bit faster. If that statement stirs a bit of tech-flavored longing in your soul, you might…
Low Profile Switches Are Coming to Shrink Your Mechanical Keyboards
Mechanical keyboards are neat! But no one would say they’re sleek or compact. Even the smallest mainstream models, the “60%” boards, are about the size and weight of a paperback book. But that might be changing very soon….
How to Use Microsoft Word’s Compare Feature
If you’re on a collaborative team of workers, or you’re simply dealing with several revisions of your own work, it’s important to be able to track incremental changes. In Microsoft Word, the ability to compare every differenc…
How to Overclock Your Graphics Card for Better Gaming Performance
If you want a little extra oomph out of your PC’s graphics card without spending tons of cash on a new model, overclocking the GPU is a surprisingly simple way to go about it. And it has indeed become simple, on Windows-bas…
How to Use Multiple Dropbox Accounts on One PC
Dropbox is the go-to service for cloud storage and file syncing, but it’s also one of the more expensive options out there once you’ve used up the free storage allotment. And you can only use multiple accounts on one machine …
What’s the Difference Between Bluetooth A2DP and aptX?
Bluetooth headphones are all the rage now, after spending the better part of a decade as a niche restricted to tech enthusiasts. Now you can find an incredible variety of Bluetooth headphones on electronic store shelves, and …
Hundreds of Smartphone Apps Are Spying on Your TV Watching. Here’s How to Disable Them
If you’re afraid that your smartphone is spying on you…well, you’re right. But that’s kind of a non-optional part of modern living: amassing huge amounts of consumer data is how companies like Google operate. But recently s…
How to Manually Set Your Location in Google Chrome
Phones get all the fun toys. Thanks to built-in GPS, network triangulation, and other goodies, it’s possible for them to use a more-or-less exact location for apps and website tools.
How to Fix a Stuck or Repeating Key on Your Mechanical Keyboard
Mechanical keyboards are great! But they’re also more complex than conventional keyboards. While they’re less likely to fail entirely, all those individual components mean you’re likely to have issues with certain switches—…
How to Fix Blank Google Maps In Chrome
Do you ever go to Google Maps on your computer, only to see a blank mother-of-pearl grid? It’s really annoying, and it doesn’t happen for any obvious reason. It’s still possible to use Google Maps when it gets like this—you…
PC Gamers, Give Left-Handed “Gamepads” a Try
Keyboards aren’t designed to play games…but most PC games are designed to be played on keyboards. It’s an interesting bit of evolutionary dissonance in the world of PC gaming, from back when people actually worked on comput…
How to Add Custom User Tags to Reddit
If you’ve spent any time at all on the Internet, odds are pretty decent that you’ve encountered Reddit, the link-sharing social network and discussion platform. And if you’ve spent any time at all on Reddit, odds are approxim…
How to Manage Podcasts in Google Play Music
Hey, did you know that the Google Play Music app that comes with your Android phone can subscribe to, stream, and download podcasts? The feature works okay, though not nearly as fleshed-out as the various dedicated podcast ma…
How to Block Specific Ads on YouTube
Have you ever gone on a YouTube binge, only to get the same annoying pre-roll ad over and over again? It’s a systemic issue, thanks to Google’s user-targeting advertising algorithm. The easiest way to solve this problem is to…
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 a…
How to Buy and Sell the Digital Movie Codes that Come With Your Discs
At the moment, we’re in a transition to an all-digital world of entertainment, and we’ll soon be able to more or less forget about DVDs, CDs, Blu-rays, and game cartridges. But while we sit in this transitory phase, movie stu…
How to Sideload Apps on the Fire TV and Fire TV Stick
Amazon’s Fire TV and Fire TV stick technically runs Android…but you wouldn’t know it from looking. Amazon has a wall of content for its set-top box, and doesn’t want Google (with its own competing platform) to crash the par…
