Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: How is my PC booting from an empty hard drive?

Posted on December 1, 2025

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Question from Marvin: I read your article about upgrading a computer by switching to an SSD to make it run faster.

The following weekend I went to Best Buy and bought a 1TB SSD and cloned the contents of the existing 1TB hard disk onto it.

I then wiped the hard drive and formatted it. Then I installed the SSD in the computer, leaving the now-blank hard drive in place to store my data files on.

Everything works perfectly but something has me baffled. When I look in the BIOS it says the hard drive is set as the boot drive.

How is this machine booting into Windows when the boot drive is blank?

[Read more…]

How to save ink, paper and money when printing web pages

Posted on November 30, 2025

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Do you occasionally need to print a web page? Or perhaps you frequently print lots of them?

If so, you know how much expensive ink and paper gets wasted by printing website headers, sidebars, ads, irrelevant images and other items that really have no connection whatsoever with the content you actually want to print.

Well, there’s a fantastic free tool called PrintFriendly that will let you print only the items on the page that you really wish to print while omitting the rest.

[Read more…]

Q&A: Why can’t I remove the Antivirus app from my computer?

Posted on November 30, 2025

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Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Dale: Hi, Rick. I have a problem that I hope you can help me with.

Following your recommendation, I recently bought the Premium version of Malwarebytes for our computers. I also read your post about only running one antivirus app at a time.

I’m trying to uninstall AVG Antivirus before installing Malwarebytes, but I’m running into a problem.

I was able to remove AVG from my wife’s computer with no problems at all, but when I try to uninstall it from my laptop it gives me an error and the uninstall fails. Can you tell me what I need to do to remove AVG from my computer? [Read more…]