Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: How do you silence a noisy mouse?

Posted on July 18, 2025

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Question from Maggie: My computer is in our bedroom and my mouse makes a loud clicking sound that drives my husband up the wall when he’s trying to sleep.

I tried the instructions from several articles I found online about silencing the mouse in the Control Panel, but nothing works.

I believe it’s the mouse itself that’s generating the clicking sound. Do you know of any way to make it stop making that irritating clicking noise? [Read more…]

How to convert a bare hard drive or SSD into an external USB drive

Posted on July 18, 2025

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Hard drives and SSDs are dirt cheap these days when compared to the prices from times past, and SSDs that are large enough to actually be usable are now quite affordable.

That’s why so many people are choosing to simply replace the hard drives in their computers instead of buying an entire new PC.

If you’ve taken the plunge and replaced the hard drive in your computer with a larger and/or faster drive, you might be wondering what you can do with your old drive. [Read more…]

Q&A: What does the phrase ‘brick your phone’ mean?

Posted on July 17, 2025

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Question from Betty: I read an article suggesting that everyone needs to keep the software on their smartphones up to date.

It also said to be careful not to ‘brick your phone’ while you’re updating it. Can you tell me what they mean by that? Thanks. [Read more…]

How to ask for a second opinion after a clean virus scan (and why you should)

Posted on July 16, 2025

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Over the years I’ve worked on lots of computers that exhibited all the classic signs of a malware infection.

And as you might expect, many of the owners of those machines insisted that the problem couldn’t possibly be malware because they regularly scan their systems with antivirus programs.

But when I ran my own scans on those systems, I often discovered that they were indeed infected, some of them with dozens of viruses, spyware objects, malicious toolbars and other digital nasties.

How could that be? [Read more…]

Did you know you can subscribe to Amazon Prime one month at a time?

Posted on July 15, 2025

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By now you probably know that Amazon Prime members get fast and free shipping on Prime-eligible products plus a bunch of other awesome perks. It truly is one of the best deals around.

That being said, you might be reluctant to sign up for a Prime membership due to the $139 annual fee, especially if you tend to cluster your Amazon shopping at various times of the year.

Well guess what? You can sign up for Amazon Prime one month at a time if you only need it for a short time. [Read more…]