How to find your Wi-Fi password in Windows 8.1

How to find your Wi-Fi password in Windows 8.1

Good news! Reverse password lookups are totally possible.

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

This happens to me often, especially when I'm visiting relatives' houses: My computer knows the Wi-Fi password from when I last connected to the network -- two years ago -- but I've completely forgotten it, though my mother is about 65 percent sure she wrote it down on a Post-it note seven months ago.

A forgotten Wi-Fi password isn't a problem for me and my omniscient laptop, but it is a problem for, say, my brother, who needs the password if he wants to jump on the network with his Japanese iPhone. My mom is hunting for the Post-it, but prospects are lookin' bleak.

Luckily, there's an easy way to reverse-lookup your Wi-Fi password on a computer that already technically knows it. Here's how to find saved network passwords in Windows 8.1:

Step 1: Make sure you're connected to your Wi-Fi network. If you're not connected, open the Charms bar by swiping in from the right side of the screen, or by moving your mouse into the upper right corner of the screen, and click Settings. Tap or click the network icon, find your network and click Connect.

Your PC should connect to your Wi-Fi network automatically, with the saved (but forgotten) password.

Step 2: From the desktop, open the Charms bar, click Settings and then open the Control Panel.

Step 3: Under Network and Internet, click View network status and tasks.

Step 4: Next to the word Connections, you should see a Wi-Fi icon and the name of your Wi-Fi network. Click your Wi-Fi network and a Wi-Fi Status window will pop up. Click Wireless Properties.

Step 5: A new window will pop up. Tap or click the Security tab and you will see your Network security key displayed as a series of black dots. Check the box next to Show characters and voila -- there's your Wi-Fi password!

Sarah Jacobsson Purewal/CNET

Now you know your network password. Write it down -- or don't; you can always just look it up again.

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Five ways to lower your smartphone data consumption

Five ways to lower your smartphone data consumption

Which apps and services are the worst offenders when it comes to chewing through your data plan?

Data usage on a smartphone.James Martin/CNET

In the early days of cell phones, it was all about the minutes -- voice minutes, that is, because people used their phones to call each other. (Weird, right?) You had to limit your conversations or suffer the horrors of overage charges.

Today, it's all about the data. Even if your plan is "unlimited," there's almost always an asterisk. After you burn through the first couple gigabytes, your high-speed connection throttles back to something closer to dial-up. (Talk about horrors!) And if you're with a pay-as-you-go service like Ting, unchecked data consumption could leave you in a higher-priced tier when the bill comes due.

Whatever your plan, it makes sense to conserve data. And what's the easiest way to do that? Connect to Wi-Fi wherever and whenever possible. Sure, it takes a few extra taps to connect to a network in, say, a coffee shop or airport lounge, and you make feel like it's not worth the hassle if you've got five 4G bars showing.

Depending on what you're planning to do with your phone, however, it may absolutely be worth it. Here are five of the biggest data hogs you want to avoid (or at least reduce) when there's no Wi-Fi available:

1. YouTube uploads

Just can't wait to share that epic video of your friend wiping out on his skateboard? Or your totally legit Bigfoot sighting? Upload at your own risk: Depending on settings and various other factors, each minute of HD video you shot can be as large as 200MB.

So if you upload just five 1-minute videos per month, that would eat a full gigabyte of your data allotment. Wait till there's Wi-Fi!

2. Video chats

Stop the Skyping! And the FaceTiming. And all the other video calling -- if you want to save data. Though the rate of consumption varies depending on the app you use and resolution of your chat, a Jetsons-style phone call can cost you up to 3MB per minute.

3. Online gaming

Don't worry, Trivia Crack addicts, turn-based games like this and Words With Friends aren't heavy data-users. However, real-time action games like Asphalt 8 and Modern Combat 5: Blackout are a different story, with some estimates pegging their data use at 1MB per minute of play.

4. Music streaming

It's so easy (and awesome) to plug into Pandora or Spotify when you're, say, riding the train home from work, you might not realize what it's doing to your data plan.

What it's doing is killing your cap. If a music service streams at a 320Kbps bit rate, that's 2.4MB of dataper minute, or a whopping 115MB per hour. Even if you tune in only a couple times per week, it's easy to rack up big data numbers. Fortunately, a lot of mobile apps let you downshift to a lower bit rate, a very advisable move if you must listen on the go.

Pandora, it's worth noting, never streams at more than 64Kbps on mobile devices, even if you're a Pandora One subscriber.

One other option: if your music service allows it (and most do nowadays), download your tunes (via Wi-Fi, of course) for offline listening.

5. Video streaming

If music streaming is bad, video trumps it by an order of magnitude. Awesome though it may be to binge on episodes of "Black Mirror" or trending YouTube vids when you're on the treadmill at the gym, streaming can swallow as much as 50MB per minute.

That's according to Netflix, which estimates 3GB per hour for HD video. Of course, those numbers can and will vary across different services (Hulu, Google Play, iTunes, YouTube, etc.), but there's no question that video does the most damage to your data plan.

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Turn your iOS burst photos into videos, animated GIFs

Turn your iOS burst photos into videos, animated GIFs

If you find yourself taking a lot of burst photos on your iOS device, Burstio is an app you're sure to find useful.

Burstio app iconJason Cipriani/CNET

My favorite kind of apps aren't entire platforms or services. Instead, they're much simpler apps that fill a hole in the feature set of an operating system. For example, Apple created a Burst Mode in its Camera app that takes photos in quick succession as long as you hold in the shutter button.

Once your burst is captured, Apple uses software to pick what it feels is the best shot out of the group and displays it for easy sharing. It's a feature I use often, but it's also one I've always felt was incomplete.

For me, it only made sense for Apple to provide a quick mechanism to turn a series of burst photos into an animated GIF, or a silent video (audio isn't captured when you're taking photos, naturally).

That's where Burstio comes in. This small app scans your Camera Roll for burst photo sets, and then allows you to export them as a video or GIF with just a few taps.

Burstio for iOS.Screenshot by Jason Cipriani/CNET

After installing the app, you only need to grant it permission to access your Photos. Once you've done that, you'll be presented with a list of the burst sets stored on your device. Tap on one, preview and trim the clip, then export it as an HD video or an animated GIF.

Additionally, you can adjust the playback speed or opt to have it replay on a loop.

Here's a GIF I created from a wedding I recently attended:

Who doesn't want to dance with a few dozen glowsticks?Jason Cipriani/CNET

Due to lighting and movement, the photos turned out pretty poor. I had planned on exporting all of the photos in the particular set and creating a GIF, but hadn't gotten around to it yet.

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