(Credit: Photo by Nicole Cozma/CNET)

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Since I started writing content for the How To blog, screenshots have become a staple of my work. Usually their purpose is to show the reader how to perform an action in a more precise way than words can express.

As you may imagine, I have tried a lot of different ways to take and save screenshots. The most basic method, PrtScr (Print Screen), still requires pasting the copied image into an editor and then saving it. While this is great because it is built-in, it makes the process more complex than necessary. Even though none of the screenshot utilities I've used are perfect, I'd say this one at least gets credit for uploading somewhere useful. Here's how to get started with CloudShot, a screenshot utility for Dropbox:

Note: You will need to have the desktop version of... [Read more]

At the end of a sweltering wedding season, many of us may be familiar with that drunken guest who falls asleep at dinner and is startled awake later, exclaiming "What's going on? Where am I? ... Where are the cookies?"

Those hazy, existential queries of the inappropriately inebriated aren't much different than the plaintive cries of modern PC users. Amid a shifting landscape of services, processes, modules, add-ons, plug-ins, drivers, BHOs, and DLLs--new Windows and Mac users trying to learn what the operating system is actually doing as their boxes suddenly whir can often feel overwhelmed. Here are a handful of free diagnostic utilities that provide some answers to the existential PC questions of Who? What? Where? and Why?

"What's going on?"

What's My Computer Doing for Windows is a fairly recent add to the Download.com catalog--its no-nonsense approach and interface earn points, but some of the additional functionality stumbles. The standalone app essentially shows users in real-time what programs are actively hitting the CPU and disk. Since the processes come and go quickly, you'll probably need to "freeze" the results, then select a program to see the available detailed information.

Links to online security scans seem like a nice touch, but the conc... [Read more]