How to Have Computer Fun: Content, Games, Writing, & More

Make your own YouTube video. Want to go viral? A great way to have fun on the computer is creating your own videos and uploading them online. Here are some video ideas to get you started:

• Start vlogging.
• Review your favorite food or drink.
• Sing, dance, and play instruments.
• Record funny skits with your friends.
• Read poetry.
• Rifle through your wallet or your purse and describe what's inside.
• Do a "haul" video, telling us what you just got at the grocery store, library, or the mall.
• Teach us a life hack.

Watch movies online. The best sites usually charge for a selection of high-quality movies, but you can also find videos without shelling out any cash.

• Popular pay sites for streaming video include:
  • Netflix
  • Hulu
  • Amazon Prime
  • Disney+
  • HBO Now
• Some free streaming sites with documentaries, news stories, and more:
  • Folkstreams
  • MetaCafe
  • Vimeo

Listen to online music. Computers have changed music forever. From the way it's recorded to the way we listen to it, music and digital technology is as big a part of the music business as guitars. Some great free or cheap ways to listen to music online include:

• Pandora Radio
• Spotify
• Apple Music
• SoundCloud
• Bandcamp
• DatPiff

Listen to a podcast. Podcasts are like free radio shows that cover tons of different topics. You can find podcasts on streaming platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, but you can also find them by using Check out PodcastOne or PodBay for a wide variety of free podcasts that you can listen to. From pro wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin to novelist Bret Easton Ellis, it seems like everyone's got a podcast these days.^[1] Some of the most popular podcasts include:

• RadioLab
• The Read
• This American Life
• The Moth
• Bodega Boys
• The Nerdist
• Hardcore History
• Stuff You Should Know
• Savage Lovecast

Listen to music. If you have a music collection saved to your computer (rather than a streaming service), make a fresh playlist or mix of songs that would be fun to dance, meditate, or work out to. Put your music app in shuffle mode to arrange your songs into a strange order and try to guess what's being played. Turn on the iTunes or Windows Media Player visualizer function to give yourself something to stare at while you zone out. Or, you know, just listen to the good stuff.

Find cool online games. When you're feeling bored, one of the best ways to have some fun is by playing online games.^[2] No matter what kind of game you like to play, you'll be able to find something awesome you can play for free. Some free online games must be downloaded and installed, but others can be played right in your web browser.

• If you like immersive RPGs, try playing:
  • Fortnite
  • Minecraft
  • World of Warcraft
• Check out an online database of free games like:
  • Steam
  • Addicting Games
  • Miniclip
  • ROBLOX
  • Andkon
  • 8bit

Try a word game. If you want to test your skills or improve your vocabulary, try a word game! There are daily games like Wordle or unlimited games you can play. Here are some popular ones:

• Train Your Brain: https://www.wikihow.com/Games/Train-Your-Brain Use the letters provided to find the one word that links all four wikiHow images.
• Hello Wordl: https://hellowordl.net
• Wordle Forever: http://alexdaily.nl/wordle
• Quordle lets you guess 4 words at once!: https://www.quordle.com
• Wordplay: https://wordplay.com

Check out Facebook games. As long as you have a Facebook account, you have access to a world of single and multiplayer games of all shapes and sizes. Many Facebook games are free thanks to advertiser support, but some may offer in-game items and upgrades for sale. To get started, visit https://www.facebook.com/games and log in to your account.

• Some popular Facebook games are Words with Friends, Candy Crush, and Farmville.

Use Steam to install games on your computer. If you're interested in installing even more games that won't cost you a cent, use the Steam client, available for free at steampowered.com. Click here for instructions on installing Steam. Here are just a few of the popular games you can install:

• Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Team Fortress 2
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Playerunknown's Battlegrounds
• Dota 2

Design your own video game. If you're feeling ambitious, you can try designing a simple game yourself with the MIT Scratch site, available by clicking here. Scratch allows you to make a game that you and other people can play. You can talk with other people, play each other's games, and curate studios. It's a lot of fun, especially if you're a gamer.

Learn more about yourself by taking a quiz. Curious about what your red flag is? Or Zodiac compatibility? Take a quiz. Try our wikiHow Quizzes: https://www.wikihow.com/Quizzes or Buzzfeed. Share the results with your friends!

Window shop online. Got some time to kill, but no money? Go online shopping, but don't buy anything. You can buy almost anything online, and it can be fun to poke around and price-compare anything from clothes and shoes to land-plots and condominiums. Make a wish list of everything you want. Just don't max out your credit card.

Plan a dream vacation. Use Google Maps to explore cities you're unfamiliar with and explore local landmarks on Wikipedia. Then hop over to Expedia and start pricing plane tickets, or check out AirBnB deals, or advertisements on CouchSurfer. Once you know where you want to go, you can start saving up to make your dream come true.

Learn a magic trick. Want to impress your friends next time you see them? Try learning a coin or card trick. There are a bunch of places online that break down the steps so that you can learn it at your own speed, including right here at wikiHow. One of the most popular sites is GoodTricks, and you can also find lots of guides on YouTube.

Check out some art. If you're looking for inspiration, check out art-specific websites like DeviantArt (alternative art), Behance (graphic design), Flickr (photography), and Juxtapoz (contemporary art blog).

Make some art yourself. Feeling a little creative? There are a lot of different online drawing and painting services that range from goofy to professional. Having them online is convenient since you won't need to install anything yourself. Some popular options:

• On the web: Sketchpad is a free option to draw all kinds of designs, while Sketchup is focused on 3D modeling.
• For download: Gimp is a free, full-featured photo and graphics editor comparable to Adobe Photoshop, and Krita is more geared toward drawing and painting.

Explore Google Earth. Google Earth gives you an up-close look at almost any place you'd want to see. Using Street View, you can actually explore the streets of Tokyo, or try to find Drake's house in Calabasas. Look up your own house and see if anyone left a window open.

Test your geography skills. Check out GeoGuessr, which presents you with a random Google Earth street picture and makes you guess where in the world it is. The closer your guess, the more points you get.^[3]

Read some listicles. Want to see a list of the 25 Best Sandwiches in the World in GIFs? How about the top 20 toys kids loved in the 90s? Buzzfeed, Upworthy, Bored Panda, Bustle, and other sites all have hilarious and interesting lists of random things you didn't know you cared about. Check them out for a great way to kill a little time and not think too hard.

Read the local news online. For news that matters to you, find your local news source online and read up on the stories that matter most to you. Increasingly, people engage with their local news sources less and less, which means the average Internet user knows more about what's going on in the lives of celebrities than in their own local government. Use the Internet to learn about where you live.

Browse Google News. Go to https://news.google.com/ to browse by topic or location. You can sign in with your Google account to get personalized news based on what you read!

Read culture or specialty blogs. Whatever you're interested in, there's probably a whole online community of others who love it, too. Like gaming? Check out PC Gamer or IGN to learn about the latest games. Music fan? Check out Complex, Pitchfork, Stereogum, Bandcamp, or Brooklyn Vegan. Do some poking around and find a community with like-minded interests that you can engage with, or at least explore.

Take a free online course. Develop skills and better yourself while you're having fun. Massively open online courses, or MOOCs, are free and easy to find. It's like sitting in the hallowed halls of Harvard but in the comfort of your own home. Look for MOOCs by searching a database like this one.

Travel back through internet-time. If you're curious about what the internet looked like 10 or 15 years back, there's a handy way to travel back through time. The Internet Archive has built a tool that lets you access old versions of websites.

Read and contribute to wikis. If you're already here, you might as well join up and start contributing! Wikis like wikiHow and Wikipedia can only survive with user-generated content and users who are willing to perform all kinds of essential tasks that keep the site up and running. From patrolling recent changes to starting whole new articles, contributing to a wiki can be a rewarding and fun activity.

Chat with your friends. Yeah, yeah, you already thought of this, but maybe there's a new way to chat you haven't tried. Share links, pictures, and videos that will make your friends laugh. Start a meme thread. Some messaging programs, like Discord, have built-in games to play while you talk to your friends online.^[4]

• Facebook Messenger, Skype, WhatsApp, and Kik are some popular options for chatting online.
• If you're feeling lonely, try video chatting with your friends. It can help to make it feel like you're actually hanging out. Message an old friend and get together on Facebook video chat or Skype. Just don't video chat with people you don't know well.

Use Facebook or open a Facebook account. Facebook is a great way to kill some time. You can upload content, check out other people's updates, and talk to your friends instantly. It's a great way to get in touch and have fun on the computer.

• If you're bored with your Feed, do some deep digging into someone you don't know. Your best friend's second cousin's girlfriend's Facebook page probably has a bunch of stuff on it that you've never seen.
• Add your own content. Studies show that people who spend more time looking at other people's content and less time adding their own are more depressed and bored than people who do.^[5] Update your status, add some pictures, and write on other peoples' walls.

Compose some Tweets. Make a Twitter account and start following celebrities, your friends, and other interesting Tweeters to get in the hashtag community, if you haven't already. If you can be witty, concise, and engaging, you can build up some followers and entertain them with ridiculous Tweets on a daily basis. Then start a Twitter beef with Nicki Minaj. Kidding. Don't do that.

Review stuff on Yelp. Have you ever been to a restaurant and had an opinion about it? Of course you have. Might as well put it online right? In all seriousness, offering consumer criticism is a great way of killing some time online and having fun. Let your voice be heard.

Pin some cool finds on Pinterest. Pinterest is a great way to explore and share recipes, interior decor, fashion, and lifestyle hacks. It's easy to glance through quickly, making it a great resource if you're having trouble thinking of something fun to do online. Start a page and get pinning!

Find a special-interest message board. Without message boards, we never would have gotten the concept of the meme, the "lulz," or the well-placed .gif. Message boards can be tough to crack into, but big communities exist around every type of subculture, from punk rock to skating to anime to video games. Find a good message board related to your interests, start an account, and chat safely.

Change your desktop. Feeling bored? Give your computer a makeover. Computer savvy people call it a desktop theme. You can start by right-clicking your Windows desktop and selecting Personalize, or selecting System Preferences on a Mac. You can also customize other elements of your computer, such as window colors, sound schemes, mouse cursors, and desktop icons.

• Surf Google Images or proper wallpaper sites when you're online to find awesome-looking wallpaper for your computer. Sharks wearing birthday hats? Sweet. Or maybe a pretty shot of your favorite celebrity, or a cool pattern.

Change your screensaver. Scroll through your pictures and pick a new screensaver, or download one. You could always go with a slideshow of all your pictures (meh) or one that makes it look like the Matrix (sweet).

Turn the screen upside down. Pressing {{keypress|Ctrl|Alt|Down} on a PC or Mac will flip the screen upside-down, which makes a great prank! You can flip it back to normal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+↑.

Take some pictures. If you've got a webcam installed, mess around taking selfies, setting up weird still-life pictures in front of your computer, or just goofing with the picture filters on your computer. Make yourself look like a bent-up alien with a weird nose, or mess with the colors until you look seasick.

Edit some photos. If you've got Photoshop or Gimp installed, cut up pictures and make weird meme-worthy new ones. Your grandmother's face on Danzig's body? Good start.

Put together a video! Windows and Mac come with built-in video editing software. Use Clipchamp on Windows or iMovie for macOS. Here are a few ideas:

• Record a how-to guide. Turn on your webcam and guide your audience through something you know how to do. Whether it’s making espresso or knitting a sweater, there’re people out there that might want to see what you’re making.
• Cut together clips of your family and friends. You can make a fun video featuring the people in your life. Add music and text to give it a cool or nostalgic feel.
• Make a movie. Have a dream screenplay that you’ve always wanted to film? Now’s the time! With a cheap camera and free video editing software, anything is possible.

Record a song. Most newer models of computers have built-in internal microphones and software installed that will allow you to record a song (or sounds at least) onto your computer and start manipulating it in minutes. You don't have to be super-talented, or even have an instrument on hand to record music. Just record yourself humming, then turn up the distortion on the settings and listen to the wild sounds you can make. Layer yourself reading random passages from the Bible, then another track of your dog snoring. Avant-garde masterpiece. If you have a Mac, check out Garage Band. If you're using Windows, try Audacity.

• Record a podcast of yourself like an old school DJ, talking about your favorite songs in between each track in the playlist. Pick songs with a theme and make a playlist, then record a vocal track of chatting in between. Do it with a friend for extra fun.
• Edit other songs together, like changing the speed of a Rihanna track to make it sound like death metal, or messing around with death metal to make it sound like ambient drone music. Slowing down tracks by 700% even became a meme recently, from dial-up sounds to Nickelback songs.^[6]

Start a digital diary. Back in the dark ages (like the 1970s), people used to actually keep things called diaries, in which they wrote about their life, eloquently and with detailed writing. Shocker, right? It's actually a great way of spending a couple hours on your computer, especially if you can't get online. Open up a word-processing file (in Word, Writer, Notepad, etc.) and just start writing about your day. Keep a running log. Who knows, you might like it so much that you could transition it into making a blog someday.

Start a short story. Open your favorite writing software and just start writing! (Or make an outline if that’s more your vibe). If you’re looking for a free writing program, try out Google Docs! Go to https://www.google.com/docs/about/ to get started. If you have a Mac, try Pages, Apple’s built-in writing software.

Learn to write code. If you're tired of the "typical" ways of having fun on your computer, why not take your passion to the next level? Learning how to code allows you to design and write your own computer programs from the ground up. It's a little like learning a new language and can be a bit of a challenge, but it can be seriously rewarding (plus, it looks great on your resume.)

• There are a lot of different programming languages out there. Though there's no "right" way to learn to program, here are five languages frequently recommended for beginners:
  • Python
  • C/C++
  • Java
  • Javascript
  • Ruby
• Check out CodeAcademy.com for free interactive coding tutorials in a number of programming languages.

Learn web design. Do you find yourself spending tons of time online? If so, consider learning the basics of web design so that you can create your own sites and give back to the online community! Some basic web design skills overlap with the list of basic programming languages above (for instance, many sites use Javascript.) On the other hand, skills like HTML coding offer the chance to learn web-centric programming.

Explore new operating systems. Did you know that you don't necessarily have to use the operating system your computer came with? It's true — Mac computers can run Windows, PCs can run macOS, and both can run Linux! Getting these setups can be tricky, so consult the support page of the program you use (or browse our help articles) if you run into problems.

• To run Windows on a Mac, use:
  • Boot Camp (comes pre-installed or available for free download)
  • Parallels Desktop for Mac
• To run a Mac OS on a PC, use:
  • A bootable USB drive^[7]
  • A virtual machine app like VMWare.
• Also consider alternatives like Ubuntu, Debian, and Haiku.