I have a Trenta-sized amount of love of the Mac app Amphetamine, because it’s a great way to keep your MacBook from sleeping (or kicking on the screen saver) for any particular reason. And I’m ashamed to admit that it’s taken me a year, if not years, to realise that I haven’t installed a similar kind of app on my Windows desktop and laptop.

There are so many Windows apps out there, that picking a list of the very best, most must-install software for your desktop or laptop feels daunting. We've pored over pages of recommendations, countless forum posts, and lots of comments to come up with this year's Lifehacker Pack for Windows, a list of software champions across four categories: productivity, internet/communications, music/photos/video and utilities.

A team of researchers at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital has published a new report in Pediatrics that tallies the number of deaths and injuries due to window-shade cords over a 26-year period.

The results are alarming: In those years, 271 children, or about one child per month, died from strangulation by window cords. This number likely underestimates the true danger, says Dr. Gary Smith, an emergency-room physician and one of the study's co-authors, as the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System database doesn't record injuries and deaths to children who are treated in a non-emergency room setting or who didn't receive medical care at all.

Windows / Mac: I confess, I’m not as well-versed in Markdown as I should be, but the awesome, free note-taking app Notable makes me want to learn its intricacies. The app, available for both Windows and Mac, is a full-fledged note-taking experience that’s leagues better than any default apps you’ll ever find on your system.

You just have to learn Markdown to make the most of it, but that sounds a lot worse than it actually is.

Windows 10 users may soon notice their hard drive storage organised a bit differently.

The few times I’ve wanted to listen to the radio while I work — because I occasionally get nostalgic for commuting—I’ve found that most radio stations’ websites are terrible. It’s like they’re trying to be this weird mix of a news service, a Tumblr blog, and a grab-bag of complicated web tools for playing music and videos. Bleh.

There’s no shortage of browser extensions you can use to stay productive by blocking distracting websites throughout the day. (Sorry Reddit, YouTube, and Facebook.) But are they really that effective at keeping you from doing the work you need to get done? If you don’t have much self-control, you can disable or uninstall the extensions, or switch to another browser to thwart your good intentions.

To celebrate the fact that it has been more than 20 years since the launch of Anno 1602—the very first game in the celebrated “Anno” strategy series—publisher Ubisoft is giving away the classic game for free.

We cover a lot of apps at Lifehacker, and always feels like we’re behind—that’s how much new stuff arrives (or gets updated) on a weekly basis.

App bundles are a great way to save a not-so-insignificant amount of money on fistfuls of useful apps and games at once. The concept is easy to understand: A developer or a third-party storefront packs a bunch of interesting software into a digital box and sells it at a big discount, costing you much less than you’d pay to buy each app individually.

Sometimes, you play a flat rate to get a number of apps; other times, you can name your own price and what you pay helps determine how many apps you get (or which ones).

Another day, another tech company being disingenuous about its privacy practices. This time it’s Microsoft, after it was discovered that Windows 10 continues to track users’ activity even after they’ve disabled the activity-tracking option in their Windows 10 settings.

Password-recovery questions have been a part of Windows 10 for more than a year now, but you’ll never know they exist if you sign into your operating system using a Microsoft account. Use a local account when you’re first installing Windows, however, and you’ll be prompted to create three security questions that you can use to reset your password and log into your account—should you ever forget your credentials.

There's certainly a market out there for a lightweight version of Windows 10; long have the masses complained about the increasingly bloated size of the OS over the years. And, while a "Lite" SKU has recently been spotted in the wild, it's not the skim-flavoured thing we'd like it to be. Rather, it's aimed at Chromebooks, going from reports.

If you have a laptop with switchable graphics, odds are you're familiar with the option to force which GPU — Intel or NVIDIA / AMD — your PC should use when running a particular program. However, Windows 10 has introduced another per-app feature that lets you pick which performance profile should be used, handy is you want every drop of speed from your hardware.

At this point, Microsoft should probably call it a day on Windows 10's troubled 1809 update. Last week, the company again had to block the patch for some users. There's a tiny ray of sunlight for Microsoft however, with the blame falling — at least partly & on Intel's shoulders.

The Windows 10 1809 update has been a bit of a disaster, with Microsoft force to halt the rollout after a spate of horror stories about user files being deleted. It got us to thinking about the company's previous big OS fail - the endlessly maligned Windows Vista.

Even now, more than a decade after the operating system was discontinued, Vista remains a running punchline. So what went wrong? In a recent blog post, ex-Microsoft VP Ben Fathi finally revealed some answers.

If you don’t have a dual-monitor setup or an ultra-wide display, your options for multitasking on your PC are limited. It’s going to be trickier to put on a YouTube video while you work, since anything you’re doing in your primary window — Excel, let’s say — is going to sit on top of what you’re trying to watch. And running the two windows side by side isn’t going to look very good, either.

Over the last month, Microsoft's done an amazing job of convincing people to never install Windows again, after a data-deleting Windows 10 update made it through QA. Now, relenting to pressure from enterprise users, Microsoft has begun work on a "status dashboard" for updates to prevent IT admins from being caught flat-footed in the future.

Computer security doesn't really have to be hard. Some of the smallest, simplest measures can be the most effective in keeping your devices secure — they won't take long, they're easy to do, and you don't really have any excuse for not doing them.