USB drives should automatically appear in Windows Explorer when you connect them to your computer. Follow these troubleshooting steps if Windows doesn’t show a connected drive.

The Windows Control Panel offers up a number of settings that you might not want some users messing around with. Here’s how to hide specific Control Panel apps in Windows 7, 8, and 10.

Not all apps run in the foreground. Some sit quietly in the background, doing work for you with an icon in the Notification Area–also commonly (but apparently incorrectly) known as the System Tray. Windows helps you manage this clutter, controlling which icons appear on your taskbar and whether certain system icons appear at all.

It’s easy enough to change an IP address on your PC using Control Panel, but did you know you can also do it from the Command Prompt?

If you’re particular about how Windows displays the contents of your folders, you can cut your customization time down considerably by taking advantage of File Explorer’s five built-in folder templates.

The Windows Control Panel and Settings interface both expose a lot of settings that you might not want some users messing around with. Here’s how to disable them in Windows 7, 8, and 10.

If your “Open With” right-click menu is getting a little cluttered, why not get rid of entries you don’t use? With a little Registry hacking, it’s easy to do.

If a slight bump to your desk is enough to wake up your sleeping PC, it’s likely your mouse doing the waking. Here’s how to prevent that from happening.

If you’re worried about someone trying to guess your Windows password, you can have Windows temporarily block sign in attempts after a specific number of failed attempts.

If you’d like to limit what apps a user can run on a PC, Windows gives you two options. You can block the apps you don’t want a user to run, or you can restrict them to running only specific apps. Here’s how to do it.

System Restore is a Windows feature that can help fix certain types of crashes and other computer problems. Here’s how it works, how to set it up, and how to use it when things go awry.

If you use Dropbox, Google Drive, OneDrive, and iCloud Drive to share and back up files, you can add them to the Send To context menu in Windows for quicker file moving.

Over the years, Windows has gotten much better about how it handles networked printers. But if you want to share a printer over the network, you may still need to do a little legwork to get it all up and running. Here’s how it all works.

Windows provides several options for conserving power when you are not using your PC. These options include Sleep, Hibernate, and Hybrid Sleep, and are particularly useful if you have a laptop. Here’s the difference between them.

Do you always have a lot of tabs open in your browser? If your browser has crashed on you, or if you just want to keep those tabs open next time you start your computer, don’t panic. There is a solution.

We know, updating your PC is a hassle–but it’s important. New security flaws are discovered on a regular basis, and most companies are pretty good about about issuing fixes for those flaws as they crop up. Plugging those holes, however, depends largely upon you making sure things are properly updated.

If you regularly search for certain files in Windows, saving searches is a great way to access them more quickly than retyping the search every time. Saving searches is especially useful if you often perform more advanced searches, or search by combinations of date range, file type, or keywords.

If you’d like to install Windows but don’t have a DVD drive, it’s easy enough to create a bootable USB flash drive with the right installation media. Here’s how to get it done for Windows 10, 8, or 7.

Which of your hard drives is the fastest, and is it really as fast as the manufacturer promised? Whether you have a desktop PC or a server, Microsoft’s free Diskspd utility will stress test and benchmark your hard drives.

Cookies are small files that websites put on your computer to store small bits of information. A cookie can keep you logged into a website by writing ID information to a cookie file. Cookies can also be used to store the items in your shopping cart.

Have you ever wondered why you can just type ipconfig into a command prompt and it works, but when you want to use a command line program you downloaded you have to navigate to its directory first? Here’s how to fix that using the Windows System PATH.

In Windows, icons for shortcuts have little arrows to remind you that what you’re looking at is a shortcut. Even though the arrows are smaller than in some previous versions of Windows, they aren’t terribly attractive. Fortunately, they’re pretty easy to remove.

Almost anyone knows how to make a “hidden” folder in Windows, but then again almost anyone knows how to make explorer show hidden folders. Let’s take a look at how to make a folder so hidden, only you will know its there.

Bringing up Windows Task Manager is not much of a task itself, but when a virus disables Ctrl+Alt+Del and takes it hostage, how else are you going to open task manager? Or maybe you’re just looking for some diversity in your life, so here are six different ways to open Windows Task Manager.

Finding out how many pages are in a Word document is really easy when the document is open. However, what if you have a lot of documents in one folder for which you want to find out page counts? This is easily done in Windows.