Downloads Archives - Rick's Daily Tips

How to use your smartphone as a metal detector (yes, really)

Posted on July 9, 2025

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Most folks love upgrading to a new smartphone at every opportunity, and chances are you have several unused, but working phones tucked away in a drawer somewhere.

If you’re like me, you probably hate having a perfectly good portable computer (that’s really what a smart phone is) doing nothing more than gathering dust.

I’ve written several posts in the past explaining how to give an old smartphone a new life by turning it into something useful simply by installing an app. I have another such tip for you today. [Read more…]

Tips for speeding up a sluggish Windows PC

Posted on June 13, 2025

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Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Modern personal computers are amazing machines. They allow us to do things in minutes that once took hours or days as well as many other things that couldn’t be done at all in times past.

But even with all their awesome power and capabilities, computers are no fun to use when they’re running slowly and freezing up at random times.

Today I’m going to discuss a few things you can do to help speed up a sluggish PC and hopefully avoid having to deal with erratic system performance.

[Read more…]

This awesome tool will quickly uninstall any program and remove all its traces

Posted on April 18, 2025

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Windows’ native “Uninstall a program” utility is an extremely inefficient and cumbersome tool for removing programs from your machine.

In addition to being slow to display a list of installed applications and remove the ones selected, the removal process sometimes fails and almost always leaves behind traces of uninstalled programs which clutter up the Windows registry and slow your system down.

As luck would have it, there are several excellent third-party alternatives to Windows’ Uninstaller utility. [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I combine several short videos into one long one?

Posted on February 20, 2025

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Question from Tina: Our church hosted a gospel music festival this past weekend and I videoed the performances of eight groups, each of which sang several songs each.

There was a considerable gap between the performances so I stopped recording after each group had finished singing their last song.

That left me with eight relatively short videos instead of just long one.

How can I combine all of those short videos to make one long video? [Read more…]

Why OlderGeeks is my favorite free downloads site

Posted on June 2, 2024

Regular readers of this blog know how much I enjoy recommending the great free software tools that I use every day on my own computers and mobile devices.

One of the most amazing things about the Internet age is how we can download useful programs and apps to complete most any task we can imagine at absolutely no cost whatsoever.

I like to call it the era of ubiquitous freebies.

But the above being said, free downloads can often have a dark side…

[Read more…]