A lot has changed with the release of Windows 8. The new interface is stealing all of the buzz, but there is a lot more going on in this new operating system than fancy tiles and the new Start screen. Case in point, the new Task Manager. The basic tool included with every version of Windows since way back has gotten a facelift. It's got a bunch of new tabs that offer a ton of information that will appeal to everyone from a power user diagnosing system problems to a novice trying to find the Internet.

Do you remember those little disposable panorama cameras? They let you take a few very wide photographs on a roll of 35mm film. Since the advent of digital cameras, making panoramic photos has been done by merging several photographs together and, in the beginning, that was something you could only do with expensive editing software. Now, anyone can make a panorama using Windows Photo Gallery 2012 and the process could not be easier. Here's how.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 include a great little application you can use to record sounds - Sound Recorder. All you need is a sound card and a microphone plugged in, or a webcam with a microphone built in. Your recordings are saved as Windows Media Audio files and can be played by any media player. To learn how to use this program, don’t hesitate to read this tutorial.

Windows Photo Gallery has many great features. One of our favorites is face recognition, which allows you to identify and tag people in your photos. The more people you tag, the easier it is for Windows Photo Gallery to suggest tags and correctly identify people. Another great thing is that, if you publish your photos on Facebook, your tags will be published on Facebook as well. Tags can also be used as search criteria, so that you can easily find the photos the interest you. In this guide, I will show how tagging and face recognition work in Windows Photo Gallery 2012.

By default, Internet Explorer 10 and 9 use Bing as their default search engine. I like Bing and l am using it a lot more often than I used to, because their algorithms have improved over time. However, some people just want to use Google and are not interested in using Bing. For them, I have created this quick tutorial, showing how to add Google as the default search provider in Internet Explorer. This guide also works for the modern version of Internet Explorer 10, included with Windows 8 or Windows RT.

Windows Essentials is a suite of free programs that has evolved a lot over the years. At first, it was named Windows Live Essentials. Now it has been rebranded to a shorter, simpler name. To make things even more confusing, the number of programs included in this suite has evolved a lot over time. That’s why, in this article, I will explain what Windows Essentials are and how to download and install the programs included in this suite.

Very few people are aware that for each file stored on your computer there is a set of metadata associated with it, that gives information about its source, author and other important details, depending on its type. In this article I am going to discuss about metadata, what it is and the uses of it. Then, I will cover how to add, remove and maintain metadata for your files. The procedures apply to any version of Windows.

Smartphones wouldn't be so useful and appreciated by users without all their apps. As soon as you have a new smartphone, one of the first steps you go through is searching for apps and installing them. With the help of the Store, Windows Phone offers an easy way of finding, downloading and installing apps. If you are a beginner with Windows Phone 8, you should read this tutorial. It also shares how to remove the apps you no longer use.

In previous articles, we introduced you to the Processes tab of the Windows 8 Task Manager. There you can get detailed information about how programs use system resources. That tab is new to Windows 8 and it is very useful, but old time users will remember that the Processes tab in Windows 7 had significantly more information to display. For those of you wondering where your detailed data points disappeared to, search no farther. We'd like to show you the new Details tab in the Windows 8 Task Manager - the place to go when you need a ton of info about the processes running on your computer or device.

Would you like to know how many open ports are found on each computer or device that is part of your network? Do you want to evaluate how good their firewall protection is and how vulnerable they are? Then, you should try Nmap - an open source tool for security auditing. We use it in our reviews for security solutions and we think it is awesome. You should also try it out.

Recently I have encountered weird problems with some modern Windows 8 apps. A few of them (not all) were malfunctioning. When I was launching these apps they never started and, after a second or two, I was back to the Start screen. I did a bit of research with the help of the Event Viewer. It was saying that those apps crashed with the 0xc0000005 exception code and that the atidxx64.dll file installed by my AMD/ATI video card driver was the cause of the problem. What was going on? How to solve this problem?

Geeks and IT professionals love the Command Prompt and for good reason - it allows you to perform many administrative tasks with ease. But what are all the possible ways to launch it? Have you thought about that? I did, and I have come up with 7 methods for launching this tool. Do you know other methods?