Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Having a recent System Image Backup on hand is a great way to get your PC back up and running quickly if you have to replace your hard drive or a virus trashes your Windows installation.
But if you recently upgraded to Windows 8.1 or bought a new PC with it pre-installed, you won’t find it in the same place it was in when using a previous Windows version.
Here’s how to create a System Image Backup in Windows 8.1: [Read more…]
By default, any time you perform any kind of search from the Windows 8.1 Start Screen you will also be presented with a list of search results from the Internet – courtesy of the Bing search engine. Some people love it, others hate it.
If you’re like me and prefer having your local searches confined just to the drives on your local computer, you can easily turn Bing Search Integration off. Here’s how: [Read more…]
If you have recently upgraded your Windows 8 installation to Windows 8.1, you can reclaim 6GB of hard drive space by removing the old Windows 8 files. Here’s a little background info for you…
When you upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Windows, the version being replaced is retained in a folder called Windows.old just in case the upgrade fails or you wish to revert back to the previous version for some reason.
The amount of space required to store the previous version of Windows varies depending on the versions involved. Since you have just upgraded from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, you now have roughly 6GB of old (and now useless) Windows 8 system files just sitting there taking up valuable disk space. [Read more…]
CryptoLocker is an especially insidious form of “Ransomeware” – malware that basically locks up all the user data on your computer’s drives until you fork over some cash to a far-away crook.
What makes CryptoLocker so bad is the way it encrypts the user data on your hard drive using a super-strong encryption method. This makes it literally impossible to access your own data without forking over a bundle of cash in exchange for the unlock key.
The key to protecting yourself from CryptoLocker lies in prevention because even though there are several “cures” being hawked on the Internet, their effectiveness varies when they work at all.
Here are are a few things you can do to prevent your PC from getting infected with the CryptoLocker virus, and recover from it if you still end up getting hit: [Read more…]
I have worked on several Toshiba laptops recently that seem to share a common problem: The function keys that lower and increase the screen brightness (usually Fn+F6 and Fn+F7) have stopped responding.
If the brightness controls on your Toshiba laptop are non-responsive, the procedure described below will most likely fix it:
1 – Shut down the laptop and unplug all cables and external adapters, including the AC power adapter. [Read more…]