Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Darrell F.: Rick, I have a two month old Lenovo Y500 laptop that works great except for one problem…
When I rest my hands on the computer to type something on the keyboard, the sound cuts completely out just as if I had clicked the “Mute” button. When I remove my hands the sound immediately starts working again. Is this something that I can fix myself?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Ron K.: Rick, this might seem like a frivolous question (and I admit that it is), but is there any way to determine the total number of hours and minutes that my Dell desktop computer has been powered on since I bought it in May 2008? No biggie if there isn’t, I’m just curious.
Rick’s answer: That isn’t a frivolous question at all Ron. Now you have me curious about how long my PCs have been powered up as well.
To answer your question, I don’t know of any way to use Windows itself to determine the total uptime of a computer, but I do know of a way to get a fairly accurate estimate: [Read more…]
Question from Andrea L.: Hi Rick. I have a problem and I’m betting you might be able to help me solve it.
My 4 year old daughter likes playing the games on the PBS Kids website (https://pbskids.org). The problem is she isn’t the best at controlling the mouse yet and she sometimes accidentally leaves Internet Explorer and starts click in places where she doesn’t need to be clicking. Last night I caught her clicking around the Control Panel!
Is there a way to force her to stay within the confines of the web browser? The computer runs Windows 7 if that makes a difference. Thanks so much for your help!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
I found it odd when Microsoft decided to make the touch screen-friendly tiles of the new Start Screen the primary selling point of Windows 8.
To this day I still haven’t figured out why the folks in Redmond thought of laptop and Desktops PC users would ever prefer “touching” their computer screens over using their mice and keyboards.
Well, it turns out that I’m not the only person who feels that way. [Read more…]
Question from Nathan E.: Hi Rick. I have a problem that I can’t seem to figure out. I’m hoping you can help me.
I work with a lot of ISO files that I download from the web and then burn onto writable CDs and DVDs. Until recently I could right-click on an ISO file and click “Burn disc image” and Windows’ built-in CD/DVD burner utility would create a bootable disc.
Alternatively, I could get “Burn disc image” to show up as a menu item in Windows Explorer by simply clicking on the name of the ISO file.
I don’t know what happened, but starting a few days ago the “Burn disc image” option fails to appear regardless of which of the above-mentioned methods I try. Can you help me get it back? I’ll be much in your debt if you can! My laptop is running Windows 7. Thanks!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]