HTG Explains: Understanding Routers, Switches, and Network Hardware

Did You Know? Ronald Reagan was a Trekkie through and through: during his stint as U.S. President he enjoyed two private screenings of 80s-era Star Trek films and, after his presidency was over, visited the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation to see everything up close and meet the cast and crew. Geek Trivia Comfort Noise Is A Tool Used Widely In Which Industry? Construction → Telecommunications → Pediatric Care → Animal Husbandry → Advertisement Download 5 Windows 7 Features You Didn't Know Existed Windows XP may be gone, but all is not lost. Windows 7 may replace it as the legacy Windows OS of choice, especially considering the little-known features hidden away in Windows 7 that may make you realize just how much you love the OS. Use this guide to learn about 5 features you didn't even know existed in Windows 7. Click here to download Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Middleware Middleware refers to software that operates as a communication, conversion, and/or translation layer between two separate programs. Programs that need Middleware may be running on different platforms, come from different software vendors, or both. What We're Reading from Around the Web Google's New Moonshot Project: the Human Body [WSJ] How Hackers Hid a Money-Mining Botnet in the Clouds of Amazon and Others [Wired] Super-Dense Computer Memory (Or: How You Might End Up with a Terabyte in Your Smartphone) [MIT Technology Review] Mysterious orbits of dwarf galaxies found all over the nearby Universe [ArsTechnica] The Weird, Underappreciated World Of Plastic Packaging [NPR] How the Crowd Taught a Robot to Build a LEGO Turtle [Singularity Hub] A Smartphone That Takes the Fall: The Case for Ditching Your Smartphone Case [NYT] New Evidence Suggests All Dinosaurs May Have Had Feathers [The Economist] Learning Windows Search: Use Advanced Query Syntax to Find Everything We arrive at our final lesson in our Windows Search series, and logically we're ending on what we've been building up to the whole time: Advanced Query Syntax, namely AQS parameters. Understanding these parameters and how to use them will give your searches that extra oomph they've been sorely needing and will ultimately crown you all as Search Masters! Read This Article → HTG Explains: Understanding Routers, Switches, and Network Hardware Today we're taking a look at the home networking hardware: what the individual pieces do, when you need them, and how best to deploy them. Read on to get a clearer picture of what you need to optimize your home network. Read This Article → Are There any Benefits from Plugging Your Mouse into a USB 3.0 Port? When you are serious about online gaming, you look for every edge that you can find. The question is, will plugging your mouse into a USB 3.0 port provide any speed or response benefits over a USB 2.0 port? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post debates the question. Read This Article → Learning Windows Search: Use Boolean, Dates, and Wildcards to Give Your Searches a Boost Finding your stuff with Windows Search doesn't require you know or even care about Advanced Query Syntax, but if you have 1000s of images, music files, and videos, then it sure helps. AQS really shines when you've saved your stuff in a safe place but can't remember where that place is, so even if you've lost something, it's never really lost if you know how to look for it! Read This Article → HTG Explains: Do You Really Need to Defrag Your PC? Ask any PC tech person how to make your computer faster, and almost every one of them will tell you to defrag your PC. But do you really need to manually trigger a defrag these days? Read This Article → Advertisement Download Refreshing, Resetting, and Restoring: A Guide to Recovery Options in Windows Learn about the powerful additions to the arsenal of recovery tools found in Windows 8. Click here to view products