Group Chats are awesome if you’re in a club, want to keep in touch with all your friends, or are trying organize something. Unfortunately, if you’re busy and the other members decide to have a long, detailed conversation about the latest episode of Game of Thrones, your phone is going to beep and flash constantly. Here’s how to stop that happening while still letting notifications from other chats and apps through....

Screencasting can seem a bit daunting at first, but there are a few good free ways to do it. The Game DVR feature in Windows 10 can create a video of your desktop. Technically it was just designed for capturing gameplay, and other software does a much better job—but it’ll work in a pinch if you need it. If you want something more powerful, Open Broadcaster Software (OBS) is a good free program that will do everything you need, but you’ll need a few minutes to learn its interface....

There’s arguably no feeling worse than deleting a file or folder that you didn’t mean to delete. If this unfortunate event took place in your Microsoft OneDrive account, then there are a few recovery options at your disposal. Restore a Deleted File From Your OneDrive Recycle Bin If you deleted a file or folder from your OneDrive account, you can restore them from the Recycle Bin within 30 days. After 30 days, the deleted file or folder is automatically and permanently deleted from the Recycle Bin....

If you’ve tampered with your Chromebook—to install Windows on your Chromebook, for example—you may have replaced its BIOS with a third-party option. Here’s how to roll all your changes back and turn that Windows or Linux PC back into a Chromebook. If you haven’t tampered this heavily with your Chromebook, you can factory reset it the normal way. The following guide is intended for those that have installed a different BIOS and operating system altogether....

Ever get into a situation where you know an option exists in a menu somewhere, but you can’t find it? Thankfully, macOS lets you search the menus of any open application to find what you’re looking for. Let’s use Preview as an example. Preview is a great, feature-packed image viewer that comes with every Mac, and it has a lot of options packed into its menus. Case in point: A simple “Export as PDF” option that lets you turn any image or document into a PDF....

Running applications as a standard user without elevated privileges is good security practice, but what about those times where an application will only work if it is run as an administrator? Read on as we highlight how to easily and permanently set an application to run with administrative privileges. Now isn’t it a small world, problem-solving speaking that is. This is a pretty magical moment at the old Ask HTG column; a reader wrote in asking us to solve their problem and ended up solving ours....

Windows 8 and 10 both allow you to set certain types of connections as metered so that you can limit the amount of data Windows (and certain apps) can use without asking. You can use the regular Settings interface to set mobile and Wi-Fi connections as metered, but for some reason Windows assumes you won’t need to do this with wired Ethernet connections. If you use an ISP that has monthly data caps, you know better....

Everyone, at some point, tries to take a photo of a spectacular sunset. But if your camera isn’t quite capturing the magic the way you see it in real life, here are a few tricks to keep in mind. What Makes a Good Sunset Photo Whether you try and shoot a sunset with a DSLR, Snapchat, or something in between, the principles remain the same. I shot the examples in this article on everything from an iPhone to a Canon 5D MKIII....

If you’re working with files in the Terminal and switching back and forth between two directories, we’re about to save you some time. There is a shortcut command that allows you to toggle between two directories on the command line. First, as usual, change to your first directory by typing the following command at the prompt and pressing Enter. RELATED: Use Tab Completion to Type Commands Faster on Any Operating System...

A hard drive upgrade is one of the easiest ways to improve your PC, whether you’re looking for more storage or the speed boost an SSD provides. Here’s how to choose and install your new drive. Step One: Choosing Your New Drive Choosing a drive that fits your budgets and does what you need is the first step. These days, your most important choice is between a traditional hard drive or a solid state drive (SSD)....

Google’s Chromecast makes it easy to browse for videos and watch them on your TV, but what if you want to quickly pause playback without reaching for your smartphone or computer? You can now do this right from your TV’s built-in remote. This feature makes use of a feature called HDMI-CEC. Through the HDMI-CEC standard most modern TVs offer, you can now use the physical remote that came with your TV to pause and unpause videos while they’re playing on your Chromecast....

While emoji has been big in Japan for many years (it originated there), it has only been somewhat recently that it’s made its way to North America, catching many by surprise and leaving them to ask, “What the heck is emoji?” To be clear, emoji is not the same as emoticons. Emoticons (emotion + icon) are user-created symbols that anyone can type out. To that end, the number of emoticons you can have are virtually unlimited....

Are you still using your internet provider’s DNS servers? You probably shouldn’t be. In most cases, ISP-provided DNS is slow, and occasionally goes down completely. Some even redirect unresolved URLs to a branded search page. Gross! For these reasons, it’s better to instead use OpenDNS or Google’s DNS service instead of what your ISP offers. They’re more reliable, and in the case of OpenDNS, even offer extra features like content filtering, typo correction, anti-phishing, and child protection controls....

Stringify is an incredibly powerful automation tool that connects your favorite web apps and smart home gadgets. In this guide, we’re going to take a look at one of its more advanced features called Mode. This “Thing” allows you to run several Flows at once based on whether you’re home or away from the house, and whether you’re awake or asleep. RELATED: How to Use Stringify For Crazy Powerful Home Automation...

iCloud allows you to store all of your important documents, desktop items, photos, and more in the cloud for convenient access from any modern Apple device. In light of this, you might think that Time Machine backups and now redundant. But you’d be wrong. iCloud Drive Is a Convenience iCloud Drive is not a backup tool, it’s a cloud storage service that syncs data between locations. Apple doesn’t advertise it as a backup tool, and you shouldn’t use it as one even though it does copy a lot of your data to a remote location....

There’s nothing more annoying than saving a file somewhere on your hard drive, and then having to browse for that file again when you’re trying to upload it somewhere on the web. Thankfully Google Chrome makes this process much easier. Note: this might potentially work in Firefox 4, but we didn’t take the time to test it out. It definitely doesn’t work in Firefox 3.6 or Internet Explorer. Using Drag and Drop for File Upload Controls Putting a line of text here to explain this is almost pointless, given the screenshot illustration—but if you insist, the basic idea is that anywhere there’s a file upload control on a web page, you can simply drag and drop the file onto it to select that file....

For the most part, many of us are familiar with the various folder icons included with Windows over the years, but once in a while, a new one shows up. With that in mind, today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a curious reader’s question. Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader K....

Screen savers are a left-over solution from a previous technology. In spite of their name, screen savers no longer “save” anything – all they do is waste electricity. Screen savers are not necessary on modern, flat-panel LCD displays. Having your computer automatically turn off its display is the new “screen saver” – it saves energy, reduces your electricity bill, and increases your battery life. Screen savers may look pretty, but they do it when no one is looking....

These Work in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari and More All web browsers have tabs in some way or another. For the most part, they all work generally the same, too. A lot of browsers have “Tab Groups” for organization now, which is a great tool if you frequently have dozens of tabs open. RELATED: Why You Should Use Tab Groups in Your Web Browser We’re going to take a step back with something a little more old school: Good old-fashioned keyboard shortcuts....

Is Facebook Down? Check and See If Facebook Is Offline First and foremost, there may be issues with Facebook’s servers or some other internal issue that has the entire site offline for everyone. You can quickly see if Facebook is down by checking its status on Downdetector, a site that aggregates and analyzes data to detect service disruptions. If Downdetector determines Facebook is down, then there’s nothing you can do but wait until Facebook’s engineers get things up and running again....