Windows 8’s Family Safety allows you to police your children’s user accounts to ensure their safety and innocence while they use the computer. Microsoft provides a helpful web interface for this service that allows you to change your settings, monitor requests from your child to change permissions for pages and apps and monitor reports of your child’s usage. While this is a great feature that is sure to help a lot of users, it isn’t for everyone. If you don’t like the web interface, or would just rather manage your Family Safety reports locally, you have the option to disable the website for your user accounts. Keep in mind that this will disable the ability for your children to send requests from their account(s).

The region or the home location is a rather hidden setting in Windows 8 which is important when using the operating system and even more important when trying to find, access and use localized apps. If you have set the wrong region, you won’t be able to find certain apps or access relevant content for your location. Here’s how to change the location in Windows 8 so that you can solve such problems.

Do you have a network with multiple devices, computers and operating systems? What does it take to set up Windows 7 and Windows 8 so that you can easily share folders, libraries and devices with the other computers that are part of the network? It turns out that the answer is: "not much". All you have to do is to double check a few settings and adjust them where appropriate.

Computers on a network can be part of a workgroup or a domain. The difference between them is how resources are managed on the network. While domains are fit for enterprise networks, home networks can work very well with workgroups. In this article I will explain the difference between domains and workgroups, show how to access your workgroup settings and how to change them, both in Windows 7 and Windows 8.

We’ve covered in past tutorials what it takes to set up Family Safety in Windows 8. We’ve also shown you how to use the Family Safety website to check your child’s usage reports from any web connected device anywhere. If you should find, based on your child’s habits or usage, that you want to increase or decrease the permission level on their account, you don’t even have to go home to do it. You can use the same website to change any of your Family Safety settings. Here’s how:

When Windows Vista was launched, User Account Control (UAC) was the most criticized and misunderstood feature. Even though it is very important for security, many people have chosen to disable it and expose their systems to possible security problems. This feature has been improved in Windows 7 and Windows 8 and, even if it adds a lot to the security of the operating system, many users still choose to disable it. That’s why, in this article, I would like to clarify what this feature is, how it works and the benefits of keeping it active.

Did you know that Windows Phone has the built-in capability to scan special barcodes such as QR codes? No third-party apps are required. Not only can you scan QR codes, but you can even scan and translate text with the phone. All you have to do is a simple “point and shoot". To find out how it works, don’t hesitate to read this tutorial.

The App History tab in the Windows 8 Task Manager collects and reports usage statistics for the apps and programs running on your computer. For instance, you can check in regularly to see how much CPU time or network usage an app has accrued over the past month. This may not be a glamourous feature, but it can come in handy, especially for mobile users. Identifying a high CPU using application can help you save battery life and slowing down a heavy downloader can keep you from going over your network usage caps. Let’s see how it works.

Sharing folders from Mac OS X with Windows computers and devices, is a lot easier than it used to be. Thanks to OS X’s built-in support for the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) Protocol, allowing read/write access to Windows computers can be done with just a few tweaks in System Preferences. After completing the steps in this tutorial, your Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers should be able to see your Mac on the local network. You’ll be able to setup multiple shared folders, each with different read/write access. Let’s see how it is done.

When I want to tweak different aspects of the operating system, I generally prefer to use the built-in tools provided by Windows. Both Windows 7 and Windows 8 provide some great tools you can use. One such tool is the underrated Disk Cleanup, that allows you to free up space on your partitions and safely remove even system files that you no longer need. Let’s see how it works and why it is one of the best tools for cleaning up space in Windows.

Windows 7 and Windows 8 include a disk error checking utility named Check Disk. It allows you to scan your partitions and see if they have issues with lost sectors, bad sectors or file corruption. Let’s see how to run Check Disk, identify and fix issues with the data stored on your computer’s hard discs.

When you are creating your home network and you need to add computers with different operating systems, one thing you must do, to make networking and sharing easier, is to change the workgroup. While we’ve shown how to do this in Windows, we did not show how its done in Mac OS X. In the future we plan to update our series on networking Mac OS X with Windows, so let’s begin by showing how to change the workgroup in Mac OS X.