Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you’ve been a Windows user for any length of time you probably know that there are times when it helps to boot Windows into Safe Mode.
In a nutshell, booting into Safe Mode forces Windows to load just the most basic Windows files and hardware drivers.
This helps a great deal when trying to remove stubborn viruses, track down faulty hardware drivers and resolve a wide range of software issues.
I frequently receive questions about speeding up computers that have become sluggish over time or fixing problems that prevent Windows from working as it should.
There are a number of different responses that I usually have for those questions, and the one I give depends on the actual issues they are experiencing with their machines.
Question from Cilla: I had a conversation with a computer salesman a couple of years ago.
He told me that if I was using Windows, there is virus protection built into the software and there is no need to purchase another antivirus program.
And as I recall, he said if you did install another one, it will turn off the Windows antivirus.
I decided to believe him and haven’t had any problems but I’ve always had a little doubt about it. Does Windows really have a built-in antivirus? [Read more…]
A while back I wrote this post explaining how to use Chrome’s native Task Manager to find out which Chrome processes could be causing the browser to operate slower than it should.
That post received a lot of engagement, and several readers contacted me to ask if there is a native Task Manager built in to other browsers as well.
I answered those folks directly, but since I keep getting this same question I thought it might be a good idea to write a similar post to answer it on the blog. [Read more…]
Back in the “olden days” (i.e. before we humans had the Internet) learning a new skill was time-consuming and often simply not worth our while.
With time being our most valuable asset, we often found it faster (and therefore “cheaper”) to simply hire someone who already possessed a certain skill to do that essential, yet one-time job for us instead of taking the time to learn how to do it ourselves.
But then along came the Internet, and before we knew it we had countless volumes of information at our fingertips. [Read more…]