Modern apps on Windows 8 work very differently than traditional Windows desktop apps. They’re always installed from the Windows Store (unless you’re a developer or on a corporate network) and aren’t uninstalled from the traditional Control Panel. Windows 8′s Modern interface doesn’t quite offer the same wealth of app stores available for the Windows desktop – the Windows Store is the only game in town.

Many Android phones come packed with useless software preinstalled by the device’s manufacturer and your cellular carrier. Sprint even includes a NASCAR app with some of their phones. This bloatware takes up valuable storage space, clutters your list of installed apps, and may even run automatically at startup, draining battery power in the background. Unlike [...]

Windows 8 doesn’t come with a Modern file explorer app, forcing tablet users to peck at the small targets in the File Explorer window on the desktop. But this is Windows 8, not Windows XP Tablet PC Edition – you can install a Modern file explorer app and have a much better touch experience.

If you’re like most people, you don’t have unlimited data and you don’t want to go over your data cap. Phones with Android Jelly Bean contain powerful tools for tracking your mobile data usage, setting phone-wide limits, and identifying the apps that are sucking down the most data. You can prevent these apps from using data entirely to save your precious data allowance and avoid cell phone bill shock.

Microsoft removed gadgets, the desktop widget feature introduced in Windows Vista, from Windows 8. Microsoft would prefer you use live tiles on the new Start screen to get information – but what if you want to see this information on your desktop? Whether you don’t like the new Start screen and are trying to avoid using it by installing a third-party Start menu or you just miss the gadgets, you can get them back with a third-party program.

Linux desktops offer many of the same web browsers you can use Windows and Mac, with Chrome, Firefox, and Opera all available for Linux. We’ll take a look at the best browsers you can use on a Linux system, including some lesser-known browsers that aren’t available on Windows or Mac. We’ve covered the best browsers for Windows before, and much of comparison holds true on Linux, too.

YouTube doesn’t expose some in-demand features on its website – including playing videos on repeat, downloading them, automatically enabling HD mode, and more. You can do all these things, but you’ll need to know these URL hacks. Most of these tricks allow you to easily do extra things on YouTube just by modifying the URL (web address) in your browser while using YouTube.

Printing has changed in Windows 8 – there’s now a standard way of printing in every Modern app. However, like many things about Microsoft’s new Modern interface, printing is not immediately intuitive for many users, especially those used to the old way of printing. Printing is still the same on the desktop, so you don’t have to learn anything new for your desktop applications. Windows 8 also has a new printer driver system that attempts to support more printers with less drivers.

Encryption isn’t only for paranoid conspiracy theorists, nor is it just for tech geeks. Encryption is something every computer user can benefit from. Tech websites write about how you can encrypt your digital life, but we’ve all done a poor job of explaining why you should actually care. Now we’ll get back to basics and explain the many threats encryption can help protect you from.

OpenWrt is a Linux distribution for your router. Like other Linux distributions, it offers a built-in package manager that allows you to install packages from a software repository. It can be used for anything that an embedded Linux system can be used for, including functioning as an SSH server, VPN, traffic-shaping system, or even a BitTorrent client.

Adobe Reader isn’t just unnecessary – it has a history of being an application you wouldn’t want on your system. From being extremely heavy and slow to having a long series of security flaws, Adobe Reader has never been a very good application for the average user. Adobe Reader’s speed and security have improved recently, but they haven’t improved enough. You probably don’t need Adobe Reader installed at all.

Twitter presents you with a river of news, status updates, and all sorts of other tweets. Following a lot of accounts on Twitter can be overwhelming, especially if you want to follow your favorite websites without missing important personal tweets from your friends. These tips will help you manage the fire house of incoming tweets without drowning in the sea of incoming content.

Whether you’re one of the majority of human beings who doesn’t live in a country with a rich selection of streaming video and music services or you’re just an American who wants to watch Netflix on your phone while travelling, region-blocks will get in your way. Just as you can use a few tricks to access region-blocked video and music services on your computer, you can do the same on your Android phone or tablet.

Whether you’re thinking of cutting the cord or just want to watch TV on your own schedule instead of the television network’s, there are more legal ways to watch television online than ever. Even better, many of these legal options are free. Most of these websites will expose you to commercials – someone has to pay for the free TV – but you’ll end up watching commercials if you pay to watch TV the traditional way, anyway.

Windows 8 isn’t quite as configurable out-of-the-box as previous versions of Windows, lacking such seemingly important features as the ability to boot to the desktop and run “Modern” applications in windows. For all its problems, Windows 8 is still Windows, and Windows is a very configurable operating system. These third-party utilities allow us to do things Microsoft has made impossible by default or easily change settings Microsoft has hidden.