Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Kevin: Hi, Rick. I recently bought a HP laptop running Windows 11, and ever since I first brought it home it’s been keeping the wrong time.
It’s always 1 hour behind, and if I change the time to the correct time it just reverts back to the wrong time all on its own. It’s about to drive me bonkers!
Do you think it might be a bad CMOS battery or maybe a bad motherboard? [Read more…]
Question from Marvin: After using a flip phone for years, I finally decided it was time to upgrade to a smart phone.
I found a good deal on a new iPhone at Best Buy, so I bought one. I like the phone ok, but some things about it are really confusing.
For example, my phone’s user manual says it supports both Bluetooth and WiFi wireless connectivity.
What is Bluetooth and how is it different from WiFi? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Bobby: Per your suggestion, I recently bought a dirt-cheap 250GB SSD to replace the hard drive in an older Acer laptop.
And you were right – the speed increase is astounding! Thanks for the info!
As I was installing the SSD I noticed how much larger it is than the 256GB SD card that’s inside my phone.
Why is the SSD so much larger than the SD card when they both hold roughly the same amount of data?
Question from Lisa: My email account is receiving so much SPAM that I’m ready to ditch it and set up a new one.
Is there a trick for setting up an email address so that it won’t end up on some spammer’s email list?
Would something like putting numbers in the middle or along the lines of [email protected] work? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Carl: I bought this 300 watt 12VDC to 120VAC power inverter to run my coffee pot and a couple of other items while I’m camping.
While I was researching a related topic online I found a couple of articles that said not to plug an inverter larger than 200 watts into a car’s cigarette lighter because it’ll burn the inverter up.
That’s a problem because the inverter I bought only came with a cigarette lighter plug. You can’t remove it and there’s no place to plug in cables that can connect it directly to the battery.
What I need to know is will my 300W inverter really burn up if I plug it into my car’s cigarette lighter socket? [Read more…]