Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
I frequently receive requests for help from people who have been swindled out of large sums of cash by people they met on the Internet.
Unfortunately, in the vast majority of those cases there’s really nothing I can do to help.
I received another of those sad requests just last night, and this one upset me even more than usual…
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
I know someone who recently bought a Windows laptop after her MacBook went belly-up on her.
She asked me if Windows would ever have a feature like the Macs that would allow the system to start up with the last-used programs and websites already open.
My answer: It already does!
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Do you ever have any conversations with your Alexa device that you’d prefer that other family members or house guests not be able to hear?
Or do you occasionally prompt Alexa to answer a query late at night only to have her wake up everyone in the house with her reply?
Well, as luck would have it, your Alexa device has a nifty “Whisper Mode” that can prevent others from hearing (and/or being disturbed by) the conversations you have with the device. [Read more…]
I receive hundreds of tech questions every week, and the one I seem to get asked most often is how to retrieve the files from the hard drive after a PC goes belly-up.
My answer always depends on which part of the computer has failed.
If the hard drive itself is the component that died, you’ll have to either send the drive off to a data recovery service or purchase a data recovery software utility and attempt to recover the files yourself. [Read more…]
When using Microsoft Windows, there are times when we need to find the entire path to a file’s exact ‘location’ on the hard drive (i.e. the file’s pathname).
For example, some of the tips I post on this blog require entering a file’s full pathname into a text field of some sort.
Back in the Stone Age of personal computing when the DOS operating system ruled the roost, determining a file’s pathname was easy…. [Read more…]