Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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If you happen to live in an area that gets hit with frequent power outages, it pays to be prepared just in case the electricity goes off for hours, or even days at a time.
And if the power outage takes out your heat pump you’d better hope you have an HVAC service agreement template.
In my opinion, the best way to be prepared for an extended power outage is to have a portable generator
Question from Kathleen: I recently bought a Roku device and I’m enjoying it immensely.
A co-worker told me she watches YouTube videos on her TV via the Roku but I looked through all the channels and I can’t find it.
Can you tell me how to watch YouTube with my Roku? [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
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Question from Kristen: The hard drive in my laptop has stopped working and I need to take it somewhere to have it fixed.
I’ve been taking your advice about creating regular System Image backups and I have a fairly recent backup they can use to restore everything once the bad hard drive is replaced.
What worries me is I have a lot of really personal photos that were backed up along with everything else. Will a tech be able to see them? [Read more…]
Question from Bill: I recently read an article about using hard drives or SSDs in a RAID configuration.
The article said RAID 1 copies all data to every drive in the array at the same time, essentially creating a clone of the primary drive in real time.
In the comments on the article someone suggested that using two drives in RAID 1 will automatically create a backup, eliminating the need to back up the hard drive in the usual way.
That made sense to me but then someone else commented and said that’s a really bad idea. But he didn’t explain why.
What’s your opinion on using RAID 1 to create automatic backups? Is it a good idea or not?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Barry: I bought an Acer Aspire S7-391 laptop with Windows 8 at an estate auction.
I took a chance on it because it looks brand new and I was able to buy it for only $20. I’m hoping that’s a good deal (LOL).
Once I got the laptop home and booted it up I found out that it has 3 user accounts on it.
The machine boots up fine into an administrator account that doesn’t have a password on it. The other two accounts I can’t get into because they do have passwords (and I don’t know them).
I’d like to reset this machine back to the factory default setting so I can I install Linux on it. Can you tell me how to do the reset? [Read more…]