Rick's Daily Tips

Is your PC infected with a Rootkit virus? Here’s how to find out.

Posted on October 1, 2020

As you probably know, modern day malware comes in many forms.

Some varieties, such as adware, are often merely annoying.

But more malicious forms of malware can actually wreck your Windows installation and help hackers steal your identity and/or your valuable financial information.

A high-quality anti-virus program such as Avast can help keep your computer free of malware, but a special class of malware known as rootkits often goes undetected by regular virus scans.

Rootkits load into your computer’s memory before Windows even boots up, and that makes them especially difficult to find. [Read more…]

Q&A: Why is Chrome using so much of my computer’s RAM?

Posted on September 29, 2020

Question from Keith: Hi Rick. I’m having a computer problem that I hope you can help me fix.

I have a Dell desktop computer that’s running Windows 10 Home.

This machine has 8GB of RAM which seems like it should be plenty, but I’ve started getting frequent “Low Memory” warnings.

When I open the Task Manager I see that there are over two dozen Chrome processes running, and every one of them is using a big chunk of of RAM.

Even if I only have a couple of Chrome tabs open I still see a bunch of Chrome processes eating up lots of RAM! Is this normal? If not, what can I do to fix it?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Review: FixMeStick Gold (hardware-based malware removal tool)

Posted on September 28, 2020

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Viruses, trojans and other malware infections are spreading like wildfire these days.

And as you probably know, all of those nasties can allow identity thieves and scammers to steal your info without you even knowing about it.

There are a number of excellent anti-malware programs out there that can rid your computer of most of these exploits, but some infections are so insidious that they won’t even allow Windows to boot up.

And even when Windows somehow manages to boot up, the malware that has taken control of your computer will often prevent your anti-virus program from loading into memory or running correctly. [Read more…]