Articles about How To

High-end routers typically come with lots of advanced features and settings usually not found in lower-spec models, or those provided by your ISP.

However, you don’t need to spend a fortune replacing your existing router to gain access to these features as you can supercharge your existing device (or a spare one) by replacing its firmware with a third-party open source alternative, such as DD-WRT.

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As part of GitHub Universe week, the Microsoft-owned software code hosting platform has announced a number of changes, improvements and new features. These include GitHub Sponsors for companies, auto-merge pull requests, discussions for all public repositories, and dependency review.

For a lot of people though, the big news is GitHub now has a stylish dark mode and you can enable it today.

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First introduced in Windows 7, and still working just fine in Windows 10, God Mode is a hidden feature that displays all of the admin tools and control options in Microsoft's operating system, on a single screen. There are actually a number of different God Modes available which offer extra functionality. We explained how to unlock them all here.

If God Mode isn’t powerful enough for you, and you want even more options, then Extended GodMode is the answer.

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The latest update to Chrome has rolled out, and Google has done a lot to improve and evolve the browser. The company says that there are massive improvements to page load times as well as improvements to resource usage by open tabs thanks to Tab Throttling.

But this is not the only change to come to tabs. Google has also made tabs touch-friendly, added tab previews, and introduced a new option to collapse grouped tabs to save space. This last option is currently in beta, however, and you'll have to enable hidden setting to enable it.

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There are numerous useful keyboard shortcuts that can make your computing life easier, but Ctrl + C and Ctrl + V for copying and pasting via the clipboard are arguably the most helpful. But you may well feel that Windows 10's built-in utility is a little lacking -- how about the ability to store multiple items on the clipboard? What about synchronizing the clipboard between devices? The ability to keep things on the clipboard permanently?

Well these are actually options that are already available in Windows 10! For some reason Microsoft has opted to not only have it disabled by default, but also failed to advertise its existence. Here's how to enable clipboard history and how to use it.

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Two weeks ago, Microsoft began rolling out a refreshed Start menu and personalized taskbar for Windows 10 Insiders on the Dev Channel. The new menu, which removes the solid color backplates behind the logos and adds a translucent background to tiles, comes as part of Build 20161 but isn’t available to everyone. We’ve already shown you one way to force Windows 10 to display this menu, but if you're feeling adventurous we have a second, more powerful method for you to follow.

Microsoft uses a system called Feature Control to hide new and unfinished features from users -- including the new Start menu -- but it’s possible to find and enable these, giving you the chance to test them out before anyone else.

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Windows 10 has a number of things that users find annoying about it, not least that it forces you to use other Microsoft products. Type a web query into the Windows search box, or ask Cortana something, and the results you receive will come from Bing.

Microsoft has recently replaced its old Edge browser with a Chromium version, and while this is a big improvement, the software giant has forced it onto users and made it hard (but thankfully not impossible) to remove.

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With Windows 10 May 2020 Update now available, many people are rushing to install it. We already know that the update contains various bugs and problems, but even if you've had a problem-free installation, you may be surprised at just how much disk space you've lost.

This is particularly true for anyone with an SSD, which tend to be smaller, but there are steps you can take to claim back this space and free up several gigabytes. Here's what you need to know.

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MyHeritage offers a handy online tool called MyHeritage In Color which automatically colorizes old black and white photos in seconds -- and does an amazing job of it.

Users without a paid plan are normally limited to colorizing just 10 photos, but MyHeritage is making the service free, and unlimited, for one month because -- you guessed it -- the coronavirus.

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Windows 10 has a lock screen mode called Windows Spotlight that pulls attractive, high resolution images from the web on a daily basis. In most instances, you’ll only see these when you log on, or lock your PC.

If you see an image that you’d like to use as Windows wallpaper, you can’t simply right-click and save it, but there is a way to easily use Windows Spotlight images as your desktop background.

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Windows 7 introduced a useful hidden God Mode that displays all of the admin tools and control options on a single screen. Because Microsoft has yet to phase out Control Panel entirely, this feature works just fine in Windows 10.

It’s very easy to action God Mode -- you just need to create a folder and give it a special name -- and there’s actually quite a few alternative God Modes available. Here’s what you need to do.

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The new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge web browser shares many features with other Chromium-based browsers such as Google Chrome, Vivaldi and Opera.

Google started to integrate native lazy loading support in Google Chrome recently (in Chrome 76 to be precise), and it appears that Microsoft added these capabilities to Microsoft Edge as well.

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Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the theatrical debut of the seminal movie The Wizard of Oz.  To celebrate the release of the 1939 classic, Google has hidden a movie-related secret in its search engine.

Whether you're a friend of Dorothy, a lover of the cowardly lion, or just a hater of the Wicked Witch of the West, it's a cool little Easter egg that's well worth checking out. Repeat after me: "There's no place like home!"

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Spam is something we've become used to in our email inboxes as well as via SMS, but it's certainly not the only way we can be pestered, harangued and irritated. Even Google Calendar can be used to spam you with ads.

The phenomenon is not entirely new, but it has been in the spotlight recently. Google Calendar spam takes advantage of a default setting that Google puts in place. By disabling this, you can protect yourself against unwanted intrusions... but there are side-effects to consider.

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The love of dark mode options in apps and operating systems shows no sign of waning. While a large number of big-names have added dark modes, there are still plenty that need to jump on the bandwagon. One app that has held out is Facebook Messenger, but there is secret dark mode option that you can enable.

Probes into the Facebook Messenger app had already revealed that Facebook was working on darker hues, and it even rolled out to small number of users in the latter part of last year -- but not everyone. Now you can use a little trick to access dark mode in the Android and iOS versions of Messenger for yourself.

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