Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Rita H.: I recently went to Verizon and upgraded my phone to an iPhone 6. I’m glad I did because this is my first iPhone and I love it! I still don’t know a lot about it though.
A friend of mine also has an iPhone 6 and she said her son enabled something called HD Voice on her phone and now her calls sound a lot clearer.
I asked her how to enable it on my phone and she said she doesn’t know. Can you tell me how to do it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Rodney T: I have an Acer Aspire 5552G-7641 with 8GB of RAM. It came with Windows 7 which always showed the entire 8GB on the System Information screen.
My employer paid for a copy of Windows 8 so I backed up my data and wiped the hard drive, then installed Windows 8 (that was an ordeal in itself but I won’t go into it here lol).
Long story short, after installing Windows 8 the System Information screen is only showing 3GB of RAM even though the BIOS screen shows the full 8GB. Did I do something wrong? [Read more…]
Question from Keenan R.: My 3 year old ThinkPad X230 2320HQU laptop won’t charge the battery past 10% no matter how long I leave it plugged in.
If I try to use the laptop while it’s running from on battery, it shuts off after just a few seconds. It runs fine with the charger plugged in, the battery just refuses to charge up.
How can I tell whether the problem is caused by the battery or the charger? If possible, I need to get it fixed ASAP. Thanks.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Cale G.: Rick, I read your post about installing the Windows 10 Preview and I’d like to try it out on my old Acer laptop that’s currently running Windows Vista.
I checked and the machine seems to meet all the hardware requirements, so I figured why not install it and check it out?
The problem is I heard you have to have a Microsoft account in order to install the Windows 10 Preview, and sure enough when I went to install it I was prompted to either log in to an existing account or create a new one.
If I can possibly avoid it, I don’t want a Microsoft account, and I definitely don’t want to have to log into Windows on my laptop through one! Hence my question: Can you tell me if there’s a way to install Windows 10 without having to open a Microsoft account first?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Alice T.: Rick, I have an HP laptop running Windows 7, and I have a question for you.
I read somewhere that hackers can take control of your webcam and make videos and take pictures of you without your knowledge.
I NEVER use a webcam for anything so I’d like just disable it completely and be done with it. How do I do that?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]