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How-to

Breaking in your iPad

When you bring home your first iPad and open up the box, everything is so pristine and pretty--so Apple. Eventually, as you warm up to the device, you're going to want to make it a little less "factory fresh" and a little more you.

Loading up your own media, photos, and apps is a good start, but there are also a handful of quick things you can do to really put your unique stamp on the iPad.

Whether it's slapping on your own home screen wallpaper or new ways to organize bookmarks in Safari, I've … Read more

Turn off Windows automatic updates

Windows automatic updates are a good thing. They keep your system patched, so you should probably leave the updater on. However, they can be annoying. The updater is always prompting you, or even automatically rebooting your system when you walk away for a moment. I'll show you how to turn off the automatic updates, only if you promise to manually keep up with the patches! We don't need another zombie-Windows-machine botnet out there.

Go to Windows Update by clicking the start button, choosing all programs, and then clicking Windows Update.

On the left side of the panel, click … Read more

How to hear the music you've been missing

A device like the 160GB iPod Classic can hold so much music, you could listen continuously for around 75 days and never hear the same song twice*. Of course, nobody does that--and let's not even go into how you scored 160GB of music without spending tens of thousands of dollars.

Most of us gravitate toward our same favorite albums and artists on a day-to-day basis, or put our iPods on shuffle. But for those completists out there, it can be frustrating to know there are songs hiding in your collection that you've probably never heard.

To find all … Read more

Share huge files on the Net for free

More devices do video these days, which means more people shoot video, which means more people want to share video. But have you attempted to e-mail a huge video file? Anything longer than a couple of minutes becomes massive. And most e-mail won't allow large files.

In this how-to I'll show you a few services that let you share files over the Internet that are larger than 1GB. Some even do it for free!

My favorite is Dropbox. You can store up to 2GB of data for free, or upgrade to 50GB or 100GB for $10 or $20 … Read more

How to share ridiculously large files (the video)

Did you somehow miss our feature from earlier this month on how to share ridiculously large files? Does reading make you sleepy? My CNET colleague Tom Merritt has taken it upon himself to present some of the highlights from that how-to guide in video form, so you can absorb its knowledge through moving images instead.

And, hey--if you do like reading (which is probably why you've made it this far), the sites mentioned in the video are: Dropbox, Glide, SendThisFile, WeTransfer, and FileDropper.