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7 Features You’ll Get If You Upgrade to the Professional Edition of Windows 8 Windows 8.1 invites you to “Get more features with a new edition of Windows.” You’ll get six more features if you  upgrade to the Professional edition  — plus a seventh if you pay extra. Windows 7’s Professional edition is similar. Features like BitLocker, group policy, and domain-joining require the Professional or Ultimate editions of Windows 7, too. (Note that BitLocker requires Windows 7 Ultimate). BitLocker Encryption Microsoft’s BitLocker encryption features  are only available on Professional and Enterprise editions of Windows 8. If you want to encrypt your entire system drive with BitLocker Drive Encryption, encrypt USB flash drives with BitLocker To Go, or  create encrypted container files , you’ll need the Professional edition of Windows. TrueCrypt  used to be a great alternative to BitLocker for people who used any edition of Windows. The TrueCrypt pro...

How to Make Your Laptop Choose a Wired Connection Instead of Wireless Have you ever connected your Laptop to a wired network point in your house and continued to get wireless  network speeds ? Here’s how you can quickly fix that, the easy way. Giving Your Wired Connection Higher Priority Press the Win + R keyboard combination and type ncpa.cpl into the run box, then hit enter. When the Network Connections window opens you will need to hit the alt key to display the classic menu bar. Once its available click on advanced, and then choose the Advanced Settings option. Here you will see the preference of your network connections. In order to make your laptop use a wired connection, if available, even when connected to a wireless network, you will need to select Wi-Fi and then click on the green arrow pointing down. This will automatically bump Ethernet to the top. That’s all there is to it.

How to Reuse Your Old Wi-Fi Router as a Network Switch Just because your old Wi-Fi router has been replaced by a newer model doesn’t mean it needs to gather dust in the closet. Read on as we show you how to take an old and underpowered Wi-Fi router and turn it into a respectable network switch (saving your $20 in the process). Why Do I Want To Do This? Wi-Fi technology has changed significantly in the last ten years, but Ethernet-based networking has changed very little. As such, a Wi-Fi router with 2006-era guts is lagging significantly behind current Wi-Fi router technology, but the Ethernet networking component of the device is just as useful as ever; aside from potentially being only 100Mbs instead of 1000Mbs capable (which for 99% of home applications is irrelevant), Ethernet is Ethernet. What does this matter to you, the consumer? It means that even though your old router doesn’t hack it for your Wi-Fi needs any longer, the device is still a perfectly serviceable (an...

How to Enable Click-to-Play Plugins in Every Web Browser Most web browsers load Flash and other plug-in content as soon as you open a web page. Enable “click-to-play” plug-ins and your browser will load a placeholder image instead — click it to actually download and view the content. Click-to-play allows you to  conserve download bandwidth , improve page load times, reduce CPU usage, and extend laptop battery life. This feature gained popularity with Flashblock for Firefox and is now built into modern browsers. Mozilla Firefox You can make Firefox require click to play by heading into Tools -> Addons -> Plugins and changing the drop-down to Ask to Activate. This should generally work, but there’s a chance an update will flip the setting back. Alternatively you can use Flashblock, which will completely whack Flash and more, and you don’t have to worry. Mozilla Firefox uses click-to-play for most plug-in content by default, but it will still load Fla...

Bloatware Banished: Windows 10 Eliminates the Need to Ever Reinstall Windows on New PCs Geeks often immediately reinstall Windows on their new PCs to get a completely clean system. Thanks to a change in  Windows 10 , you can get a fresh copy of Windows on any PC without downloading an ISO file and reinstalling Windows. Microsoft is changing the way Refresh and Reset works in Windows 10. Computer manufacturers won’t be able to pollute the recovery image with their own software and modifications. Manufacturer-provided software is stored separately. PC Manufacturers Polluted Windows 8’s Recovery Images Windows 8’s refresh and reset feature  was a nice improvement over the recovery partitions necessary with previous versions of Windows. However, these functions didn’t give you a completely fresh Windows system unless you installed Windows yourself — or purchased a clean computer from a MIcrosoft Store . Computer manufacturers had...

How to Make Your Computer’s Browser Use Less Data When Tethering Websites – at least the desktop versions – are designed for broadband connections and are larger than ever. This isn’t normally a problem, but what if you’re tethering your computer to a smartphone with a limited data plan? These tips will help you use less data and come in under your data cap. They shouldn’t be necessary if you are on a decent, wired Internet connection with unlimited data or a high data  cap. Enable Click-To-Play Plugins Many websites include embedded Flash content, often for videos or advertisements. This Flash content can be fairly large in size. To prevent Flash content from loading, you can enable the click-to-play plugin feature in your browser. When you access a page containing content that needs plugins – usually Flash, but occasionally Silverlight or something else – you will see placeholder images\. Click the placeholder and the content will download and play. With click-t...

How to Log In To Your Linux Desktop With Google Authenticator For additional security, you can require a  time-based authentication token  as well as a password to log into your Linux PC. This solution uses Google Authenticator and other TOTP apps. This process was performed on Ubuntu 14.04 with the standard  Unity desktop  and LightDM login manager, but the principles are the same on most Linux distributions and desktops. We previously showed you  how to require Google Authenticator for remote access via SSH , and this process is similar. This doesn’t require the Google Authenticator app, but works with any compatible app that implements the TOTP authentication scheme, including  Authy . Install the Google Authenticator PAM As when setting this up for SSH access, we’ll first need to install the appropriate PAM (“pluggable-authentication module”) software. PAM is a system that allows us to plug different types of authen...