Maintenance & Optimization Articles

How to Free Over 10GB of Disk Space After Installing Windows 10’s October 2018 Update

Did you just install the October 2018 Update? If so, there’s more than 10 GB of data wasting space on your hard drive—we had 21.8 GB! On a laptop or tablet with a limited amount of storage, this can fill up your d...

How to See What Data Windows 10 is Sending to Microsoft

Microsoft is making Windows 10’s telemetry more transparent with the April 2018 Update. You can now view the exact diagnostic information your Windows PC is sending to Microsoft. You can even delete it from Microsoft&#8...

Chris Hoffman Apr 30th, 2018

Not Getting macOS Notifications? Here’s How to Fix It (Without Rebooting)

If your Mac is mysteriously no longer showing notifications, restarting your Mac will most likely fix the problem. However, here’s a quick way to remedy the situation without restarting.

Craig Lloyd Apr 17th, 2018

How Much Electricity Do All Your Appliances Use?

You know how much electricity you use overall each month, because you pay the bill. But, you can also figure out how much electricity each appliance uses individually and how much it contributes to your total usage....

Craig Lloyd Apr 16th, 2018

How to Hide a Recovery Partition (or Other Drive) in Windows

PC manufacturers often include recovery partitions. These are usually hidden, but sometimes become visible under This PC and elsewhere in Windows. Here’s how to hide a recovery partition—or any other drive....

Can You Upgrade the RAM in Your Mac?

While Macs certainly aren’t as easy to upgrade as a typical PC, it’s surprisingly simple to upgrade some components like RAM—especially if you’ve got a Mac desktop or an older laptop. Adding more RAM can breat...

Harry Guinness Apr 11th, 2018

How to See Which Apps Are Draining Your Battery on an Android Phone or Tablet

If your Android phone’s battery always feels a little low, you can find out exactly where that power is going. Android’s Battery screen shows you what’s used battery power since your last charge, from apps to syste...

How to Change Your User Account in Windows 10’s Ubuntu Bash Shell

When you first install Ubuntu or another Linux distribution on Windows 10, you’re asked to create a UNIX username and password. Bash automatically signs into that user account when you launch the shell, but you can chan...

Chris Hoffman Mar 13th, 2018

Troubleshoot Browsing Issues by Reloading the DNS Client Cache on Windows

Have you ever gotten DNS errors while trying to browse the web, but another computer on the same network is working just fine? There’s a good chance you need to clear the computer’s DNS cache to fix it....

Chris Hoffman Mar 9th, 2018

How to Get More Meaningful Battery Stats on Your Android Phone

Android battery life and the tools for monitoring usage have gotten better over the last few years, but the stock options are still sometimes not enough. But there are ways to gauge your battery usage, remaining time, and ev...

How To Tag Any Windows File For Easy Organization

If Windows Search just isn’t cutting it for helping you find your files, you can give it a little help by adding tags to any Windows file.

Michael Crider Mar 7th, 2018

Not Getting Android OS Updates? Here’s How Google Is Updating Your Device Anyway

How to Monitor Your Android Device’s Battery Health

Battery health is a big deal—perhaps now more than ever, with the whole iPhone slowdown debacle. While that in itself doesn’t necessarily have any bearing on Android phones, keeping your device’s battery hea...

Cameron Summerson Feb 23rd, 2018

What Are All Those NVIDIA Processes Running in the Background?

If you’ve installed NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience software, you’ll see quite a few NVIDIA processes running in the background on your PC. We counted ten separate processes in our Windows Task Manager. But what...

How to Set Your PC Games’ Graphics Settings with No Effort

PC gamers have to set a myriad of graphics options to balance performance with graphics quality. If you don’t want to tweak them by hand, NVIDIA, AMD, and even Intel provide tools that will do it for you....

Chris Hoffman Feb 16th, 2018

The Best Third-Party Alexa Skills on the Amazon Echo

The Amazon Echo can do a lot of neat stuff, but its built-in features are just the tip of the iceberg. With third-party “Alexa Skills”, you can add further capabilities to the Echo, like adding events to your Goo...

Craig Lloyd Feb 7th, 2018

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,...

How to Read Comic Books and Manga on Your Kindle

The iPad has been toted as the ultimate comic book reader, but that doesn’t mean your can’t give it a run for its money with your Kindle. Here’s how to optimize and transfer your comic books and manga to your Kindle...

Whitson Gordon Jan 25th, 2018

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...

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 Windo...

Five Ways to Free Up Space on Your Android Device

Android phones and tablets can fill up quickly as you download apps, add media files like music and movies, and cache data for use offline. Many lower-end devices may only include a few gigabytes of storage, making this even...

How to Speed Up Your Old, Slow iPhone or iPad

Every year, Apple comes out with new iPhones and iPads and a new version of iOS. While it’s a good idea to stay current on software, not everyone can afford to buy new hardware every year. If your iPhone or iPad is show...

How to Set Up All Your New Holiday Gadgets

It’s the holidays, which means new gadgets for everyone! Whether you’re rocking a new PC or trying to get a handle on what the Amazon Echo really does, we’ve got you covered. Here’s how to set up all y...

How to Use Your Mac’s Disk Utility to Partition, Wipe, Repair, Restore, and Copy Drives

Need to create a new partition, or re-format an external drive? There’s no need to hunt down paid partition managers or disk-management boot disks: your Mac includes a built-in partition manager and disk management too...

Chris Hoffman Dec 21st, 2017

How to Get Detailed Information About Your PC

Sometimes, you need to find information about your PC—things like what hardware you’re using, your BIOS or UEFI version, or even details about your software environment. Join us as we take a look at a few Windows ...

Walter Glenn Dec 18th, 2017