Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Are you expecting to have guests staying at your home at any time during the holiday season?
If so, it’s possible that one or more of them might ask to borrow your computer to check their email, get on Facebook, or do whatever it is they enjoy doing online.
There’s really nothing wrong with allowing a visitor to use your computer, but there are a few things you might want to do before your guests arrive: [Read more…]
If you could only post one tweet per day, when would be the best time to do it?
I’ve seen this question asked over and over on various social media forums, and as you might expect there sees to be no uniform answer.
Some people prefer to tweet in mid-morning, others at night. In other words, this isn’t a good question to ask in a forum if you want an accurate answer.
Well, thanks to a fairly comprehensive body of research, we don’t really have to guess about when is the best time to post a single daily tweet. [Read more…]
The motherboard in every Windows PC is equipped with firmware code that the CPU uses to initialize the computer’s hardware components and prepare the machine to boot up into Windows.
Depending on the age and model of your PC, this firmware is typically referred to as either the BIOS or the UEFI.
In a nutshell, the firmware in older PCs is referred to as the BIOS while newer computers have a UEFI Control Panel.
Just keep in mind that regardless of what the manufacturer of your particular motherboard calls it, the onboard firmware performs the same basic “bootstrap” tasks.
Manufacturers occasionally release firmware updates for their motherboards in order to fix bugs, optimize hardware performance and add new features.
Personally, I don’t recommend installing BIOS/UEFI updates unless they are absolutely necessary, for the following reasons: [Read more…]
There are times when it would be nice to have the ability to schedule a post to go live on your Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn timeline at a later date and time.
Facebook already allows users to schedule posts for future publication on “business pages”, but they don’t allow you to do it with your personal account. And neither do Twitter and LinkedIn.
However, a fantastic service called TwitTimer allows you to schedule your posts for later publication on all three of those social media platforms. [Read more…]
It’s no secret that Apple has always opposed allowing third-party repair shops to service Apple products.
As a result, third-party shops weren’t allowed to use genuine Apple parts, which meant they either had to use often inferior after-market replacement parts or buy genuine Apple OEM parts from the gray market.
As you might expect, a third-party repair would also void the device’s warranty.
And to top it all off, just last month Apple released a firmware update for iOS devices that refused to show new batteries that had been installed by third-party techs as “healthy” even when they were brand new genuine Apple batteries that had been obtained on the gray market.
After taking an incredible amount of heat over the new battery policy, Apple has now reversed course by announcing a new program under which authorized third-party repair shops can now fix Apple products using genuine Apple parts that are provided directly by Apple.