How-To Guides from Gadget Hacks

Some App Store apps now let you pay for an annual subscription in monthly installments instead of one upfront charge. Apple calls it "monthly subscriptions with a 12-month commitment," and it's easy to mistake for a flexible, cancel-anytime monthly plan.

The Apple CarPlay settings to change after that first pairing aren't hidden exactly, but they do live in two different places: the iPhone's Settings app and CarPlay's own on-screen Settings, reached from the car's display. CarPlay ships with a handful of options that adjust how it looks and behaves, and most are worth checking once the initial setup is done (Engadget, yesterday).

Apple TV boxes don't ship with automatic content recognition, and the Apple TV 4K can't inspect video coming through a television's other inputs, giving it a privacy edge over most other streaming devices and smart TVs, according to Ars Technica's reporting from last year. That's a real advantage, but it doesn't touch app tracking, diagnostics, Siri's data handling, or how the Apple TV app personalizes recommendations. That's where the Apple TV privacy settings below come in.

Tom's Guide walked away unimpressed with the Pixel 11 overall, but the outlet singled out one feature it called "genuinely useful": Magic Capture, a camera mode that records a short clip and lets AI pick the best still photos so users stop guessing when to hit the shutter (Tom's Guide, two weeks ago). Anyone figuring out how to use Magic Capture on Pixel 11 will find the basic setup simple, but getting the most out of it means enabling one setting in advance and thinking about your connection...

NameDrop lets two iPhones, or an iPhone and Apple Watch, swap contact cards by holding the top edges close together and confirming a prompt that appears on both screens. It works by sharing contact information using AirDrop, and it's available now on any compatible iPhone running iOS 17.1 or later (Apple Support). This guide covers how to use NameDrop on iPhone step by step: which devices qualify, how to control exactly what gets shared, and what to check when the screen refuses to show up.

Trading in an old phone with Google Store can turn a drawer relic into real money toward a new Pixel. At the Pixel 11 launch, Google's trade-in program offered $150 for a Pixel 4a and $200 for a 2019 iPhone 11, numbers that catch owners off guard who figured those phones weren't worth listing anywhere. The U.S. trade-in ceiling also climbed from about $800 at the Pixel 10 launch to $1,000 this year, with top-tier phones like a Galaxy Z Fold 7 or iPhone 17 Pro Max eligible for $900 to $1,000.

Most Galaxy tablet problems, freezing, laggy apps, a screen that stops responding, don't need a factory reset. A restart, either a normal one or a forced one depending on what the screen is doing, often clears temporary freezing or app stuttering without touching a single photo or file (Asurion). Learning how to reboot a Samsung Galaxy tablet the right way, and recognizing the smaller set of cases where a restart genuinely isn't enough, keeps you from wiping a tablet that didn't need it.

To stop CarPlay from automatically connecting, turn off the per-car toggle if the iPhone shows one for that vehicle. Use the Screen Time restriction when the goal is blocking CarPlay everywhere, across every paired car at once. Reach for Forget This Car only when a full re-pairing is acceptable, since that's the method Apple's own support page walks through for CarPlay.

Some PCs upgrading from Windows 11 23H2 or 24H2 to 25H2 run into a specific, confusing failure: "We couldn't update the system reserved partition," paired with error code 0x800f0922 (also logged as 0xc1900104). A Microsoft Q&A thread posted late last year reports a connection between this failure and devices running a 100 MB EFI System Partition, smaller than Microsoft's current sizing minimum (Microsoft Q&A). That's the scenario driving this look at Windows 10 to Windows 11 upgrade partition...

For years, every iMessage conversation looked the same: the standard plain Messages backdrop, no matter who you were talking to. That changed when Apple shipped iOS 26, which lets you swap that plain canvas for a photo, a solid color, an animated preset, or an AI-generated image. Learning how to change the background on iPhone Messages takes about thirty seconds once you know where to look, but the feature works differently than most people expect. It isn't a personal theme sitting quietly on...

A specific button sequence on your Roku remote opens a live Wi-Fi diagnostics screen that isn't documented in the Roku support pages reviewed for this guide. It surfaces wireless readings that may help explain buffering: signal-to-noise ratio, signal strength, packet error rate, and the exact Wi-Fi channel your device is using. In one outlet's own test, repositioning the router and TV after checking this screen improved a signal reading from -58 dBm to -40 dBm (MakeUseOf).

When Spotify shut off the servers behind its Car Thing accessory, the company's advice to owners was blunt: factory-reset the device and dispose of it as e-waste, according to The Verge. Community projects emerged to repurpose the hardware instead.

Pixel 11 Pro XL Extreme Charging mode can be activated from the phone's Battery and charging settings, the lock screen when eligible, or Quick Settings after the feature has been activated once.

Ask three different people what "Microsoft Copilot" does, and there's a good chance you'll get three different answers, and all of them will be partially right. That's the problem. Microsoft Copilot isn't one product. It's a family of surfaces, and each one sees a different slice of your data. Mixing up Copilot Chat with Microsoft 365 Copilot, or a Teams meeting assistant with the standalone Researcher agent, is a common reason people asking how to use Microsoft Copilot for research end up with...

This guide walks you through preordering any of the three new Galaxy foldables in a way that minimizes total cost or preserves flexibility, depending on which matters more to you. By the end, you'll know which channel fits your situation, how to run a real cost comparison, and what to verify before submitting your order.

Battery damage from heat doesn't announce itself. It builds quietly through July and August, and by the time September's heat waves roll in, a phone that used to coast to bedtime can barely make it past lunch. Summer is the season when phones take their biggest annual hit to battery health, and most of that damage happens in ways that don't feel serious in the moment, according to CNET. Knowing how to protect your phone battery from summer heat means understanding what's actually happening...

For years, Apple Notes was a one-way street. Text went in and mostly stayed there, with no built-in way to hand a note back out in a format other writing tools could actually read. iOS 26 changes that by building native, two-way Markdown support into Notes, and this guide walks through how to import and export Markdown in Apple Notes on iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Pixel Watch 4 owners who feel left out of the Pixel Watch 5 launch have a workaround. According to Android Authority, Reddit user m0rr0ng0 found that sideloading a newer build of the Pixel Watch Faces app unlocks five Pixel Watch 5 faces: Weave, Chronograph, a Steph Curry edition, Multicolor Reveal, and Multicolor Modular.

Chrome didn't kill ad blocking. It killed one specific technical approach, and took a popular extension's full functionality down with it. If ads have started slipping through since your last Chrome update, or an old uBlock Origin install stopped filtering the way it used to, the good news is that ad blockers that still work in Chrome are easy to find, once you know which one actually matches your problem.

Most CarPlay customization doesn't happen on the car's screen at all. The app layout can be rearranged from an iPhone before the driver even starts the engine, as long as that iPhone has connected to the car's CarPlay system before, according to a 9to5Mac walkthrough from about six months ago.

iOS 27 splits Apple's Clean Up tool into three processing modes: Auto, Fast, and High Quality, and picking the right one is the difference between an edit that holds up and one that looks obviously doctored. This guide covers how to use Clean Up in iOS 27 Photos to remove unwanted objects from iPhone photos, including which mode to trust and when to override it. Hands-on tests from Macworld and TechRadar show High Quality producing noticeably more convincing results than Fast in complex...

Most people assume a TV without Bluetooth means a trip to the electronics store. It doesn't. Bluetooth has become mainstream in most televisions now, but that's only half the picture: plenty of older or specialty sets, like a favorite pair of wired headphones or a plasma TV still hanging on in the den, never got the feature and won't get it through a software update either, according to Wirecutter/NYT reporting from last month. Figuring out how to add Bluetooth to a TV without Bluetooth usually...

iOS 27 gives Find My something it has never had: a way to pause your location for one specific person without sending them any alert. That closes the long-standing gap between sharing everything and stopping sharing and hoping nobody notices.

T-Mobile and Verizon opened preorders for the Pixel 11 lineup on the same day, and both are advertising offers that sound like a free phone. Not all of them actually are. T-Mobile's top Google Pixel 11 carrier deals are device discounts tied to which plan a customer is on and whether they trade in a phone. Verizon's flagship switcher offer bundles a device credit into a specific 48-month plan structure. Read the fine print carelessly and the two "free phone" headlines start to look...

If you own an older Pixel, you may have noticed something Pixel owners have not generally expected to see: a promotional notification sitting in the shade next to your texts and calendar reminders. After the Pixel 11 launch, Android Authority reported this week that many users, including one of its own writers, started receiving ads for the new phone on their older Pixel devices.

A Shortcuts setup can get close to sending photos in iMessage with one tap.

When researchers swabbed 178 healthcare workers' phones in a Peruvian hospital in 2023, 90.5% turned up some kind of microbial contamination. That number is a clinical-setting data point, not a diagnosis of the phone in your pocket: a hospital ward is a different exposure environment than a coffee shop counter or a train seat. Still, the question of how to clean your phone safely deserves a real answer, and two hospital studies tested the same disinfectant.

A newer iPhone can text emergency services from a trailhead with zero bars, but that capability isn't something you switch on in advance. It becomes available when you're off-grid and a normal call or text to emergency services can't connect, as long as you're outdoors with a clear view of the sky and using an iPhone 14 or later.

Android phones carry a set of safety tools built for exactly this moment, but learning how to use Android Emergency SOS after a car accident really starts with setting it up long before any crash happens. The system can call for help and share a live location without anyone unlocking the phone or dialing a number, triggered by pressing the power button five or more times (Android, earlier this year). As Android Police put it last year, "these tools help only if you set them up beforehand." Even...

Tucked inside CarPlay's Accessibility menu are three tools: Voice Control, Sound Recognition, and a set of display adjustments covering text size, boldness, and color. These count among the hidden Apple CarPlay features that go unused simply because accessibility submenus rarely get opened without a specific reason to check them. None of them is a universal upgrade. Each solves a specific kind of friction for a specific kind of driver, and figuring out which one applies to you is the actual...

TechCrunch's hands-on verdict on the rebuilt Siri AI is blunt: the assistant finally works the way Apple promised, though the review reads more like relief than excitement, closer to a bug fix than a breakthrough (TechCrunch's hands-on review). Scientific American frames the wait differently, noting that Apple has promised, and repeatedly delayed, this more proactive Siri for two years (Scientific American). Whichever framing feels right comes down to something more basic than opinion: can you...

The instinctive fix everyone reaches for is "just use the Roku app." That works, but only for one specific situation, and if you're trying to connect Roku to Wi-Fi without a remote right now, it's probably not the one you're in. Roku's own support documentation is blunt about this: the mobile app cannot detect a Roku that's offline after a reset or during first-time setup.

If you need to know how to clear cache on Roku TV, the fastest method is a restart triggered by a hidden remote sequence: Home × 5, Up × 1, Rewind × 2, Fast Forward × 2. Your screen goes dark for 15 to 30 seconds, then comes back. Done.

This guide covers how to disable AI Mode in Chrome on desktop: the shortcuts that show up in the address bar, the New Tab Page search box, and the right-click context menu on Windows, Mac, and Linux. It doesn't touch Google Search's own AI Mode tab, which lives outside the browser entirely and gets a short, separate note near the end.

"My webcam mic has background noise" sounds like one problem. It rarely is. Treat it instead as a troubleshooting question with several possible answers: is Windows processing the signal too aggressively, is the app running on top of that doing its own processing, is the device itself missing or misconfigured, or, in rarer cases, has something gone wrong with the whole system's audio and the webcam just happens to be where it showed up first? Working through how to fix webcam microphone...

Bluetooth speaker problems rarely have one cause. Microsoft's own support documentation splits them into distinct categories: pairing failures, connection failures, and audio-output failures, each requiring a different fix (Microsoft Support, 3 months ago; Microsoft Support, 3 months ago). Treat all three as the same problem and you'll end up applying the wrong fix for hours.

Turning off Roku's automatic content recognition system took investigators at The Markup 11 to 24 clicks. That click count applies specifically to Roku's ACR setting on Roku TVs, the feature built into Roku's television hardware rather than its streaming sticks (The Markup, 2023). Even after finding it, disabling ACR doesn't answer the bigger question most people actually have: how to stop Roku from tracking what you watch across every app you open. This guide walks through the Roku privacy...

Sony packs most of the useful controls for its headphones and earbuds into a phone app, and if you've ever wanted to flip noise-canceling modes or tweak EQ from a laptop instead, there hasn't been an official way to do it. A trio of open-source projects, including one called Sony Device Center, now claim to bring that control to Windows. The Sony Device Center Windows app is the newest and most talked-about of the three, but "claim" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Nothing reviewed for...

Snap two windows side by side in Windows 11, drag the shared border to resize one, and in many cases the other window resizes too, whether you wanted it to or not. Microsoft currently documents a checkbox for controlling that behavior under Settings > System > Multitasking > Snap windows. Some users nevertheless report that the checkbox is missing on their installations, so this guide covers both the documented setting and the available workarounds.

Samsung says the Galaxy Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra can charge from empty to 65% in 30 minutes. In preliminary testing, the Fold 8 Ultra actually beat that mark, reaching 67% in the same window, according to Android Authority testing three weeks ago. That's a real jump from what the Fold line could do a year ago, and it raises the obvious question for anyone hunting for the best charger for Galaxy Z Fold 8 devices: which one actually gets you there?