Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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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…]
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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…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Question from Doreen: Hi, Rick. I moonlight doing product research for a local company, and I often find myself having to scan looooong web pages for a certain word or phrase related to the task at hand.
Some of these pages are literally thousands of words in length, and the font size is often very small which makes it even harder to find what I’m looking for.
Is there any way that I can just search for the word or phrase and have Firefox take me right to it? [Read more…]