Hello and welcome to the Ask Lifehacker podcast. It is August 15th, 2013, and today we're talking about the raging battle between Microsoft Office and Libre Office, encrypted email, and ditching photo management software. We're also answering your questions about making an awesome podcast, perhaps like this one, getting your relatives to stop using your Wi-Fi all the time,

the best laptop for college, and password managers.

As always, we'll be going through our favorite tips and downloads of the week, so let's get started.

So let's get started. Hello, everybody. Welcome. It is August 15th. You might have known that from the top of the podcast, but I figured why not continue the tradition from last week and be repetitive. So, hi, I'm Adam Dachis. Witson is in New York this week doing business-y things, so he decided that he was too important to be here.

But fortunately, we have both Alan Henry.

Hi, Alan.

Hey, what's going on?

And Thorin Klosowski.

Outy.

To Alan, to answer your question, I'm doing a podcast.

So I'm glad you both could be here today, so I'm not talking to myself. We've got a bit of news, we've got some stories, we got the usual stuff.

Might as well just get right into it.

For those of you who are looking forward to Windows 8.1, and I'm sure that's everyone who is using Windows 8, however many of you there are,

it is going to do a couple of things like let you go right to the desktop.

I think that's probably the biggest thing, but as Witson has mentioned repeatedly in the past,

it is not something that you can't lifehack your way around.

But if you are looking forward to it and you want it to just happen naturally through Microsoft's

good graces, you can get that update on October 17th.

Google added something a little bit more interesting though, Thorin.

Yeah, it added some personalized question answers.

Man, I worded that really strangely.

Basically, you can ask Google questions

...