If you have lost your Windows 7 or Windows 8 license key, you can still recover it from the computer or device where it is installed. Many programs were developed for recovering Windows 7 product keys but not that many work on Windows 8. That’s why I decided to test a couple of programs, identify those that work also with Windows 8 and share them with you. You never know when you need to recover your lost license key.

Connecting all your Windows 8 devices together in a home network allows you to share data between them directly. If all of your devices are using Windows Vista or newer, you can use the Homegroup to connect them all seamlessly. If that isn't an option for you, or you would rather not use this feature, you can easily map shared network locations to a local drive letter using a process called drive mapping. While this procedure is very similar to drive mapping in Windows 7, there are a couple of changes to the File Explorer user interface that might throw off some users. Read on and I'll show you how to map network drives and FTP servers in Windows 8.

Windows 7 introduced a brand new Windows Explorer that is very different from the version found in Windows XP or Windows Vista. Windows 8 continues this trend and not only renames the product to File Explorer but also introduces a ribbon based interface. Even though these products have lots of new features, as with any piece of software, you can customize and improve their functioning, using the Folder Options window - the place where all the important settings are found, related to how Windows Explorer and File Explorer work. Let’s see which settings are worth improving and where to find them.

Some of our readers have asked how they can set Windows 7 or Windows 8 so that it plays an alarm sound when the battery or their laptop or tablet reaches a low or critically low level. Such alarms can be played automatically with the use of sound schemes. In this tutorial you will learn how this works.

Windows has a set of sounds applied to events and programs, such as "Close Program", "Default Beep", "Maximize", "Minimize", etc. The collection of all these sounds is called a sound scheme and is associated with a Windows theme. For example, the themes that come bundled with Windows 7 and Windows 8 use the Windows Default sound scheme. When you change your Windows theme, the sound scheme is also changed according to the new theme’s settings. If you are not happy with a certain sound scheme, you can easily customize it so that it uses the sounds you want to. You can even create your own sound schemes. Let’s see how it all works.

SSquared-Photography, the duo of Poland born Slavo Janowski and Italy born Stefano Canali, are a self-taught team of photographers currently based in Ireland. Their new home with its beautiful scenery and haunting shores not only brought them together as artists, but also provided fuel for their inspiration. They’ve developed a business from their passion for photography and are the proud honors of a small studio that offers prints, web design solutions as well as artistic and commercial photography. They love taking long exposure shots and want to bring unique and creative imagery to landscape photography. To find out how the duo came together and have a look at their beautiful work through a Windows theme, we recommend reading their interview below.

When I was asked to update our 2010 article about connecting remotely to a PC from a Mac, I thought it would be a fairly simple task. However, since that article was written, Microsoft has dropped support for their Remote Desktop Connection software for Macs. While there are anecdotal reports of it working on OS X Lion, it definitely will not work on OS X Mountain Lion, the latest version of OS X. So I went in a quest of new, free options, and that also turned out not to be a simple task. Here are the best free tools for connecting remotely from your Mac to a Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer or device.

Windows 8’s Family Safety gives you an amazing amount of control over your children’s user accounts. It allows you to monitor their activities, restrict their usage times and prevent them from viewing and using things that aren’t meant for them. This tool is easy to use, but it also has enough going on that it might intimidate some users. We’ve compiled a list with the best features of Family Safety, to show you how it works and why it’s worth the trouble of using it.

When using Windows 8, you encounter all kinds of scenarios in which you are asked to enter one password or another. And, as all operating systems do, Windows 8 masks the passwords you enter with bullets, so that they cannot be read by someone standing nearby. A useful security precaution. But, what if you want to double check what you just typed, to make sure it is correct. How do you temporarily reveal the password you just typed, before submitting it?

A while ago we talked about environment variables and their role in Windows operating systems. Did you ever need to experiment with these variables? Or do you want to learn more about how to use environment variables? Then, read this guide and learn how to create your own user & system variables, both in Windows 7 and Windows 8. Creating your own variables may turn out to be useful in certain scenarios.

Windows 8 themes are not different from Windows 7 themes, at least not when you look at them for the first time. The process for creating and customizing themes is the same in both operating systems but the theme files that result from the process have a different file extension and they are not compatible with each other. Why is that? I really wanted to learn the answer to this question and I decided to do a bit of research on my own. Here's what I have learned:

When accessing network shared folders from your Mac is a difficult task to do, the only solution you have left is to map a network shared folder from your Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer, so that the Mac always remembers its IP address and the credentials required to login. Here’s how it works