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Sure, Windows 10 comes with its own search feature—the Cortana search that you access by poking the Windows button on your keyboard and typing in an app, file name, or anything else you feel like finding on your system or learning more about. More importantly, it makes it easy to quickly search the web by tapping just a few keys on your keyboard—whether you want a simple Google search or would rather use your own customized prefixes to load your query in a different search engine.

Wox also supports third-party plugins, so you can do everything from find out your current IP address, to searching YouTube and Twitch streams, to controlling your Spotify playlist. Easy as that. If you have a fancier Windows tablet, you can even write out or draw your notes with a stylus or finger. As Lifehacker alum Patrick Allan wrote in :. Think of any tedious typing you do during the day—addresses, canned email responses, bits of code, or anything else—and imagine being able to type it all with just a few keystrokes.

PhraseExpress is [ For a new, no-frills, open-source alternative, you can also give Beeftext a try. A number of other text expansion fans also swear by Breevy , which you can also use to launch applications via tiny text shortcuts. The age-old battle continues. Todoist is one of our top choices for task management, and its core functionality is completely free for you to use. You now, officially, have no reason to put off your tasks any longer.

Microsoft To-Do —built by the team that developed Wunderlist —is worth keeping your eye on. You can track tasks, drop in reminders, and color-code your various task lists. We still prefer Todoist for now, since it works on even more devices and browsers than Microsoft To-Do, but the latter might eventually eclipse the former If you need an offline and free solution, consider the open-source office suite LibreOffice.

For the basics, LibreOffice is a great alternative. Mozilla dropped some formidable enhancements into Firefox with the release of Firefox Quantum in November of , and the two browsers are closer in performance and usability than ever before. Which UI do you enjoy? Which browser has the extensions you use most or are most familiar with. Which feels like less of a performance hog when you have 30 tabs open at once?

Not really. Opera is also a great alternative to both Chrome and Firefox. Nowadays, you probably just send texts, blast Facebook messages, or use one of the numerous other chat services that have both mobile and desktop applications—WhatsApp, Slack, Google Hangouts, et cetera.

For a little more conversational firepower, check out Franz , which lets you chat on Messenger as well as a variety of other services all from one handy window. As we wrote in the Lifehacker Mac Pack , there are plenty of services you can use to have video chats with your friends and colleagues: WhatsApp , Google Hangouts , Houseparty , and even Facebook Messenger itself. Your smartphone undoubtedly has a video-chat service built in as well.

So, why Skype? Microsoft recently updated the app to make it more user-friendly and pack it full of even more useful features. As a single, standalone app, Skype can do it all: file-sharing, one-on-one and group video chats, text and instant messaging, screen-sharing, translation, and voice messages. The email app eM Client looks a lot simpler, but packs plenty of features into its free offering. Mailbird is a great alternative.

Instead, consider the free Adobe Bridge CC app. Social Wallpapering started ages ago with a Digg-like approach to create a user-curated collection of wallpapers, organized by quality based on user votes. The Social Wallpapering community may not be big enough to really get the wallpapers organized that way, but the collection of available images is huge and updated with new submissions fairly regularly. The sort-by-category function is a little wonky, but you can also upload your own images or create an account to save your favorites.

DeviantArt is a huge community of artists and fans, and among the many things you can find on the site is a huge collection of wallpapers. It features everything from photos and illustrations to abstract digital art—even fantasy or fanart of your favorite movie, video game, or comic franchise. One of our favorite underrated desktop wallpaper sites , Desktop Nexus has a community of over a million users who have collectively uploaded and voted on nearly 1.

Everything at Desktop Nexus is neatly organized by category, and if you select one category, a wealth of subcategories opens up underneath it and you can view them all here.

FYI: you have to be a member for at least a month or upload 25 of your own wallpapers in order to vote on others. You can sort by featured, popular, or latest, browse based on category, or search for something specific. When you go to download, you can choose your specific mobile device, your computer screen resolution, or even a social media platform like a Facebook cover photo. The community is massive, the database is large, and once you have a free account, you can browse by tag or popularity the Toplist option , filter for SFW images or not , choose specific resolutions, or roll the dice with the Random function and see what you come up with.

Another old and well-loved standard in the wallpaper community, IntefaceLift has long been a premier source of beautiful wallpapers of natural scenes, photos-turned-wallpapers, and more. InterfaceLift will automatically detect your screen resolution and show you wallpapers accordingly—you can also sort by resolution or device. All of the wallpapers at Simple Desktops are fairly minimal and include patterns, text snippets, or iconographic images that look great and say a lot without saying much at all.

Simple Desktops has options for mobile devices via Android and iOS-specific apps. Finally, all of their images are sourced, so you can learn a little bit about the artist who made them too.