Insider tips, how-to, best security practices, and more

Microsoft wants to strong-arm us into abandoning IE 6 and embracing its latest browsers. Starting Jan. 17, Microsoft began pushing out IE 8 and IE 9 to all customers through Windows Update.

If you’ve ever struggled with your PC’s BIOS — or been knee-capped by a rootkit that assailed the BIOS — you undoubtedly wondered why this archaic part of every PC wasn’t scrapped long ago. Well, be of good cheer: Windows 8 will finally pull the PC industry out of the BIOS generation and into a far more capable — and controversial — alternative, the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

Some free and low-cost apps make your Android phone and your Windows PC work together as a team.

Use these tools to optimize your home or office Wi-Fi setup, remotely control your PC from your phone (or your phone from your PC), share and transfer files in either direction, create and edit full-blown Microsoft Office documents on your phone, and much more!

Microsoft’s newly released beta version of Windows Defender Offline, a rootkit-sniffing and Windows-rehabilitation tool, should be the latest addition to your bag of Windows-repair tricks. WDO should be able to catch a wide variety of nasties that evade detection by more traditional antivirus methods.

When you need a quick way to share files between two Windows PCs that aren’t normally connected, an ad hoc wireless network is the way to go.

Everything you need is already built into Windows 7, Vista, and XP. Here’s how to set up an ad hoc network on wireless PCs.

A YouTube video by Trevor Eckhart documents a litany of privacy-busting transgressions made by Carrier IQ, a software program factory-installed on mobile phones.

Almost every news outlet in the U.S. seems to have run the story about Carrier IQ as if 1984 had finally arrived, with Big Brother (in large, corporate form) working the phones — our smartphones in this case. But is that view accurate?