Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Sean W.: I have an HP laptop running Windows Vista. Now all of a sudden it won’t turn on. When I press the power button some of the LEDs light up then go right back out and the system is dead. Do you think my computer is fried? Or maybe the power adaptor?
Rick’s answer: Sean, I don’t think anything is “fried”. I believe a hard reset to the machine will probably get you back up and running. Try this: [Read more…]
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Question from Anna G.: Hi Rick. I read your post the other day about playing old games on new computers and it reminded me that I have a ton of old 3.5″ floppy disks filled with stuff that I’d like to check out and possibly copy onto my hard disk.
The problem is my laptop doesn’t have a floppy disk drive. Any ideas?
Rick’s answer: You’re in luck Anna. All you need to do is buy an external USB 3.5″ floppy drive
There are a couple of things to be aware of however: [Read more…]
Question from Lynn: How do I restore my laptop to the factory settings before I give it to somebody else?
Rick’s answer: Lynn, there are two ways to reset a Windows PC back to its factory settings. The first one is to simply insert the Restore disc into the optical drive and boot from it. You can reinstall Windows from there.
The second option is probably the most widely used one these days since most PCs come without a set of Restore discs and few people take the time to create one. Here are step-by-step instructions for resetting a PC that’s running either Windows 7 or Windows 8… [Read more…]
Question from Darren S.: I have several old DOS-based games that I bought at a yard sale and I’d love to be able to play some of them on my Windows 7 laptop. Will they run on that computer? If not, is it possible to install DOS in a dual-boot configuration and run them that way?
Rick’s Answer: Darren, it is possible to run some DOS games under Windows 7 (as well as XP, Vista and Windows 8), but due to major differences in the way DOS and Windows handle memory and I/O you’ll need to run them within a DOS emulator.
There are several DOS emulators for Windows available, but I would recommend trying one called DOSBox first. DOSBox has been around for a long time and they seem to have a lot of the kinks in the emulation process worked out. [Read more…]
Question from Kim: Everything was working fine until this morning, but now every time I click on a file it tries to open in Notepad. I can’t open anything! Please help??? My computer has Windows 7 if that matters. Thanks!!
Rick’s answer: It sounds like your file associations have gotten messed up Kim. Your PC’s Windows installation associates virtually all common file types with a specific application that it uses to open that file by default whenever you click on it.
For example, files with the .doc extension are usually opened with Microsoft Word while .xls files typically open in Excel. There are literally dozens of other file types with different extensions, and Windows looks at the extension to decide which program it should use to open that file by default. [Read more…]