Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Many of the tips I’ve written explain the importance of creating regular System Image backups in case your PC’s hard drive ever fails or some other catastrophe wipes out your Windows installation.
It really is important to always have a recent backup on hand for those unexpected emergency situations, but one of my blog’s faithful readers recently pointed out that I have never explained how to restore a PC from a System Image backup.
The purpose of this post is to correct that oversight.
As you probably know, Windows 10 comes with a bunch of apps pre-installed on your system.
In addition to those pre-installed apps you might have also installed one or more additional apps from the Microsoft Store.
By default, most of those apps run in the background at all times – even the ones you never use!
In most cases having all those apps running in the background serves no useful purpose, but it does have a couple of serious downsides: [Read more…]
Question from Alan: I bought a new 4TB external hard drive to hold my photos.
I bought the new drive because the 1TB drive I’ve been using to store my photos is full and I have a lot more pictures to scan and store.
My plan is to give the 1TB drive to my niece so she can use it with her iMac, but I want to completely erase everything from the drive before I give it to her.
That way she can start fresh with a blank drive.
Can you tell me how to completely erase this drive with my MacBook?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
If you’re like me you probably have a dozen or more electronic devices that use AA or AAA batteries.
If so, you’ve probably noticed how much quality disposable batteries cost nowadays!
For example, a bulk pack of 24 name-brand batteries can easily set you back $20 or more, and their prices will most likely just keep going up in the future.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to save money on your batteries while making sure your gadgets are always powered up and ready to use when you need them… [Read more…]
If you use Windows 10 you probably know it comes with a bunch of preinstalled apps that most of us will never use.
You can easily uninstall several of these unwanted apps simply by right-clicking on their Start Menu entries and then selecting the Uninstall option, but for whatever reason Microsoft has decided not to provide an Uninstall option for some of them.
If you search the web for “uninstall any Windows 10 app” you’ll find a number of ways to do it, but the easiest method I have found by far is using a simple free app called Bloatbox.