how-to

Most people generally consider  the iPad's lack of a physical keyboard a disadvantage. However, if you do a little digging, you will find that Apple includes a few useful features in the iPad's onscreen keyboard  that physical keyboards can't match.

You can easily uncover some of the tricks to extend the keyboard's capabilities by peeking at the iPad's general settings and opening the keyboard options.

However, some of the other tricks are truly hidden. If you've never held down a vowel for an accent character or successfully found the symbol for the … Read more

In this video, CNET editor Brian Tong shows you how to avoid awkward text-message situations on the iPhone and Android platforms.

One big complaint about the iPad is its lack of support for Adobe Flash. This means many Web sites, especially video and gaming pages, aren't accessible in the Web browser.One way around that is using a VNC app. VNC stands for virtual network computing. It lets you show and control one computer from another.With this app, you can use a computer that does support Flash to view the content in a VNC app on the iPad.For my example I'm using Desktop Connect. It currently costs $12 in the iTunes App Store. Though there are cheaper … Read more

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

In this video, CNET editor Donald Bell gives tips on how to tweak your iPad by rearranging apps, changing the background image, customizing the picture frame mode, and making Safari bookmarks more useful.

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