Internet connection problems can be frustrating. Rather than mashing F5 and desperately trying to reload your favorite website when you experience a problem, here are some ways you can troubleshoot the problem and identify the cause.
Ensure you check the physical connections before getting too involved with troubleshooting. Someone could have accidentally kicked the router or modem’s power cable or pulled an Ethernet cable out of a socket, causing the problem.
Image Credit: photosteve101 on Flickr
Ping
One of the first things to try when your connection doesn’t seem to be working properly is the ping command. Open a Command Prompt window from your Start menu and run a command like ping google.com or ping howtogeek.com.
This command sends several packets to the address you specify. The web server responds to each packet it receives. In the command below, we can see that everything is working fine – there’s 0% packet loss and the time each packet takes is fairly low.
If you see packet loss (in other words, if the web server didn’t respond to one or more of the packets you sent), this can indicate a network problem. If the web server sometimes takes a much longer amount of time to respond to some of your other packets, this can also indicate a network problem. This problem can be with the website itself (unlikely if the same problem occurs on multiple websites), with your Internet service provider, or on your network (for example, a problem with your router).
Note that some websites never respond to pings. For example, ping microsoft.com will never results in any responses.
Problems With a Specific Website
If you’re experiencing issues accessing websites and ping seems to be working properly, it’s possible that one (or more) websites are experiencing problems on their end.
To check whether a website is working properly, you can use Down For Everyone Or Just For Me, a tool that tries to connect to websites and determine if they’re actually down or not. If this tool says the website is down for everyone, the problem is on the website’s end.
If this tool says the website is down for just you, that could indicate a number of things. It’s possible that there’s a problem between your computer and the path it takes to get to that website’s servers on the network. You can use the traceroute command (for example,tracert google.com) to trace the route packets take to get to the website’s address and see if there are any problems along the way. However, if there are problems, you can’t do much more than wait for them to be fixed.
Modem & Router Issues
If you are experiencing problems with a variety of websites, they may be caused by your modem or router. The modem is the device that communicates with your Internet service provider, while the router shares the connection among all the computers and other networked devices in your household. In some cases, the modem and router may be the same device.
Take a look at the router. If green lights are flashing on it, that’s normal and indicates network traffic. If you see a steady, blinking orange light, that generally indicates the problem. The same applies for the modem – a blinking orange light usually indicates a problem.
If the lights indicate that either devices are experiencing a problem, try unplugging them and plugging them back in. This is just like restarting your computer. You may also want to try this even if the lights are blinking normally – we’ve experienced flaky routers that occasionally needed to be reset, just like Windows computers. Bear in mind that it may take your modem a few minutes to reconnect to your Internet service provider.
If you still experience problems, you may need to perform a factory reset on your router or upgrade its firmware. To test whether the problem is really with your router or not, you can plug your computer’s Ethernet cable directly into your modem. If the connection now works properly, it’s clear that the router is causing you problems.
Image Credit: Bryan Brenneman on Flickr
Issues With One Computer
If you’re only experiencing network problems on one computer on your network, it’s likely that there’s a software problem with the computer. The problem could be caused by a virus or some sort of malware or an issue with a specific browser.
Do an antivirus scan on the computer and try installing a different browser and accessing that website in the other browser. There are lots of other software problems that could be the cause, including a misconfigured firewall.
DNS Server Problems
When you try to access Google.com, your computer contacts its DNS server and asks for Google.com’s IP address. The default DNS servers your network uses are provided by your Internet service provider, and they may sometimes experience problems.
You can try accessing a website at its IP address directly, which bypasses the DNS server. For example, plug this address into your web browser’s address bar to visit Google directly:
If the IP address method works but you still can’t access google.com, it’s a problem with your DNS servers. Rather than wait for your Internet service provider to fix the problem, you can try using a third-party DNS server like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS.
Ultimately, most connection problems you’ll run into are probably someone else’s problem – you can’t necessarily solve them yourself. Often, the only thing you can do is wait for your Internet service provider or a specific website to fix the problem you’re experiencing. (However, restarting a flaky router can solve lots of problems.)
If you are experiencing problems, you can always try calling your Internet service provider on the phone – you’re paying them for this service, after all. They will also be able to tell you whether it’s a problem that other users are also having — or whether it’s a problem on your end.
Unlike most other operating systems, Windows still doesn’t include first-class support for printing to PDFs. However, PDF printing is still fairly simple — you can quickly install a free PDF printer or use the support included in various programs.
We’ll cover ways you can easily print to PDF, whether you’re on a home computer where you can install a PDF printer or you’re using a locked-down computer you can’t install any software on.
Install a PDF Printer
Windows doesn’t include a built-in PDF printer, but it does include one that prints toMicrosoft’s XPS file format. You can install a PDF printer to print to PDF from any application in Windows with a print dialog. The PDF printer will add a new virtual printer to your list of installed printers. When you print any document to the PDF printer, it will create a new PDF file on your computer instead of printing it to a physical document.
You can choose from a variety of free PDF printers available online, but we’ve had good luck with the free CutePDF Writer. Just download it, run the installer, and you’re done. Just be sure to uncheck the terrible Ask Toolbar and other bloatware during installation.
On Windows 8, PDF printers you install will appear both in the classic desktop Print dialog and the Modern printer list.
Use a Program’s Built-in PDF Export
Some applications have added their own PDF-export support because Windows doesn’t have it natively. In many programs, you can print to PDF without installing a PDF printer at all.
- Google Chrome: Click the menu and and click Print. Click the Change button under Destination and select Save as PDF.
- Microsoft Office: Open the menu, select Export, and select Create PDF/XPS Document.
- LibreOffice: Open the File menu and select Export as PDF.
You can generally create a PDF file from the print dialog or with an “Export to PDF” or “Save to PDF” option if the program supports it. To print to PDF from anywhere, install a PDF printer.
Print to XPS and Convert to PDF
Perhaps you’re using a computer that you can’t install any software on, but you want to print to PDF from Internet Explorer or another program without integrated PDF support. If you’re using Windows Vista, 7, or 8, you can print to the Microsoft XPS Document Writer printer to create an XPS file from the document.
You’ll have the document in the form of an XPS file you can take with you. You can convert it to a PDF file later with one of the following methods:
- Use an Online Converter: If the document isn’t particularly important or sensitive, you can use a free web-based converter like XPS2PDF to create a PDF document from your XPS file.
- Print the XPS File to PDF: Bring the XPS file to a computer with a PDF printer installed. Open the XPS file in Microsoft’s XPS Viewer, click File -> Print, and print the XPS file to your virtual PDF printer. This will create a PDF file with the same contents as your XPS file.
Quickly Create PDFs from Websites
If you’re using a computer without a PDF printer and you just want to print a web page to a PDF file you can take with you, you don’t need to mess around with any conversion process. Just use a web-based tool like Web2PDF, plug the web page’s address in, and it will create a PDF file for you. Tools like this one are intended for public web pages, not private ones like online-shopping receipts.
This would all be easier if Windows included a PDF printer, but Microsoft still wants to push their own XPS format for now
It’s not a miracle, but these helpful tips can improve the quality of an image when enlarging from a low-resolution sample. It’s surprisingly simple and quite easy. Fire up Photoshop and check it out for yourself!
At How-To Geek, we’ve written extensively about how it’s impossible to “enhance” images and reclaim detail that is lost or isn’t there to begin with. Are we changing our tune? Nope, there’s nothing magical about these tips, except for the improved results you’ll get when you improve your own low resolution images. Keep reading and give it a shot!
A Better Way to Enlarge Images
Here’s our image at our starting point. This is zoomed to 100%, only a paltry 150 pixels wide.
As we can see, this is painfully low resolution. Let’s improve things somewhat with a basic enlargement.
Navigate to Image > Image Size. Where it says “Resample Image” you can change the type of anti-aliasing used to enlarge and smooth the image. Change it to “Bicubic Smoother (best for enlargement).” By default, Photoshop uses “Bicubic.”
Notice the difference in the Bicubic Smoother version on the left versus the basic “Bicubic” enlargement on the right. Changing the type of anti-aliasing can make a huge difference the edges in your image, helping to keep them smoother, less jaggy. This can make a big difference
Improving Detail in Enlarged Images
Most Photoshop users don’t go beyond RGB or CMYK. Today, we’ll be using a different color mode called Lab Color. Switch any enlarged image (we’re going to be using our image from before) and change it to Lab color by navigating to Image > Mode > Lab Color.
Make sure you have a channels panel open by going to Window > Channels. Then select the “Lightness” channel or click the 
beside the a and b channels as shown.
beside the a and b channels as shown.
With “Lightness” selected, we’ll perform a Smart Sharpen filter by going to Filter > Smart Sharpen.
The settings above worked for our example quite well, but feel free to fiddle around and find your own. You’ll probably want to keep your “Remove” setting to “Gaussian Blur” as shown above.
You can remain in Lab Color or convert back to RGB. Unlike a conversion between RGB and CMYK, RGB converts perfectly to Lab without any noticeable color shift. In either color mode, select your combined channelset by pressing Ctrl + 2.
It’s not perfect, but the comparison of before and after is pretty dramatic. Our updated image (on the right) has a much richer skin texture and doesn’t look like it was enlarged nearly 2000% from an image 150 pixels wide.
But Wait! Wild Typography Appears!
Typography is a different beast altogether. This low resolution sample is set at only 100 pixels wide and has some big, very noticeable problems.
Resize your image to your target size. Here, we’re increasing the size by 10 times and using the “Nearest Neighbor” setting to keep our edges jaggy. Don’t worry, this will all make sense in a moment.
And it looks no different than before! Let’s see what we can do to change that.
Apply a Gaussian Blur by going to Filter > Gaussian Blur and using a setting that blurs the edges without making the text completely unreadable.
Your final type should look something like this.
We’re now going to use a “Threshold” adjustment layer. Click the 
in the Layers Panel to insert one.
in the Layers Panel to insert one.
Is it perfect? No. Is it less blurry and jaggy? Yes, surprisingly so. But any further improvement would have to be done with the brush tool and a lot of patience. This can be a surprisingly helpful trick for anyone that has to work with typography and is often stuck with low resolution files.
While our “enhanced” image cannot ever reclaim the detail of the original high-resolution image, we can, at a cursory glance, say that we’ve improved our image quality, both with the typography and with the photo of the girl. Not satisfied with these tricks? Have some better ones of your own? Sound off in the comments section and let us know what you use when you have to improve a low quality image.
How and Why to Back Up Your Cloud Data
So you’ve got all your data stored on servers somewhere — your emails at Gmail, photos on Facebook, and passwords in LastPass. But what if one of these services failed and lost your data?
Sure, it’s true that your data is safer in the cloud — Google, Microsoft, and other companies have lost less data than average people have when their hard drives crash — but there’s always a risk.
So you’ve got all your data stored on servers somewhere — your emails at Gmail, photos on Facebook, and passwords in LastPass. But what if one of these services failed and lost your data?
Sure, it’s true that your data is safer in the cloud — Google, Microsoft, and other companies have lost less data than average people have when their hard drives crash — but there’s always a risk.
Isn’t My Cloud Data Safe?
Your emails are probably safer in Gmail or Outlook.com than they are on your hard drive. Service providers generally back up your data to multiple locations. This is more than many users do to protect their personal data — many people tend to ignore backups until they lose their precious data.
But you shouldn’t ignore backups entirely just because your data is in the cloud. Having backups of your data is always a good idea, whether that data is stored in the cloud or on your computer.
Having a backup is a good idea for a few reasons:
- Accidents and Bugs with Syncing: You may accidentally delete or overwrite your data, or a bug with a service could result in your data being erased. For example, you could accidentally delete your bookmarks on one of your Chrome browsers. Or an error with Google Chrome’s bookmark-syncing protocol could result in them being deleted. Either way, you would lose all your bookmarks — unless you created a local backup copy of your bookmarks. If you’ve been building up a collection of bookmarks for years, this could be a big problem.
- Service Crashes: A service itself may experience a problem and lose your data. Luckily, this hasn’t been particularly common. The most high-profile case of a cloud service losing all its customers data occurred when Microsoft’s Sidekick servers lost many customers’ contacts, photos, to-do lists, calendar entries, and other data in 2009. Microsoft, who acquired the Sidekick service along with Danger, who went on to make Microsoft’s terrible Kin phones, did not have any backups of this data. Sidekick owners who trusted Danger (and then Microsoft) to store their photos and other personal data realized how dangerous relying solely on a cloud service could be.
- Attacks: If you’re ever unlucky enough to be the target of attacks, your data may be lost. Matt Honan, who lost much of his data when attackers targeted his accounts by exploiting weaknesses in account recovery mechanisms, lost many personal photos and home videos when the Find My Mac service was used to remotely wipe his Mac’s hard drive. His other data was recovered thanks to help from engineers at Google and Twitter, but who knows how helpful they would have been if it wasn’t such a high-profile attack. Without any local backups, he was completely at the mercy of these companies.
- Deletion Due to Inactivity: Some services delete your data after you haven’t logged in in a while. For example, Microsoft’s Hotmail (now Outlook.com) service deletes all your emails if you haven’t logged in in about eight and a half months. If you’ve switched to another service but still have an old Hotmail account with important email, you may lose it all. If you had those important emails backed up locally, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. Yahoo and Gmail appear to have similar policies, although they may not be enforced as often — stories of Hotmail accounts being wiped have been much more common over the years.
- Switching Services: If you would like to switch from one cloud service to another, you may want to create a local backup and import it into the new service first — assuming both services support that. This helps protect you if a service you use ever shuts down — you can just take your data with you.
Your emails are probably safer in Gmail or Outlook.com than they are on your hard drive. Service providers generally back up your data to multiple locations. This is more than many users do to protect their personal data — many people tend to ignore backups until they lose their precious data.
But you shouldn’t ignore backups entirely just because your data is in the cloud. Having backups of your data is always a good idea, whether that data is stored in the cloud or on your computer.
Having a backup is a good idea for a few reasons:
- Accidents and Bugs with Syncing: You may accidentally delete or overwrite your data, or a bug with a service could result in your data being erased. For example, you could accidentally delete your bookmarks on one of your Chrome browsers. Or an error with Google Chrome’s bookmark-syncing protocol could result in them being deleted. Either way, you would lose all your bookmarks — unless you created a local backup copy of your bookmarks. If you’ve been building up a collection of bookmarks for years, this could be a big problem.
- Service Crashes: A service itself may experience a problem and lose your data. Luckily, this hasn’t been particularly common. The most high-profile case of a cloud service losing all its customers data occurred when Microsoft’s Sidekick servers lost many customers’ contacts, photos, to-do lists, calendar entries, and other data in 2009. Microsoft, who acquired the Sidekick service along with Danger, who went on to make Microsoft’s terrible Kin phones, did not have any backups of this data. Sidekick owners who trusted Danger (and then Microsoft) to store their photos and other personal data realized how dangerous relying solely on a cloud service could be.
- Attacks: If you’re ever unlucky enough to be the target of attacks, your data may be lost. Matt Honan, who lost much of his data when attackers targeted his accounts by exploiting weaknesses in account recovery mechanisms, lost many personal photos and home videos when the Find My Mac service was used to remotely wipe his Mac’s hard drive. His other data was recovered thanks to help from engineers at Google and Twitter, but who knows how helpful they would have been if it wasn’t such a high-profile attack. Without any local backups, he was completely at the mercy of these companies.
- Deletion Due to Inactivity: Some services delete your data after you haven’t logged in in a while. For example, Microsoft’s Hotmail (now Outlook.com) service deletes all your emails if you haven’t logged in in about eight and a half months. If you’ve switched to another service but still have an old Hotmail account with important email, you may lose it all. If you had those important emails backed up locally, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. Yahoo and Gmail appear to have similar policies, although they may not be enforced as often — stories of Hotmail accounts being wiped have been much more common over the years.
- Switching Services: If you would like to switch from one cloud service to another, you may want to create a local backup and import it into the new service first — assuming both services support that. This helps protect you if a service you use ever shuts down — you can just take your data with you.
Are you looking for a quick bit of good fun to “impress” your less computer-savvy family and friends with? Then you need Hacker Typer. Hacker Typer lets you produce awesome looking “1337 code” with just a few keystrokes.
When you visit Hacker Typer you can select how your screen will appear and set the typing speed using the options available on the start screen. Click on Hack when you are ready to begin.
Once you have clicked through you get a fresh, clean screen and a blinking cursor to start with. Just begin typing with any combination of keys or hold down a single key such as theSpacebar and watch the hacker code pour forth!
Here is what it looked like in full screen mode on our system. This could be a lot of fun to have displayed on that second monitor!
UPDATE: The link has now been updated to reflect the change in address for the website.
So I'm sitting at my computer one day and you walk up and ask if I have such and such album on my computer. I say, no I don't have it, BUT LET ME HACK INTO SOMEONES COMPUTER AND GET IT BECAUSE I LIKE PRETENDING THAT I LIVE IN A MID-90s CYBERPUNK MOVIE.
I then spin around in my chair real dramatic-like, and start typing furiously at 500 WPM as random strings of text start flying all over the screen. After that, I copy the album onto a thumb drive and give it to you, and you walk away all impressed with my h4ck3r sk1llz.
What really happened is that I just loaded up Hacker Typer and just started typing gibberish. It translated that into Linux terminal code (or something) making it look like I have a masters in computer science. Then I just copied that album from my music folder because I bought it onAmazon a month earlier. But I wanted to look kewl, ya know? [Hacker Typer viaGeekosystem]
