Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Kevin: Can you settle an argument between me an my cousin?
I told him that smart phones are really just small computers that are designed to make phone calls.
He said that since you can’t install programs on them or hook them to printers and stuff they can’t really be considered computers.
I think I’m right, but so does he. In your opinion, which one of us is right? [Read more…]
Question from Carrie: I have a WordPress blog that averages around 2200 visitors a day.
When I first started this blog the pages loaded very quickly, almost instantly. But now it takes them forever to load, often as long as a minute or more.
I’ve read everything I could find about how to make blog pages load faster and so far nothing has helped.
I’ve cut back on my images quite a bit and optimized the ones I’m still using. I cut the number of WordPress plugins I was using from 16 to 5.
I even ran a malware scan in my blog like you recommended in this post.
I’m at a loss as to what I’m doing wrong. Do you have any idea what could be making my blog load so slowly? [Read more…]
Question from Barbara: Hi, Rick. I have a very urgent problem and I need your help, ASAP!
Everything was fine when I went to bed last night, but when I woke up this morning and turned on my laptop to check my email, the laptop couldn’t find my WiFi network.
I had it scan for available networks and it found just one (and it had a really nasty name that I can’t repeat on here).
I first thought it might be a neighbor’s WiFi signal that was straying into my house, but then I noticed that it was a really strong signal.
Since it was so strong I figured this strange WiFi signal had to be coming from my own router, and sure enough when I unplugged my router the “nasty” WiFi network disappeared.
It appears that someone has hacked my router somehow but I don’t know how to take back control of it because it won’t accept my password. Can you help? [Read more…]
Question from Melanie: I read an article about Windows 11 SE and they said it was meant to be Microsoft’s alternative to Chromebooks.
That sounds exactly like what I’m looking for because I don’t need anything more than a way to get on the Internet.
I checked on Amazon and a couple of other sites and I couldn’t find any computers that come with Windows 11 SE on them.
There are plenty of machines with Windows 11 on them but none with Windows 11 SE. Why not? [Read more…]
Question from Brenda: I heard a couple of kids talking about overclocking their computers to make them run faster.
What exactly do they mean by overclocking? And it that something that I can do to speed up my HP laptop?
It’s a pretty slow machine and I’d love to overclock it if you think it’s would really help.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]