Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If your PC was either purchased used or “inherited” as a hand-me-down system, you probably keep seeing the previous owner’s name pop up from time to time as the “Registered Owner”. And I’m guessing that you probably find that a bit irritating.
It’s actually pretty easy to change the Registered Owner setting in the Windows Registry. But before I show you how to do that, it is incumbent upon me to tell you the following… [Read more…]
Have you ever wished you could easily switch from one email provider to another without losing any of your stored emails, attachments or contacts?
For example, lets say you’ve heard that Gmail is the best thing since sliced bread, and you’d like to ditch your Yahoo Mail account and transfer all of your existing emails, attachments and contacts from Yahoo to a new Gmail account (or vice versa).
A great online service called YippieMove will complete the transfer for you in the background while you use your computer for other things. [Read more…]
If you’re one of the relatively few seasoned Windows users who have made the switch to Windows 8, you have probably already noticed that Microsoft’s Music App is now the default player for MP3s as well as most types of video files. But by changing a single setting you can have your music and videos open in Windows Media Player instead.
Of course there’s absolutely nothing wrong with having the Music App set as your system’s default media player, but most people (myself included) tend to prefer Windows Media Plater. If you’re one of them too, you can follow these steps to set Windows Media Player as the default app: [Read more…]
Every now and then we find ourselves needing to record a phone call either for archiving purposes, legal reasons or for any number of other reasons.
Back in the day when landlines ruled, recording a call was easy. You simply plugged a cassette tape recorder into the phone jack via a special adapter and pressed the Record button.
But times have changed. Most calls these days are made either via cell phone or with a computer using an extremely popular service called Skype, neither of which work all that great hooked up to a cassette recorder.
There are several apps available for recording cell phone conversations, but only a handful for recording a conversation over Skype. The purpose of this tip is to clue you in about a couple of my favorites. The one you use will depend on whether you’re running Skype on a Windows PC or a Mac. [Read more…]
Microsoft released Windows 8 with some changes that quickly proved to be extremely unpopular with seasoned Windows users, and as a result the sales of both Windows 8 itself and new PCs that come with it pre-installed never even made it out of second gear.
But to the company’s credit, they listened to their customers and reversed a couple of the most bone-headed decisions in the Windows 8.1 update.
The first and most appreciated change was putting the Start button back in its rightful place. The second (and to me at least, even more important) change was giving users the ability to bypass the reviled Start Screen and boot directly to the Desktop. The instructions that follow explain how to set Windows 8.1 to do just that: [Read more…]