Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Question from Kellie: I was messing around with the network settings on my Windows 11 laptop last night.
While I was in there I noticed that my WiFi network is set to “Public” instead of “Private”.
I’ve always heard that public networks are dangerous.
Is that true? And if it is, how can I change it to private? [Read more…]
Question from Luella: My sister bought a new laptop a while back and after using it for a couple of days she decided she hates Windows 11.
She was going to return it and buy a Mac but I told her I would just buy the laptop from her since I had been planning to buy one anyway.
The thing is this laptop shows up on our company network under my sister’s name and I don’t know how to fix it. I know our IT guy could do it but he’s out on vacation and won’t be back until the end of the month.
Would you mind telling me how to change the name on this laptop from my sister’s name to my name? [Read more…]
If you have a WiFi-enabled Windows PC there might come a time when you’ll need to switch your connection to a different WiFi network than the one your machine is currently connected to.
For example, your laptop might automatically connect to a network with a weak signal when you know there’s another network available with a much stronger signal.
Or perhaps it automatically connected to an insecure unencrypted network instead of the secure network you intended to use.
Whatever the reason, you can easily switch your PC’s Wi-Fi connection from one network to another one with just a few clicks of your mouse. [Read more…]
Question from Tim: I have what is surely an easy question to answer, Rick.
Is it safe to run a laptop without a battery installed?
I’ve heard conflicting answers and I’d really love to have your opinion on the matter.
Like other popular web browsers, Safari allows you to choose the default search engine you want to use when you search for something on the web with your Apple device.
Safari comes pre-configured with Google set as its default search engine, but you can easily change that to Bing, DuckDuckGo or one of several other popular search engines if you choose to do so. [Read more…]