Stop Testing Software on Your PC: Use Virtual Machine Snapshots Instead

Did You Know? Brass doorknobs, thanks to their copper-alloy composition, are naturally bactericidal and self-disinfect. Geek Trivia Which Candy Was Originally Marketed As A Smoking Cessation Tool? Tic Tacs → Pez → Red Vines → Life Savers → Advertisement Download Network Security For Dummies -- eBook (usually $22.99) FREE until January 1st! Get quick, easy, low-cost solutions to all your network security concerns. Click here to download Geek Comic Today's Tech Term Smoothed Data Smoothed Data refers to statistical data that has been manipulated (averaged out) in order to focus on important patterns in the data (smoothing out the curves on its graph) by reducing the impact of individual points of data that could be considered ‘irregularities’ in comparison to the rest of the data. What We're Reading from Around the Web King of Clickbait: The Building of a Meme Empire [The New Yorker] The Benefits of Being Cold [The Atlantic] Google got it wrong. The open-office trend is destroying the workplace. [The Washington Post] 7 Facts About the New Year's Eve Ball [YouTube] This Medium Format Camera Was Made Using Parts from an Epson Scanner [Petapixel] Everything we know about how people watched "The Interview" and what it means for the future of internet video [Quartz] Stop Testing Software on Your PC: Use Virtual Machine Snapshots Instead We’ve long railed against registry cleaners and system tuners as useless products that waste your money, but how do you go about cleaning up after uninstalling shady freeware? Answer: You don’t. You avoid installing nonsense on your PC to begin with by testing everything in a virtual machine first. Snapshots just make it easier. Read This Article → How to Use FC (File Compare) from the Windows Command Prompt There is a great command line tool that can be used to compare files to see if there are any content or binary code differences that you can access if you are using a PC. File Compare or FC as we will refer to is from here on out, is a simple program that will compare the contents of text or binary files and is capable of comparing both ASCII and Unicode text. You can use this tool to display any lines from two files or two sets of files that do not match up with the others. Read This Article → Why does Google Say Mozilla Thunderbird is Less Secure? Sometimes when you are looking for an answer to one thing, you end up finding something else rather surprising. Case in point, Google’s statement that Mozilla Thunderbird is less secure, but why do they say that? Today’s SuperUser Q&A post has the answer to a confused reader’s question. Read This Article → Beginner: How to Use Notes in Outlook 2013 for Easy Desktop Reminders Notes are simple and very handy. They are basically desktop Post Its, which you can collect and save in your Outlook and display on your desktop as reminders to do stuff. Read This Article → Mac OS X: Change Which Apps Start Automatically at Login OS X makes dealing with startup items really easy — you just head into the preferences and add or remove things from the list. But if you’re a recent convert to Mac, you might not know how to do it. But now you will. Read This Article → How to Find Your Lost Windows or Office Product Keys If you’re planning on doing a reinstall of Windows but can’t find your product key, you’re in luck because it’s stored in the Windows Registry… it’s just not easy to find, and it’s impossible to read without some help. Luckily, we’re here to help. Read This Article → Advertisement Download 9 Lethal Linux Commands You Should Never Run Linux can be a double-edged sword. It assumes that you know what you're doing and gives you the freedom to do whatever you want. It won't question you. This is convenient when you actually know what you're doing, but it also means that you could conceivably render your system unusable within seconds. Click here to download