The way operating systems work is that an app’s program data (the "executables") goes into the application installation folder, and any settings for said app in the user folder. Why? There’s several reasons, but the most important is that if there are multiple user accounts in an OS, each user that uses that app can have their own custom...

Not everyone has a fast computer. In fact, it’s probably a good bet there’s a whole swath of users out there with CPUs in their computers that are at least 5 years old or older. Making a computer faster these days has less to do with hardware and more with software. It’s an unfortunate truth that many of the popular desktop apps used today are...

The Facebook web experience (as in how good or bad your experience is on a particular web site) has never been that great. In fact, it’s awful. Over the years, Facebook has had the nasty habit of reshuffling where things are on their web site seemingly almost every other month. Or at least it feels like that. Facebook users have really simple...

There’s more than a few out there who absolutely refuse to use cloud storage services like Dropbox because they feel it’s not secure enough, or not secure at all. Well, the absolutely easiest way to store data in the cloud that is secure is by using TrueCrypt. The reason it’s the easiest is because it’s true on-the-fly encryption. If you...

Every day, more people are getting online and the world is a whole lot smaller than it used to be. That’s really great, but a problem that’s been an ongoing issue in the world of electronic messaging is the date format. Problems with date formats predate the internet and go back to the BBS messaging days. In America (en-US), the standard format is...

When editing a photo in an image editor, sometimes you want to get that cinema-style look by cropping the photo to a specific ratio. The problem however is that other than the templates you may be given for "pre-boxed" cropping, you really have no clue what dimensions you’re supposed to use since photos are in different pixel dimensions depending...

When Microsoft introduced the taskbar with Windows 95, this was as far as I’m concerned the greatest breakthrough in desktop GUI productivity. Why? Because before that, desktop UIs simply weren’t designed for multitasking very well. Yes, they could multitask, but the way in which it was done was awful. In just about every GUI prior to Win95, all...

For anyone that’s ever seen an episode of Hoarders, you know that hoarding is bad because it can lead to destructive habits that can significantly decrease the quality of life. Data hoarding is not the same as regular hoarding because you’re dealing with data and not physical items. And there are some out there who never delete anything. Some keep...

Periodically I receive PCMech reader mail from people asking for help with browser cookies, specifically pertaining to how they work with a security suite. Said honestly, it is not easy to explain how browser cookies work. They’re simple enough to define, but when it comes to explaining what they actually do to someone who doesn’t know otherwise,...

This is a quick tip but a good one to know. Strangely enough there is no way to rename a task once it’s set in Windows 7 Task Scheduler. You can right-click/Properties or edit the task until you’re blue in the face (or screen, ha ha), but you can’t rename that darned task. There is a workaround however. Right-click your task and select...