How to back up Local Group Policy Editor Settings on Windows

Why You Should Back Up the Local Group Policy Editor Settings

The Local Group Policy Editor is a handy Windows utility that allows you to configure group policy settings on your computer. It’s mainly aimed at network administrators, but it can also be used by individuals to manage how their machine performs. You can use the Local Group Policy Editor to change password requirements, configure startup programs, define which applications and settings a user can change, and more. Because the Local Group Policy Editor manages a wide range of necessary settings, it’s important to back it up.

Doing so gives you the freedom to try out different apps, unstable Windows releases, and experimental features without worrying about losing your settings. Even if something goes wrong, you can quickly restore the Local Group Policy Editor settings to bring your computer back to a known good state. It also means that you can transfer the settings to another machine, if you have got a new computer or want to deploy the same configuration across multiple systems.

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How to download and install Steam on Linux

For those who don’t know what Steam is, it’s an online platform by Valve where you can download and play thousands of games, and also discuss them with the community. Steam is also great for Linux users because you can use Proton to play Windows games on Linux. The Proton compatibility layer is changing the gaming landscape on Linux, and you can take advantage of it by installing Steam on your system.

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Add a User to a Group (or Second Group) on Linux

To add a user to a group, open the Terminal, then type “sudo usermod -a -G examplegroup exampleusername” into the window. Replace “examplegroup” and “exampleusername” with the group and username you want to modify.

Changing the group a user is associated to is a fairly easy task, but not everybody knows the commands, especially to add a user to a secondary group. We’ll walk through all the scenarios for you. User accounts can be assigned to one or more groups on Linux. You can configure file permissions and other privileges by group. For example, on Ubuntu, only users in the sudo group can use the sudo command to gain elevated permissions.

If you’re using a new Linux laptop, you might have some type of GUI interface to configure these settings (depending on the distribution that you’re running, at least) but realistically it’s almost always easier to just drop down to the terminal and type out a few commands, so that’s what we’re showing you today.

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How to determine the current User Account in Linux

Linux distributions normally display the username of the current user in the Terminal as (Username)@ComputerName. If your Linux distribution doesn’t, run “who” or “whoami” in the Terminal to get the username instead. You can use the “w” command to get even more detailed information.

If Linux means anything, it means choice. You can achieve even a simple task like identifying the current user in many ways. This tutorial will show you how to use some of the quickest and easiest methods.

Why would you need to find the identity of the current user? In many cases the owner of the computer is the only user and, without getting too existential, they probably know themselves. Perhaps, but it is also common for people to create additional user accounts to allow family members to have access to the computer. And, if you’re connected to a remote shell on a server somewhere, you may need a quick reminder of the username you’re logged in with. If you see a logged in session with no one in attendance, how do you identify the current user from the command line?

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How to turn off Google Chrome’s targeted advertisements

The Privacy Sandbox has been in development for years, first using a technology called Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC for short), which was panned by privacy groups and other browser vendors. The current version is made of several different technologies, including Shared Storage (a way to store data across sites), Fenced Frames, and the Private Aggregation API for site analytics.

The most important components are the Topics API and Protected Audience API, which tells Chrome to generate a list of topics you are interested in from your browsing history, and then gives that list to the sites you visit for use in targeting ads. Even though that’s technically more privacy-preserving than third-party cookies, because the scope of the data is more limited, it’s still pretty creepy!

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How to Format a USB Drive to FAT32 on Windows 11 or Windows 10

Formatting your USB flash drive using the FAT32 file system is as easy as selecting a few options or running a command on your Windows 11 or Windows 10 PC. We’ll show you both ways to accomplish the task, so your drive is formatted in your preferred format.

! Warning: Formatting your drive with any file system erases all the data stored on the drive. Make sure you’ve backed up your important files before proceeding to reformatting your drive.

Should You Format Your USB Flash Drive With FAT32?

There are many reasons to format your drive in FAT32 format. The most common one is that your drive will work with many more devices than if it was formatted in another file format, say NTFS. Nearly all the devices support FAT32. A good example here is that you can add data to your drive from your Mac machine if your drive was formatted in FAT32. You can’t do that with an NTFS-formatted drive.

While there are pros to using the FAT32 format, a few cons exist as well. You can’t store an individual file larger than 4 GB on a FAT32-formatted drive. Also, the built-in graphical formatting options on Windows only let you format your drives in FAT32 if they’re 32 GB or less in storage capacity. (However, there’s a command-line method and a third-party app to format drives larger than 32 GB in FAT32 format.)

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