Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Charise: I read that with all the hacking going on we need to check the strength of our passwords with an online password checker.
I did a Google search for the term “password checker” and a bunch of them came up. The thing is, I’m wondering if it’s safe to use them.
I’m a little leery of typing my passwords into a form on a website that I don’t know anything about.
Are those password checker websites safe to use? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Kendra: Hi, Rick. I really love your blog, especially the section where you answer questions from your readers.
If you don’t mind I’d like to ask a question of my own.
Back in March of 2020 the tech guy I used at the time installed a Crucial 500GB SSD in my Acer laptop and it really made it run a lot faster.
I recently read on another site that all SSDs wear out over time because they can only be written to a certain number of times.
That has me sort of worried because this drive is now about four years old and I have a lot of personal files on it that I don’t want to lose.
My question is do you think this drive is likely to fail at some time in the near future? [Read more…]
Question from Paula: Hi, Rick. Thanks for all your hard work writing and sharing your tips. I’ve been reading your stuff for more years than either of us want to admit!
I’m wondering if you know of a way to do a Google search for things and have them leave pages from Pinterest out of the search results?
Question from Callie: I bought a new Windows laptop (an Acer) that has a camera built into it.
I don’t ever plan to use the camera for anything and I’d like to completely disable it.
I don’t want to just prevent apps from accessing the camera. I want to disable it completely.
Is it possible to do that? If it is, can you tell me how to do it? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Thomas: I have a little cash to spend to upgrade my desktop computer and I need your advice on how best to spend it.
Right now it has 16GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive (which is close to being full).
My question is should I use the money to double the RAM on this machine by adding another 16GB or would I be better off replacing the hard drive with a 1TB SSD? [Read more…]