Top 10 Lifehacker Posts of All Time

Lifehacker launched exactly ten years ago today (happy birthday to us)! In light of the occasion, let's take a look back at some of the most popular posts we've shared with you this last decade.

This list is, more or less, our top 10 best performing posts by unique visits as determined by Google Analytics (there are many different measurements we could have used, but we went with this one). We took a few editorial liberties when putting it together, since some posts that had the most traffic are no longer relevant, or needed to be replaced with updated versions. In any case, we hope you enjoy this look back and thanks for reading us—whether you've been with us from the first post or just discovered us last week. Let's all go have some cake.

10. How Long to Nap for the Biggest Brain Benefits

This post from 2013 is both a health and a productivity tip: The amount of time you spend napping will have different effects on your energy and brain power. Posts about sleep in general usually do pretty well in these parts, such as the science of the perfect nap and how to reboot your sleep cycle, perhaps for obvious reasons. Sleep is one of the three pillars of health (along with nutrition and exercise) and most of us can't get enough of it.

9. How to Plant Ideas in Someone's Mind

Good ol' Evil Week, where we explore the dark side so we know how to beat it. If you've ever want to manipulate someone so you can get what you want—or detect when someone's subtly manipulating you—this post is a must-read. It covers popular persuasive strategies, cleverly planting "clues" during your conversations for what you want, and more. Of course, there are more ethical ways to go about this as well.

8. Hack Attack: Burn Almost Any Video File to a Playable DVD

Although this post is from eight years ago, the technique still shockingly works. You'll need the open source, free Windows utility DVD Flick and these step-by-step instructions to create playable DVDs.

7. How to Get a Complete Workout with Nothing But Your Body

Who needs a gym when you can get a full-body workout with no equipment at all? These exercises—covering cardio, upper body, core, and lower body—can be done practically anywhere. (So they're great when you want to keep in shape while traveling or you don't have the room or budget for an expensive home gym.) We've also posted our own well-rounded Lifehacker Workout if you want more workout ideas or want to get over inevitable fitness plateaus.

6. Top 10 Obscure Google Search Tricks

Google search is packed with so many shortcuts and tools that few people probably know all of them. We took a look at the top 10 hidden search tricks back in 2008, then followed up more recently with 20 Google shortcuts and 10 more after that. That's a lot of shortcuts! And they're pretty handy.

5. Geek to Live: How to Format Your Hard Drive and Install Windows XP from Scratch

Sometimes it's best to just start all over again from a blank slate. Lifehacker founder Gina Trapani wrote this XP guide back in 2006, and judging from its popularity, it's classic how-to guides like this one that help geeks and non-geeks alike the most. Although we're long past Windows XP, the basic steps are actually still pretty similar. But if you want something a bit more up-to-date, check out this guide to formatting your hard drive and this one for learning how to do a clean install of Windows (while keeping your files, settings, and tweaks intact).

4. The Always Up-to-Date Guide to Building a Hackintosh

Ah, the hackintosh. For some, just mention of the word sparks joy. Over the years, we've posted countless guides to installing Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware, and most of them made it into our top posts of all time. Of course, almost all of them are out of date now, so bookmark this one for the most relevant, continuously updated instructions. Building a hackintosh is still as great a project as it ever was.

3. Five Best DVD Ripping Tools

Lifehacker readers' five favorite DVD ripping utilities from 2012 are still awesome at what they do: Quickly and easily ripping DVDs and Blu-ray discs to files so you can watch them anywhere. You'll find options for all OSes here, several of them free.

2. How to Supercharge Your Router with DD-WRT

This is the updated version of our second most popular post of all time: Turn Your $60 Router into a $600 Router. DD-WRT makes it possible to do much more with your router than you can with your router's default firmware, like improve your wireless signal, add advanced features, and more. (DD-WRT also tends to be more secure, as was the case with the WPS router vulnerability easily cracked with Reaver.)

1. How to Crack a Wi-Fi Password

Gina's How to Crack a Wi-Fi Network's WEP Password with BackTrack guide is the site's top post of all time. But by now, you probably know you shouldn't be using WEP for your Wi-Fi network, and instead should be using the much more secure WPA2 (with AES encryption, if possible). WPA is still crackable, though, so it's an important subject to learn about. Check out both our guides on WEP and WPA password cracking for info on how to protect yourself.

That's it—our top 10 posts from our first 10 years. Thanks for taking this slightly navel-gazing journey with us, and more importantly, for sticking with us so long. We'd be nowhere without all of you guys, and our site would not be nearly as awesome without all your tips and contributions. So if you have a favorite post that didn't make the list, share it below!

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Lifehacker's Weekend Roundup gathers our best guides, explainers, and other posts on a certain subject so you can tackle big projects with ease. For more, check out our Weekend Roundup and Top 10 tags.

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