Remember when your PC was brand new and it seemed to respond instantly to every request? And now there's some days you're lucky if it even acknowledges that you've even asked it to do something? Our HowTo this months suggests some steps you can take to try and give your machine a bit of a speed boost.

We've all been there - you're right in the middle of something very important, and then Windows decides that it's a great time to update your PC. While disabling updates entirely is hugely inadvisable (and very difficult by design), it is possible to get Windows to try to apply at more convenient moments. This month's HowTo delves into the Windows 10 update options.

While the SSD drives that are supplied as standard with most devices these days are great at speeding up loading times compared to the bulky magnetic drives, they do currently tend to be a lot smaller. While storing your files on network file shares or cloud services like Dropbox or OneDrive can help to take the strain off of your own device, it's all too easy to fill it up anyway. Our HowTo this month will demonstrate some steps you can take to try and free up some space.

One request we get a lot is to work out why an email bounced back. This month's HowTo guide will explain how go about doing this, and will hopefully help you next time you receive a bounceback and want to know what has gone wrong.

Everyone knows how to do a basic Google search. Type in either a full question or just keywords, and it'll return the results it thinks are most relevant. However, you may not be aware there's a whole series of extra things you can add to your search to help refine your results.

As you may or may not be aware, by default, your web browser keeps a record of every page of every website that you visit. While this can often be useful, if other people use the same browser, it can inadvertently ruin surprises you've been researching - especially at this festive time of year. In this HowTo, we take a look at how you can temporarily disable this record.

You may not know this, but Windows 7, 8 and 10 provides a handy way of creating screenshots using something called the "Snipping Tool". This guide will explain how to find this tool and how to use it to create and send screenshots.

One common problem we deal with is the fallout from a Windows update resetting and removing people’s default apps. PDFs opening in Edge rather than Adobe Reader is a frequent offender. We thought a quick guide on how to get them back to just the way you like them, could be just the ticket.