Heating and cooling are the biggest energy costs in most American homes, which makes a smart thermostat one of the few gadgets that can pay for itself. Two models dominate the premium end: Google’s Nest Learning Thermostat, redesigned for its fourth generation, and the ecobee Smart Thermostat Premium. Both are ENERGY STAR certified, both...
A space heater lets you heat the room you are actually in instead of the whole house, which is why so many people turn to one when the weather turns cold. Almost every plug-in model tops out at 1,500 watts, so the differences between them are not about raw power. They are about how evenly and quietly the heat is delivered, how well the thermostat...
Excel can do almost anything, but a surprising number of everyday jobs still take a formula you have to look up, a macro you have to write or ten minutes of copying and pasting: combining a folder of workbooks into one sheet, splitting a list into separate tabs by region, merging cells without losing their contents, finding duplicates across two...
AI upscalers have turned a problem every photographer has — the shot that is slightly soft, noisy or too small to print — into something you can fix in a few seconds. The catch is that the best-known option, Topaz Gigapixel, is now subscription-only at $149 a year. Aiarty Image Enhancer is the main alternative that still sells a...
The standard SEO toolkits have become expensive. Ahrefs starts at $129 a month and Semrush’s SEO plan at $139 a month, and both cap how many keywords, projects and crawls you get. SEO PowerSuite takes a different approach: four desktop apps — a rank tracker, a site auditor, a backlink checker and a link-building tool — that run...
When you uninstall a program in Windows, it runs that program’s own uninstaller, and many of them leave things behind: folders in Program Files and AppData, registry entries, scheduled tasks, services and browser extensions. Over time those leftovers add up. Revo Uninstaller and IObit Uninstaller are the two most popular tools for removing...
Driver Easy and IObit Driver Booster are the two best-known driver updaters for Windows. Both scan your PC for missing and outdated drivers, download the right versions from their own databases and install them with one click, with backups in case something goes wrong. Both had major releases in September 2026: Driver Booster 14 added a tool that...
Windows PCs slow down for a handful of predictable reasons: programs that launch at startup and stay running, gigabytes of temporary files, apps that were uninstalled but left their files and services behind, out-of-date drivers and a drive that is nearly full. Windows has built-in tools for some of this, but they are scattered across Settings...
The worst part of a backyard fire has always been the smoke. It follows you around the circle, gets into your clothes and hair, and sends the neighbors inside to close their windows. Smokeless fire pits fix most of that with a simple idea: a double wall that draws in air at the bottom, heats it as it rises, and releases it through holes near the...
A home oven tops out at around 500°F. A Neapolitan pizzeria oven runs at 800°F or more, and that gap is why homemade pizza so rarely tastes like the real thing: at 500°F the crust dries out before it chars, and the cheese overcooks while the base is still pale. Outdoor gas and wood-fired ovens solved this years ago, but they need a garden, a...
