Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Danielle G.: I use OneDrive all the time and I’d like to be able to access it by clicking a desktop icon.
The problem is I can’t figure out how to create an icon for it. Is it even possible to do that?
My computer is an Acer Aspire All-In-One with Windows 10 on it.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Caleb H.: Rick, I have a Dell laptop with Windows 10 Home Edition. It’s connected to the Internet with a LAN cable plugged into my router (it’s an older router and not wireless, but it works great).
I know the router and modem are working fine because my desktop PC can load web pages with no problem at all.
The laptop was working fine last night, but when I woke it up from sleep mode this morning I couldn’t load any websites or check my email even though the little indicator in the lower-right corner of the screen says I have an active connection to the Internet.
What do I need to do to get my Internet connection working again? Rebooting the PC didn’t help. Thanks in advance.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Callen W.: I really need your help Rick. I followed your advice and installed the Opera browser so I could use the built-in VPN.
Everything worked perfectly for a couple of days, then Opera started hanging up and no websites would load.
I noticed that the VPN button in the address bar was white instead of blue so I clicked on it and saw that the VPN was turned off and trying to connect.
Every time I try clicking the button to turn the VPN on it says “Connecting” but it never connects.
I did some research and saw where someone said it could be a conflict with my antivirus software. I temporarily disabled AVG Antivirus and sure enough, the VPN connected just fine and websites started loading with no problem.
The problem is when I re-enable AVG the connection issue comes back after a little while.
I’ve used AVG for years and I’d rather not have to give it up just to use Opera and its built-in VPN. Is there something I can do to make Opera and AVG work together?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Oliver: After reading your post about replacing Windows with Linux I decided to give to try it on an old Windows Vista laptop that I haven’t used in a while.
I took your advice from that post and installed Ubuntu. The installation went fine, and just as you predicted that old laptop now runs a LOT faster than it did with Windows!
Since I’m the only person that will use this machine I removed the password in the user settings and set it to boot into Ubuntu without having to enter a password.
Now the laptop boots up without asking for a password to log in, but every time I load Google Chrome I get a message telling me to enter the password, and I can’t do anything with Chrome until I enter the old password that I deleted from my user account. This is the message I get:
“Enter password to unlock your login keyring“
How can I stop Chrome from asking for a password?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Caitlin: I have an HP Envy X2 laptop that came with Windows 8 originally.
I upgraded the Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, and eventually to Windows 10.
Everything was fine with Windows 10 until the last round of Windows Updates. Now all of a sudden it’s giving me an error screen that says “Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC”.
Here’s a screenshot showing the error: [Read more…]