Melissa Holt

Before you hand your Mac to someone or do anything else that would involve others seeing your screen, it might be wise to temporarily disable your Notification Center alerts and banners. You know, so, ahem, those people won't, um, see anything they (cough) shouldn't. Anyway, here's how you do it, not that we're suggesting you've got stuff to hide or anything.

Depending on how your iOS device is set up, you may see a banner notification come down from the top of your screen every time you get an email, a text message, or a Twitter mention. This can be frustrating if you happen to be doing something that gets covered up under those notifications, so here's how you tell them to scram, pronto.

If you've ever used System Preferences' Installed Software list to troubleshoot installation problems, you may be disturbed to find out that it's gone in Mountain Lion. OK, not gone. Moved. But moved to an extremely out-of-the-way location. And while that handy list isn't bothering anyone where it's living now, it's sure not going to help if no one knows where it is, either. Oh, Apple. You and your changes.

Apple's decision to replace Google Maps with their own iOS 6 app didn't sit well with a lot of people. Our crack team of investigative reporters suggests that it may be because of Maps' inability to actually get you anywhere. Awfully perceptive! In any case, here's a tip on using Quick Route, a neat new feature that may redeem the app for you just a little bit.

In OS X, there's a very easy way to strip the text you're copying and pasting of any fancy formatting it has. It's especially useful in Mail, where an additional command can also add quote formatting to what you're pasting. Once you learn how to use these simple tricks, manipulating text'll get a whole lot faster, we promise.

Did you forget your password? Even worse—did you forget the password for your Mac's sole administrator account? We've got help for you in this tip. While it's fairly easy to reset a lost password, there are plenty of things to know before you attempt to do so. Mac thieves and those will malevolent intent, look away from this article!

Sometimes printers just won't behave. Sometimes, however, it's your Mac that's the problem, so we can't always blame the poor printer. In this tip, Melissa Holt will cover a troubleshooting step for you to try if your Mac isn't playing nice with other devices. Feel free to kick your printer just on principle, though.

Before iOS 6, setting an alarm with music rather than a rinky-dink ringtone required a third-party app. We're grateful that Apple has finally bestowed this ability upon us, and we're gonna tell you how to use it. Hey, just because we're grumbling about how long it took doesn't mean you guys should suffer.

In recent versions of OS X, we've had to get accustomed to the resume feature, which reopens existing windows when we relaunch certain programs. You can turn this off completely, of course, but how do you insist just once that a program discard any windows it has when you launch it? Well, here's how! We're so excited, we're using exclamation points!

In this tip, Melissa Holt will go over a bunch of ways to force-quit stubborn, locked-up applications, including one special keyboard shortcut that'll allow you to force-quit your frontmost program. Almost instantly. Without having to confirm the action. Scary, right? But it's a useful kind of scary.