How to Keep Your Windows PC and All Its Apps Up to Date

Did You Know? Although the children of identical twins are, legally speaking, first cousins, they are, genetically speaking, more like half siblings. Geek Trivia In China An Unauthorized Harry Potter Sequel Was Revealed To Be A Rewrite Of? The Colour of Magic → The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe → Alice's Adventures in Wonderland → The Hobbit → Advertisement Download Excel 2013 All-in-One for Dummies (8 Books in 1) A $22.99 Value, FREE! The featured minibooks address Excel basics, worksheet design, formulas and functions, worksheet collaboration and review, charts and graphics, data management, data analysis, and Excel and VBA. Click here to download Want to Change Your Email Preferences? At some point in the past you subscribed to the How-To Geek newsletter, but if you'd like to change the frequency or unsubscribe, you can do so by clicking the button. Change my Subscription (or unsubscribe) Today's How-To Geek Articles By popular request, we're including a quick list of the daily articles at the top of the daily email as well as the regular format near the bottom. How to Open Tabs from Your Last Session Whenever You Start Your Browser How to Remove the Windows Defender Icon From Your Notification Area How to Periodically Scan Your Computer With Windows Defender While Using Another Antivirus How to Keep Your Windows PC and Apps Up to Date Is Downloading Retro Video Game ROMs Ever Legal? Everything You Can Do With Windows 10’s New Bash Shell How to Share SmartThings Access with Family Members How to Turn Chrome’s New “Material Design” On and Off How to Customize the New Tab Page in Chrome How to Disable Cortana on the Windows 10 Lock Screen How to Install Extensions in Microsoft Edge How to Set “Active Hours” So Windows 10 Won’t Restart at a Bad Time Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Skyscraper Ad A Skyscraper Ad is an online banner, image, or media ad that is narrow and vertically orientated, generally being 120*600 to 160*600 pixels in size. What We're Reading This section contains what we're reading from around the web, along with commentary from our editors. Think of it like your daily digest of the most interesting things online. Extreme Sports in Space A dispatch from the future of extreme sports. [Nautilus] Mint 18 review: "Just works" Linux doesn't get any better than this New themes and moving from GNOME/GTK 3.10 to 3.18 mean two good years of Mint 18.x ahead. [ArsTechnica] What Does 'Superfood' Even Mean, Anyway? The closer you look at the title the less the label means. [New York Magazine] How to Open Tabs from Your Last Session Whenever You Start Your Browser Do you always have a lot of tabs open in your browser? If your browser has crashed on you, or if you just want to keep those tabs open next time you start your computer, don’t panic. There is a solution. Read This Article → How to Remove the Windows Defender Icon From Your Notification Area Windows 10 has always included the Windows Defender antivirus, but many Windows users didn’t notice it was even there. To make it more obvious, Windows 10’s Anniversary Update adds a Windows Defender icon to the notification area on your taskbar. Read This Article → How to Periodically Scan Your Computer With Windows Defender While Using Another Antivirus Windows 10 comes with Windows Defender, a built-in antivirus tool to help protect your PC from malware. With the Anniversary Update, Windows Defender can keep protecting your PC by providing a second layer of protection, even if you install another antivirus. Read This Article → How to Keep Your Windows PC and Apps Up to Date We know, updating your PC is a hassle–but it’s important. New security flaws are discovered on a regular basis, and most companies are pretty good about about issuing fixes for those flaws as they crop up. Plugging those holes, however, depends largely upon you making sure things are properly updated. Read This Article → Is Downloading Retro Video Game ROMs Ever Legal? There’s nothing quite like reliving your childhood with your favorite retro games, but are emulators and ROMs legal? The internet will give you a lot of answers, but we talked to a lawyer to get a more definitive answer. Read This Article → Everything You Can Do With Windows 10’s New Bash Shell Windows 10’s Anniversary Update brings a “Bash on Ubuntu on Windows” environment to Windows 10. But don’t be deceived: This is more than just a Bash shell. It’s a full compatibility layer for running Linux applications on Windows. Read This Article → How to Share SmartThings Access with Family Members If you have multiple people in your household and want them all to have access to SmartThings from their phones, here's how to share access to SmartThings with anyone you want. Read This Article → How to Turn Chrome’s New “Material Design” On and Off If you use Google Chrome as your default web browser, you might have noticed a big change in its appearance. Google has changed Chrome’s theme to sport the Material Design style on some machines. If you prefer the old look however, don’t worry, it can be turned off–and if you don’t have this new design yet, you can turn it on with the same hidden setting. Read This Article → How to Customize the New Tab Page in Chrome For most people, the default New Tab Page in Chrome works perfectly well for their purposes. But if you would prefer to choose what opens in a new tab for yourself, then we have some alternative solutions for you. Read This Article → How to Disable Cortana on the Windows 10 Lock Screen With the Windows 10 Anniversary Update, Cortana is now enabled by default on your lock screen–assuming you haven’t disabled her entirely. If you’d rather not have Cortana answering questions when your PC is locked, it’s an easy enough feature to disable. Read This Article → How to Install Extensions in Microsoft Edge Microsoft Edge finally supports browser extensions thanks to Windows 10’s Anniversary Update. Edge extensions are now available in the Windows Store, although only a few are initially available. Read This Article → How to Set “Active Hours” So Windows 10 Won’t Restart at a Bad Time Windows 10 automatically downloads and installs updates, but a new feature in Windows 10’s Anniversary Update gives you more control over when this happens. Set “active hours” when you generally use your PC, and Windows won’t restart your computer during those hours. Read This Article → Advertisement Download Excel 2013 All-in-One for Dummies (8 Books in 1) A $22.99 Value, FREE! The featured minibooks address Excel basics, worksheet design, formulas and functions, worksheet collaboration and review, charts and graphics, data management, data analysis, and Excel and VBA. Click here to download