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Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Question from Martina: I have an Internet question for you, Rick.
I keep hearing the terms “website” and “web page” and I find them a little confusing. Is there a difference between the two or do they both mean the same thing?
Rick’s answer: Martina, the terms “website” and “web page” are closely related but they in fact refer to two very different things. Some people use them interchangeably, but they really shouldn’t.
Here’s the scoop… [Read more…]
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Question from Kevin: For a while now I’ve been using Bitly to shorten my blog post URLs before I post them on Twitter and LinkedIn so I can track the clicks on them.
Yesterday I heard that using a URL shortener can cause a website to rank lower in the search engines.
Is that true? [Read more…]
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Question from Phillip W.: Rick, I have a Dell laptop with Windows 7 on it and I need your help fixing a problem I’m having with it.
I downloaded a game from a free games website and now some of the keys on my keyboard produce strange characters when I press them.
The letters look normal but they have various punctuation marks added to them almost like I’m typing in a foreign language. How can I fix this?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
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System Restore is a powerful tool for reversing detrimental changes to your PC’s Windows installation.
In a nutshell, System Restore allows you to “roll back” the Windows installation to the state it was in at a time before the detrimental changes were made.
For example, lets say that somehow a critical Windows setting gets changed and your system starts doing strange and unexpected things.
You can usually fix this type of issue by simply using System Restore to roll Windows back to a Restore Point that was created a few days earlier.
System Restore is typically launched from within Windows, but what if the issue at hand is so severe that your PC won’t boot up into Windows at all? [Read more…]
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Question from Carmen: I have an HP laptop that I use both at home and at work.
I have to connect to our office network via the wired Ethernet port because we don’t have Wi-Fi there (my boss says WiFi is a security risk).
The problem is the laptop’s built-in Ethernet adapter got fried a couple of days ago when a power surge took out my router at home.
My brother gave me an old USB to Ethernet adapter to do in the interim, but I really need to get one that works at Gigabit speed because we transfer large files all the time at work.
Can you recommend a good USB Gigabit Ethernet adapter that won’t cost me an arm and a leg that will plug into a USB 3.0 port? [Read more…]