Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Should I replace a 4 year old SSD just to be safe?

Posted on January 26, 2024

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…]

Q&A: Can you exclude a specific website from Google’s search results?

Posted on January 25, 2024

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?

[Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware these fake “Microsoft Account Update” emails

Posted on January 24, 2024

Phishing scam attempts are distributed in many forms, but most of them arrive in our email Inboxes in the form of fraudulent emails.

The scammers are getting better at their evil craft by the day and it’s pretty hard to tell some of the fake emails from real ones.

Luckily, that isn’t the case with this latest round of phishing emails.

Here’s a screenshot one such email that landed in my Inbox this morning: [Read more…]

How to check your smartphone’s memory usage

Posted on January 24, 2024

Even premium smartphones have their limitations. As soon as the memory and space on the smartphone runs out, it will begin appear unstable, start to lag, or even freeze up or turn off.

The problem isn’t necessarily the smartphone memory, but you can easily check to see if RAM and/or storage space usage on your smartphone could be causing the issues. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware fake Gmail ‘account closure’ emails

Posted on January 24, 2024

There’s a very dangerous email scam making the rounds again, and as before it’s catching a lot of Gmail users off-guard.

As usual, the text of the email varies a bit, but the message conveyed is always the same.

The email claims to be from Google in response to a request to close your Gmail account. [Read more…]