Every Windows user has seen the Windows system tray (also known as the notification area) become cluttered over time. We’ve covered disabling distracting desktop notifications in the past, but what if the icons themselves are the problem? With Windows 7, Microsoft has included a variety of tools that put you in control over which icons appear.

Getting paid to play video games is the dream of many young gamers. While it may seem like an impossible dream, there are many people out there making some money – or even a living – off playing video games. The ways people make money playing video games are fascinating. From eSport athletes making six figures a year by winning tournaments in front of crowds to game testers making near minimum wage with little appreciation.

You may often clear your computer’s browsing history, but that isn’t the only thing you need to worry about. The mobile browsers your use on your Android smartphone or tablet remember your browsing history, too. Anyone that gets access to your phone can see exactly which webpages you’ve visited. If you use multiple browser apps, each one stores its own browsing history. These steps will take you through deleting your browsing history.

Flash games can be awesome – they’re all over the web, free to play, and easy to dive into. Flash games run the spectrum from fun, casual time wasters to indie gems created by developers with a unique vision. Downloading a Flash game is deceptively easy and simple once you know the trick.

While Apple offers their own podcast app for iOS, there’s no official Google application for podcasts on Android. Google Listen, a podcast app once developed by Google Labs, languished without updates for years and has now vanished from Google Play. The good news is there are plenty of high-quality third-party podcast apps waiting to fill the gap.

Bitdefender Sphere is total protection for all the devices in your household. Instead of purchasing a different security product for Windows, Mac, and Android – and managing individual licenses – you can buy Bitdefender Sphere for $99.95 and install the included products on an unlimited number of devices. This week we’re giving away 25 one-year subscriptions of Bitdefender Sphere, worth a total of $2500! Plus, we’ve also got a $300 ASUS netboook up for grabs! Read on to find out more.

It seems like all the apps we use on our computers are migrating to the cloud these days. Email, chatting, editing documents and pictures – increasingly, we’re using cloud-based solutions for almost everything.. There are even cloud-based antivirus solutions that run in your browser. Online antiviruses can be useful, but they’re no replacement for an installed antivirus program – antivirus is one area browser-based apps just don’t cut it.

When you use the hibernate shut-down option, Windows 7 saves the contents of your computer’s memory to disk and powers off the computer. If your computer can’t hibernate or isn’t resuming from hibernation properly, there are a variety of possible problems — including a particularly obscure bug you’d never think to check.

Cloud storage services like Dropbox, Google Drive, and SkyDrive are slick and easy-to-use, but security is always a concern. If someone gained access to your account, they could view all your files. Encrypting your files protects them from prying eyes – if your account gets hacked or one of the service’s nosy employees snoops around, they won’t be able to view your files without your encryption password. Encryption can be hard to use, but BoxCryptor makes it easy. This week we’re giving away 25 copies of BoxCryptor’s Unlimited Business edition – that’s $2500 worth of software licenses!

Notepad++ is an extremely powerful (and free!) text editor. Its find and replace tools can do everything from a simple search and replace in a single file to a regular expression-based search and replace across thousands of files at once. Notepad++ is particularly ideal for quickly editing and changing data in CSV files, but it’s also amazing for editing HTML, CSS, TXT – or any other type of file that can be opened and edited as text.

Most of us spend hours reading on the computer every day, but our computers probably aren’t optimized for reading. The text on our monitors may not be sharp enough or may be too small, especially if we have high-resolution monitors. Websites usually aren’t optimized for reading long-form articles either – they’re cluttered with too many navigation elements, flashing advertisements, and often use text that’s too small.

Everyone wants their devices to run faster and scammers prey on that. Recently, a scam app named Android Defrag Pro popped up on Google Play. Android doesn’t need defragmentation, but many users installed it anyway and left positive reviews. Android isn’t like Windows and doesn’t require as much maintenance — still, there are some things you can do to make your device perform faster.

Cross-site scripting vulnerabilities are the biggest website security problem today. Studies have found they’re shockingly common – 55% of websites contained XSS vulnerabilities in 2011, according to White Hat Security’s latest report, released in June 2012. While most people have heard of computer viruses and other such problems, XSS vulnerabilities remain unknown to the average person.

Have you ever seen the “this device can perform faster” message when you connected a USB device to your computer? This message is Windows’ way of telling you that you’re missing out on the theoretical speed of your hardware, but it may not be clear how to fix the problem. Like many computer issues, particularly with hardware, this problem has a number of possible causes and solutions.

If you’ve got an older PC running important software, one of the best ways to give that software a new lease of life is by ditching the hardware entirely – you can convert your existing system to a virtual machine and run it on another computer. The process is fast, and at the end you’ll have an image you can use in VMware or any virtual machine program that can import VMware disk images.