Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Rita: My granddaughter is in the Air Force and the last time she was in she opened a Snapchat account on my phone so I can chat with her while she’s overseas.
The name she gave me on there is “Grandma”.
That’s fine, but I’ve recently started talking to other people on Snapchat and I’d like to use my real name instead of Grandma.
Can you tell me how to change it? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Virtually every computer technician on the planet keeps one very special piece of equipment on hand, and you should too.
It’s called a SATA/IDE to USB adapter, and it’s quite simply the handiest tool on any computer tech’s test bench. [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Question from Janie: I have an Asus VW266 27″ LCD monitor that I’ve had for several years. I’d really like to keep it because my late father gave it to me before he passed away, but I’ve started having problems with it.
About a month ago it started taking a minute or two for anything to be displayed on the screen after I turned it on.
The screen would just stay black for a couple of minutes, then display the picture.
These past few days it’s taking longer still for the picture to show. The screen stayed black for about 20 minutes this morning. [Read more…]
As you probably know by now, Microsoft designed Windows 10 and Windows 11 to be quite intrusive when it comes to your privacy.
By default, the operating system collects all sorts of sensitive user data and stores it on your PC’s hard drive and/or sends it back to Microsoft via the Internet.
Luckily, most of Windows’ “spying” can be either mitigated somewhat or disabled completely if you know where to look for the various settings.
Unfortunately, finding (and understanding) all of the relevant privacy settings can be a challenge to say the least. [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Kyle: The hard drive in my computer died and I replaced it with an SSD per your suggestion.
I’ve read that SSD’s are a lot more reliable than hard drives and that they rarely go bad.
My question is do I need to back up my SSD like I did my hard drive? [Read more…]