Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Denise P.: Rick, I moved a while back and ended up losing the CD for my Epson Stylus Photo 1280 printer. This is one of the many reasons why I hate moving so much!!
Anyway, now I need the disc to install the printer driver on my new laptop. I can probably order a replacement CD but I need the printer ASAP.
Is there a driver site where I can just download the driver? I don’t mind paying. I just need the driver right away. Thanks!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Sylvia M.: Rick, I have a womens’ book review blog that I’m trying to promote. I’ve been writing at least one post every day for 7 months, but my traffic is still just a trickle compared to where I would like it to be.
I was doing some research on the Internet about how to grow blog traffic and I discovered a service called BlogUpp. Since there’s no sign-up of any kind required and you don’t have to give them any personal information, I’m seriously considering adding their widget to my blog.
I have a couple of questions that I’d like to ask you before I start using the BlogUpp widget:
1) Is it really effective at driving traffic to a blog?
2) Will using BlogUpp cause me any problems with the search engines ranking my blog posts?
Thanks in advance for your help Rick!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Elisa M.: Hi Rick. I just ditched my old phone that I’ve had for years and bought a new Samsung Galaxy S5. I like taking screenshots with my phone from time to time, but I can’t figure out how to do it with this one.
Can you tell this dummy how to take a screenshot with a Galaxy S5? LOL – and thanks!
Rick’s answer: You’re not a dummy Elisa. If you don’t know how to do something, you don’t know how to do it. That’s why every day offers new opportunities to learn. And believe me, I learn something new every day!
To answer your question, it’s pretty easy to capture a screenshot on the S5 once you know how. Here are the steps: [Read more…]
Question from David: Unlike the Windows Media Player included in Windows Vista Home Premium, the version in Windows 7 Home Premium on my Samsung laptop does not have a Menu Bar. Is there a way to add or enable one?
Rick’s answer: Try this David:
1 – Launch Windows Media Player.
2 – Press the Alt key by itself and you’ll see a menu pop up.
3 – Click the Show menu bar option.
Note: Pressing the Alt key in most Windows programs will display the “File menu” in situations where it isn’t already displayed by default.
That should do it David. Please let me know if it works for you.
Update from David: Yes it does. Many thanks.
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Question from David H.: My brother gave me his old HP Pavilion Elite HPE-120f desktop computer after the hard drive died. The shop returned the computer to him without the hard drive in it and I need to know what kind of hard drive to buy for it.
Also, I don’t have a set of factory Restore discs for this computer. Will HP send me a set?
Thanks in advance for your help.
Rick’s answer: David, your HP Pavilion Elite HPE-120f most likely came from the factory with a 1TB SATA hard drive, so virtually any 3.5″ SATA hard drive will work in that system.
That being said, instead of simply installing another hard drive, I recommend installing a solid state drive (#ad) as the boot drive and a spacious hard drive as a secondary data drive. [Read more…]