Windows Tools, Help & Guides

If you’re looking for desktop wallpaper, the best way to make sure you’re getting wallpaper that will fit, not blur, and show the complete image is to get wallpaper at the right resolution.

What is Resolution?

Screens are made up of tiny addressable squares or pixels. If you look closely at your monitor, you’ll see these tiny squares made up of (usually) Red, Green, and Blue lines. The Red, Green, and Blue lights mix to produce a colored light; the collection of these colors work like a huge patchwork quilt to produce the image you’re looking at right now.

Resolution is the number of these pixels wide by the number of pixels high that your screen displays.

i.e. 1920 x 1080 resolution is 1,980 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high and is referred to as “nineteen twenty by ten eighty.”

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Most programs put a shortcut on your start menu or desktop when they’re installed. However, if you accidentally remove this shortcut or need to create a shortcut to a commonly used folder, this guide will show you the basics:

• Create a shortcut on your desktop
• Create a shortcut on the start menu

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If you want the maximum viewing area in Windows Explorer, simply press the F11 key (or hold CTRL when you click the maximize button—if not already maximized.)

To return to the normal view, press the F11 key a second time.

The F11 key is also be used for full-screen mode in popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, and Google Chrome.

Recently, we updated our guide on run commands to open Windows applications. If you don’t want to use the list (or commit it to memory), I’ve put together a zip file with useful Windows shortcuts. You can add one or all of these to your desktop for easy access:

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If you use your laptop or tablet on battery power, you’ll know how annoying it is to lose battery power at the “worst time”. While I can’t guarantee your PC will lose power at a more convenient time, I can offer 14 ways to improve your battery life. Learn, in this guide, how to save power when running on batteries.

Note: This guide is written for Windows 7 but most tips apply for Windows Vista

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You probably have a hard drive in your home that’s one terabyte or more. If you open Computer (Windows Key + E), you’ll see your terabyte hard drive might only show a capacity of around 930 GB. Where did all those extra gigabytes go? Aren’t there a thousand gigabytes in a terabyte? If you have questions like these, this guide answers them.

Terabyte vs. Tebibyte

Hard drive manufacturers use the International System of Units (SI) convention to when listing hard drive capacity. Kilo-, mega-, giga-, and tera- are some of the prefixes used in accordance with the SI and are base-10 (decimal.) “Tera” means trillion so a terabyte is one trillion, 1,000,000,000,000, or 10²⁰ bytes.

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