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In the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, Edge received a performance boost that lets it pre-launch processes and preload the Start and New Tabs during Windows startup. If you don’t use Edge, though, these optimizations are wasting resource and slowing startup. With a quick Registry hack or Group Policy setting, you can disable it. All Windows 10 Users: Prevent Pre-Launching and Preloading by Editing the Registry If you have Windows Home edition, you will have to use Registry Editor to make these changes....

Did your PC suffer a catastrophic failure requiring new hardware? Have you upgraded to better components and Windows 10 just doesn’t recognize your PC? This guide shows you how to reactivate Windows 10 after a hardware change. What Counts As a Hardware Change? That’s an area even Microsoft won’t fully explain. Instead, the company provides this statement on its website: Documents retrieved by Paul Thurrott, however, state that hard drive replacement does not fall under Microsoft’s “substantial change” label....

It’s never a bad idea to remove your personal information from a file before sharing it. Office applications might store personal information in each file you create, meaning everyone that receives that file will have your information. Here’s how to remove it. Save a Copy of Your File First things first; if you plan to remove any of your personal information from a file, you might not be able to restore the data once it’s gone....

If you want to share your presentation with someone that doesn’t have Microsoft PowerPoint, you can save and share the file as a PDF. You can also adjust the way the slides appear on the PDF. Here’s how. Save PowerPoint Files as PDFs When you save a PowerPoint presentation as a PDF file, the layout, format, fonts, and images of the presentation will remain the same. This lets users without access to PowerPoint view the presentation (though they are unable to edit it)....

Start With Smart Plugs Here’s the good news: Making your Christmas lights smart doesn’t mean you need to throw out the perfectly good lights you’ve used for years. You’re better off using what you have because smart outdoor lighting tends to be expensive. Instead, buy smart plugs. These can make any “dumb” gadget smart. Smart plugs run off a simple principle. When you turn a smart plug off, it cuts power to whatever you connected it to—much like a light switch....

How to Watch the Fight Live in the United States UFC 241 is exclusive to ESPN+, ESPN’s streaming service, in the United States, so the only way to watch the fight live is online. For that, you’ll have to sign up for ESPN+ and then purchase the fight as a pay-per-view event. Coverage of the main fight card begins at 10:00 PM Eastern Time (US). With a total of 12 fights on the card, early prelims start at 7:00 PM and the prelims start at 8:00 PM....

Google Search’s dark mode looks great, but just like everything else in the world, it’s not for everyone. If you’d prefer performing your searches on a light theme, here’s how to turn off dark mode on Google Search on desktop and mobile. Later, if you change your mind, you can quickly re-enable the mode. RELATED: Dark Mode Isn’t Better For You, But We Love It Anyway Turn Dark Mode Off on Google Search on Desktop To disable Google Search’s dark mode on your Windows, Mac, Linux, or Chromebook computer, launch your web browser and access the Google site....

RELATED: Do the People You Follow on Social Media Spark Joy? Unfriending vs. Unfollowing Someone Unfriending and unfollowing are two different things on Facebook. When you unfollow someone, you can continue to be friends with that person. It’s just that you don’t see that person’s posts in your newsfeed anymore. Unfriending, on the other hand, removes that person from your friend list and also makes that person’s posts disappear from your news feed....

Windows 10 updates most of your device drivers automatically. But if you’d like to manually install the latest drivers (say for your graphics card), you can do so by downloading the drivers from the device manufacturer’s site or using Device Manager. We’ll show you how. When Should You Manually Update Your Device Drivers? Windows 10’s update system installs the latest drivers for most of your hardware components automatically, saving you time and effort....

curl vs. wget : What’s the Difference? People often struggle to identify the relative strengths of the wget and curl commands. The commands do have some functional overlap. They can each retrieve files from remote locations, but that’s where the similarity ends. wget is a fantastic tool for downloading content and files. It can download files, web pages, and directories. It contains intelligent routines to traverse links in web pages and recursively download content across an entire website....

Slack, the popular workplace communication tool, now has a Workflow Builder to help you automate recurring tasks. Here’s what it is, what it can do, and how you can use it. Workflow Builder is only available on Slack’s paid plans: Standard, Plus, or Enterprise. If you’re on its free plan, you’ll need to upgrade to use Workflow Builder, although you can get a free trial of the paid plans if you want to play with it....

The whois System The whois system is a listing of records that contains details about both the ownership of domains and the owners. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) regulates domain name registration and ownership, but the list of records is held by many companies, known as registries. Anyone can query the list of records. When you do, one of the registries will handle your request and send you details from the appropriate whois record....

YouTube’s new Creator Studio has left beta and is now set the default studio for all users. It’s laid out much differently and has a lot more features and analytics for you to peruse. The Dashboard The dashboard isn’t too useful in its current state. Right now, it just shows how well your latest video is doing, as well as an overview of your channel is doing. There are more cards for YouTube news and its Creator Insider newsletter, which feels like it’s just taking up space....

If you’ve used the Mailbox Cleanup tool to look at the size of your Outlook folders, you might have noticed three (or sometimes four) folders starting with “Sync Issues.” You can empty the “Sync Issues\Conflicts” folder with the Mailbox Cleanup tool, but that still leaves the others. Let’s take a look at how to access them, what they’re for, and whether you can—or should—delete their contents. How Do You Access the Sync Folders?...

Gatekeeper Prevents Unsigned Apps From Running If you get an error that says an application “can’t be opened because the developer cannot be verified,” Gatekeeper is to blame. Gatekeeper was first introduced in 2012 with the release of Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. It’s a security feature that stops an app from running if it hasn’t been signed with a certified Apple developer certificate. On modern versions of macOS, unsigned software simply won’t run unless you go out of your way to approve it....

The Roku Express is the cheapest streaming device from Roku, capable of playing most popular streaming services at 1080p for just $30. Roku has now announced a new version with upgraded hardware. Roku’s updated Express has the same form factor and most of the same features as the previous model. It’s a small box with an HDMI port (a short HDMI cable is included), a microUSB connector for power, and a dedicated remote....

In the last three years, virtual reality hasn’t exactly set the world on fire. Even so, 2019 shaped up to be VR’s best year ever, with new headsets that might have cracked the code on what gamers need. After all, how many people do you know with a room-scale VR rig in their living room? Probably not many, and according to Statista, fewer than 5 million units were sold in 2018....

Facebook is a great place to keep in touch with friends and family—especially those for whom you’d like to do so at a distance. Unfortunately, your friends list is probably filled with people you can’t unfriend but would prefer not to hear from. Go ahead and unfollow them. Facebook was more peaceful in its infancy. Grandma and Uncle Bob didn’t know about it, and the only friends you had were people you called friends in real life....

VMware released a Tech Preview for the Mac version of Fusion on Thursday, which works similarly to Parallels Desktop. This is the first version of VMware that can run Windows 11 without any hacks or workarounds, on both Intel and Silicon-based Mac computers, thanks to a new virtual TPM module. VMware also now offers early graphics drivers for Windows on ARM, so 4K and higher resolutions should work — don’t expect to play any demanding games, though....

Dolby is a trusted name in audio, but its latest product is a little different. “Dolby Dimension Headphones” isn’t an audio standard, like 5.1 Surround or Dolby Atmos, but a new wireless headphone set you can buy. Dolby crammed the Dimension Headphones full of their audio tech, both licensed (technology that’s sold to other manufacturers to use in their products) and exclusive to this rare hardware release. Things may stay that way, or they may not: at $600 a pop, Dolby is unlikely to sell so many Dimension Headphones that it won’t consider licensing some of this new tech....