Computer Tips Archives - Page 172 of 231

This is the absolute easiest way to add a second monitor to your computer!

Posted on February 1, 2018

It’s no secret that using multiple monitors with your computer greatly enhances the user experience and boosts productivity.

For example, you can use your primary display for your essential tasks while your email and other tangential apps are running on one or more side monitors where they are out of the way, yet always in view and ready to use when you need them.

The biggest drawbacks to installing additional monitors have always been the need to have multiple video ports on your PC and the complexity involved with setting everything up in Windows or OS X. But thanks to the wonderful world of USB, that is no longer the case. [Read more…]

Q&A: Why is my computer not working with the new RAM I bought?

Posted on December 5, 2017

Question from Eric H.: I have an older ASUS Essentio CM1630 desktop computer that came with 2GB of RAM.

I scanned the system with Speccy and found out it currently has a single 2GB/DDR3 RAM stick in it.

I want to upgrade the RAM so I bought an 8GB/DDR3 RAM stick and installed it so I can have 10GB total, but I ran into a problem.

The computer won’t boot with both RAM sticks installed. It also won’t boot with just the 8GB stick installed. However, it boots just fine with just the original 2GB stick installed.

What could be the problem? I know this computer is supposed to support up to 16GB of RAM total.

I’m thinking I might have bought a bad RAM stick but I wanted to check with you first in case there’s a BIOS setting or a jumper that needs to be changed.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Make your Chrome browser history easier to read and understand with ‘Better History’

Posted on October 26, 2017

Important update: The browser extension mentioned in this post has been removed from the Chrome web store. It apparently morphed into malware so Google banned it. I have removed the links to it from the original post.

Have you ever tried to find a web page you’ve visited in the past by scanning your browser history? If so, you probably found the experience both difficult and frustrating.

Most browsers display your history items in a boring, confusing list that’s hard to read and even harder to understand, but a fantastic Chrome extension called Better History makes finding the URL you’re looking for a breeze!

Chrome already does a much better job at displaying your browser’s history items than most other browsers, but the Better History extension takes that already enhanced usability to an entirely different level. [Read more…]

How to reclaim up to 40GB of wasted storage space after installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

Posted on October 24, 2017

If you’ve already installed the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on your PC you might be wondering where a huge chunk of your free hard drive/SSD storage space went.

Well, when Windows Update installs a new major Windows release it automatically backs up the previous Windows installation just in case you need to revert back to it for some reason.

That’s a good thing because it provides a way to roll your system back to the previous version of Windows in case something goes wrong with the update.

But there’s a problem: It can take as much as 40GB of storage space to hold the files in that previous Windows version backup. That means dozens of Gigabytes of “wasted” space won’t be available for storing photos, Office documents and/or other important user-created files.

Of course if your system has a massive hard drive with tons of unused space available, you probably won’t even miss that “wasted” disk space.

But what if your hard drive was already close to being maxed out before the upgrade? Or maybe your PC has a relatively small solid state drive (SSD) (#ad) instead of a much larger hard drive?

If you find yourself running low on storage space after installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you can easily recover dozens of Gigabytes of space by removing those old Windows backup files. Just follow the steps below: [Read more…]