Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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…]
There are several handy free utilities out there that will tell you what hardware is inside your PC.
One of the best I’ve ever used is HWiNFO.
Like Speccy, HWiNFO is a free program that provides tons of details about your system’s CPU, motherboard, memory and such.
But HWiNFO also provides a live snapshot of the CPU temperature and various system voltages, great information to have if you’re a computer tech or system builder. [Read more…]