Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Personal computers are amazing things. They allow us to do things and work in ways that were simply unimaginable just a few short years ago.
But they are also complex machines that run millions of lines of programming code each day while storing our digital lives on hard drive platters that spin thousands of times per minute.
The hard drive is arguably the most important part inside any PC, and unfortunately it’s also one of the most likely parts to fail. [Read more…]
Rick’s Daily Tech Tips Update for Thursday, April 4, 2024
• My bi-annual gadget cleaning and maintenance routine
• Q&A: What happens with Two-Factor Authentication if I switch phones?
• This is the best computer upgrade you can make for the money
• Bananas are berries, but strawberries aren’t? Are you kidding me???
• April’s Tech Tips Giveaway: Anker 521 300W Portable Power Station
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
You probably know that you can share the music you’re listening to on your iPhone with others by pairing your phone with a Bluetooth speaker, but what if not everyone in the room wants to hear it?
Well, there’s a simple solution that will let other iPhone users listen to your music right along with you on their own phones. It’s a free iOS app called Audibly, and works quite well. [Read more…]
I love writing about great free software that makes using computers, tablets and smart phones easier to use, more secure and more user friendly.
And I must admit, my favorite software programs of all tend to be free Windows utilities.
In previous posts I wrote about two outstanding Windows utilities (Process Explorer and Autoruns) that every PC user should have at the ready at all times.
Today I’m going to tell you about System Explorer, a wonderful program that bundles these two utilities together with a host of other useful tools into a single tabbed package. [Read more…]
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Microsoft provides a utility called MSCONFIG that allows us to determine and control which programs Windows loads at Startup, but unfortunately it is woefully lacking.
MSCONFIG does list the major applications that start up automatically, but it doesn’t provide anywhere near a full list of all the independent processes that load into memory with every boot-up and consume precious CPU clock cycles.
Luckily, there is a better much better Windows Startup manager, and it is available as a free download. [Read more…]