Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Phyllis: Hi there, Rick. I love your website and all of your handy tips.
I’m looking to buy an external USB hard drive so I can back up the hard drive in my laptop. I really want one that will last and maintain a good backup in case something happens to my laptop.
In your opinion, which brand of external hard drive is the best? [Read more…]
Question from Cilla: I had a conversation with a computer salesman a couple of years ago.
He told me that if I was using Windows, there is virus protection built into the software and there is no need to purchase another antivirus program.
And as I recall, he said if you did install another one, it will turn off the Windows antivirus.
I decided to believe him and haven’t had any problems but I’ve always had a little doubt about it. Does Windows really have a built-in antivirus? [Read more…]
Question from Evelyn: I have an Acer desktop computer with Windows 10 Home edition on it.
Everything was working fine this morning but when I came back from lunch my web browser was in full screen mode (maximized).
I thought that was odd because everything was normal when I left for lunch.
I tried to click the little square icon in the top-right corner to take the browser out of full screen mode but I couldn’t click it. It’s like it ignored my clicks.
Anyway, I was able to minimize the browser but then I noticed something else really strange. None of my open apps were showing up on the taskbar.
I don’t know how things got so messed up, but I hate it. Do you have any idea what’s going on, and what I need to do to fix it? [Read more…]
Question from Charlie: I read an article last night about using two hard drives or SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration to speed up disk access speeds on my PC.
It said RAID 0 can speed up disk read and write speeds by as much as 50% but that it’s risky to use it.
The article didn’t explain why RAID 0 is risky. Can you explain it to me? [Read more…]
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Question from Della: I’m in the process of shopping for a new laptop because my old one got stolen.
Every time I type the word “laptop” into Amazon’s search box there are usually a few Chromebooks included in the search results.
I remember seeing commercials on TV where they said Chromebooks aren’t laptops. If that’s true why do they come up in a search for the word laptop?