First make sure that you have a bootable Windows Vista installation DVD, as you will be unable to use your computer if you don’t. Next, download the GParted Live CD and burn it to cd. Boot off the GParted cd, and you will see your hard drives in the drop-down list. The first drive is typically your boot drive, but you can check the Flags column to make sure....

“Today I Learned” TIL stands for “today I learned.” People use it to share a fact that they recently learned. That fact could be something as simple as a new route on the way home, or it could be an obscure, interesting fact picked up on the internet. TIL is almost always spelled in all caps. It’s also frequently placed at the start of a sentence, immediately preceding the brand new piece of information....

What is “Lurking?” On the internet, “lurking” is the act of being in an interactive community, like a group chat or a forum, but not directly participating or getting involved. Lurking is essentially passive observation of a public conversation. People who do this on the internet are often called “lurkers.” While the word itself tends to have negative connotations in the English language, “lurking” online isn’t necessarily a bad thing. It might just mean that a person isn’t ready to contribute to a forum yet, and prefers to continue browsing other people’s posts....

You pay your Internet Service Provider (ISP) for internet access, and they turn on the sweet, sweet, fire hose of data for you. But who provides the flow for your ISP? Read on to learn the ins and outs of global data delivery. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-drive grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader KronoS poses the question many geeks have asked at one point:...

Spotify is great. $10 a month gets you access to pretty much all the music ever made, and you’re done. We’re not going to get that kind of thing for TV shows and movies. Wouldn’t it be nice if one $10 subscription could get you all the TV shows and movies you wanted? A lot of people imagined Netflix would turn into that, and honestly we can’t blame them. When Netflix launched their streaming service, it was a veritable smorgasbord, offering access to almost every TV show you could imagine....

Whether it’s from overuse or your damn cat, damaged and frayed USB charging cables are a common occurrence. It’s usually not worth the time and extra money spent trying to repair them. RELATED: What to Do When Your iPhone or iPad Isn’t Charging Properly You’ve probably experienced a damaged charging cable at some point. When smartphone batteries barely last an entire work day, you’re using those cables often. They also get subjected to all kinds of other abuse....

Some people think that task killers are important on Android. By closing apps running in the background, you’ll get improved performance and battery life – that’s the idea, anyway. In reality, task killers can reduce your performance and battery life. Task killers can force apps running in the background to quit, removing them from memory. Some task killers do this automatically. However, Android can intelligently manage processes on its own – it doesn’t need a task killer....

If you’ve been following video game news at all for the last couple of weeks, you’ve probably heard that EA’s Star Wars: Battlefront II is having some teething troubles. EA has backpedaled to avoid more controversy, but we’re here to say: don’t fall for it. The Original Problem with Battlefront II RELATED: Microtransactions in AAA Games Are Here to Stay (But They’re Still Terrible) It’s technically out today in most markets, a short open beta and a pre-play period for EA Access subscribers have exposed extremely troubling parts of the game’s core structure....

Why Use Power Tool Batteries with Your Dyson Stick Vacuum? We’re big fans of Dyson stick vacuums, but their biggest shortcoming is limited battery life. Limited battery life isn’t a big deal if you’re just taking it off the charger to sweep up some spilled coffee grounds in the kitchen or grab a few dust bunnies off the stairs. But Dyson stick vacuums are pretty powerful, and it would be nice to use them longer....

Android users have long been able to send texts from their computers with third-party tools like Pushbullet or MightyText. But Google is taking this function native with a new feature called Messages for Web. Here’s what it’s all about. What is Messages for Web? Messages for Web is Google’s fully integrated way to send text messages directly from your computer. It requires the company’s Android Messages app, so if you’re using something else for text messages, this feature won’t work....

As always, make sure you know what you’re doing before diving in. If you’ve got an old Mac that’s out of warranty, you can take more risks than if you’re thinking about tearing open a brand new MacBook Pro. Finding Your Mac’s Model Macs are regularly refreshed and even if newer models don’t look all that different, big changes can happen on the inside. A 21.5” iMac from 2012 and a 21....

Gas-powered lawn mowers and string trimmers may be the gold-standard, but electric options (battery-powered and corded alike) are becoming more common. Here are some things you should know about both so you can decide which is best for your situation. RELATED: How to Maintain Your Lawnmower So It Lasts (Almost) Forever For this guide, we’ll mostly be focusing on push lawn mowers and string trimmers. There are a lot of tools and equipment to choose from to maintain your yard, but these are by far the two most common....

The “My Passport SSD” is a portable solid state drive (SSD) from Western Digital, providing fast and reliable storage in an enclosure designed to withstand a few drops and scrapes. There are some smaller flash drives that have similar storage capacities, but this is an NVMe SSD inside a USB enclosure, offering up to 1,050 MB/s read speeds and writes of around 1,000 MB/s. Most flash drives struggle to maintain 100 MB/s reads or writes....

Windows 10’s integrated Windows Defender antivirus has some “cloud” features, like other modern antivirus applications. By default, Windows automatically uploads some suspicious-looking files and reports data about suspicious activity so new threats can be detected and blocked as quickly as possible. RELATED: What’s the Best Antivirus for Windows 10 and 11? (Is Microsoft Defender Good Enough?) These features are part of Windows Defender, the antivirus tool included with Windows 10....

Google Docs doesn’t automatically include page numbers for your documents, but it’s easy enough to add them to your header or footer. Here’s how to get it done. RELATED: How to Work with Microsoft Office Files in Google Drive Note: Adding page numbers is available only for use on Docs; neither Sheets nor Slides support this feature. How to Add Page Numbers to Google Docs Open up your document and head to Insert > Header & Page Number > Page Number....

Strikethrough is an important formatting option that draws a line through selected text instead of deleting it. It’s often used during the editorial process or when collaborating on a document. Here’s how to use it in Google Docs. Why Apply Strikethrough to Text When You Can Delete It? When you apply strikethrough to text, it draws a line through the words but keeps the text visible underneath. This type of text formatting is useful in a number of scenarios....

If you don’t know about the calling and messaging feature with Alexa, check out our guide on how to set it up. Otherwise, read on how to block contacts that you don’t want to hear from over Alexa and your Echo devices. To start, open up the Alexa app and tap on the Conversations tab at the bottom of the screen. Next, tap on the Contacts button up in the top-right corner....

By default, inactive worksheet tabs in Excel are gray, and active or selected worksheet tabs are white. If you have a lot of worksheets in your workbook, it may be hard to quickly find a particular sheet. One way to differentiate worksheets is to assign different colors to the worksheet tabs. We’ll show you how to change a single worksheet tab or multiple worksheet tabs at once. To change the color of a single worksheet tab, right-click on the tab and move your mouse over the “Tab Color” option....

“Create a backup of my NAS?” you might say. “isn’t the NAS the backup though?” Not so fast—not all backups are equal, and a backup isn’t truly a backup until there’s a cold storage copy of it somewhere. Let’s take a look at how to back up your Synology NAS for the ultimate data redundancy. RELATED: How to Set Up and Get Started with Your Synology NAS Although the Synology NAS platform—including the Disk Station Manager operating system that runs on it and the propriety automated Synology Hybrid Raid (SHR)—is a rock solid and easy way to back up data from your computers, it suffers, by the very nature of things, from some of the same issues that plague any always-on backup system....

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 your role and come prepared with one key ring full of flash drives to rule them all. With a set of drives filled with portable versions of useful PC repair and maintenance programs, along with some bootable troubleshooting utilities, you’ll be ready for just about any problem....