Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Emil P.: Ever since I updated my computer to Windows 10 it’s been hanging up at shutdown.
It displays a window saying that the system is closing X number of apps and shutting down.
But then it says that an app is preventing Windows from shutting down and asks if I want to shut down anyway or click cancel.
Sometimes it will name the app that’s hanging the shutdown but sometimes it won’t.
This is a screenshot of one of these messages: [Read more…]
Question from Kyle H.: I have an Acer laptop with Windows 7 and I’ve had a problem with it from day one.
Every time I touch the trackpad the mouse pointer starts shaking and it’s really irritating.
This has been going on ever since the day I bought the laptop and Acer hasn’t been any help at all.
Do you know why it’s doing this or if there’s anything I can try to maybe get it fixed?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Connie G.: I have a question about Facebook and I’m really hoping you an answer it for me.
Yesterday morning I received a very intriguing private message from someone telling me we went to school together.
They said they saw my name pop up after I left a comment on a picture that a mutual friend had posted and they’d like to reconnect with me.
The thing is there’s no name listed for the sender. All it says is “Facebook User”.
I can’t reply to the message (It says “You cannot reply to this conversation”) and there’s no link to click to look at their profile.
I’m curious as to who this person could be since I graduated from high school over 20 years ago. Is there any way to find out who sent me that message?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Eric H.: I have an older ASUS Essentio CM1630 desktop computer that came with 2GB of RAM.
I scanned the system with Speccy and found out it currently has a single 2GB/DDR3 RAM stick in it.
I want to upgrade the RAM so I bought an 8GB/DDR3 RAM stick and installed it so I can have 10GB total, but I ran into a problem.
The computer won’t boot with both RAM sticks installed. It also won’t boot with just the 8GB stick installed. However, it boots just fine with just the original 2GB stick installed.
What could be the problem? I know this computer is supposed to support up to 16GB of RAM total.
I’m thinking I might have bought a bad RAM stick but I wanted to check with you first in case there’s a BIOS setting or a jumper that needs to be changed.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Lois P.: My computer (HP laptop with Windows 10) was working fine until it installed an update about a week ago.
Ever since that update was installed the computer won’t automatically connect to my Wi-Fi network when I turn it on.
I can connect to the network manually and it works perfectly until I shut the computer down. It just won’t connect automatically no matter what I do and I really miss having it do that.
I’ve searched Google from top to bottom and I haven’t found a solution to this that works. I even used System Restore to remove the update but that didn’t help either.
A friend told me about your website but I couldn’t find anything you’ve written about this topic on there. Do you know of a fix for this? You’re my last hope!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]