Rick's Daily Tips

8 Tips for buying open-box and demo tech items

Posted on August 8, 2020

Have you ever walked through your local electronics retailer’s showroom and seen open-box computers, smart phones and other tech items on sale at greatly reduced prices?

I have, and I’m guessing that you have too.

You really can save some serious money by buying open-box and demo tech products, but there are a few things you need to consider before laying out your hard-earned money for one of them.

With that in mind, here are 8 tips for getting a truly good deal on open-box and demo tech products: [Read more…]

Q&A: Can I replace a bad power supply with one from another computer?

Posted on August 7, 2020

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Larry G:. Rick, I have a two Gateway Desktop computers, neither of which are operational.

One has a bad motherboard and the other has a bad power supply.

Can I replace the bad power supply with the one in the computer that has the bad motherboard? If I can I won’t have to go buy one.

The power supplies look exactly the same and have the same cables and connectors, but the working power supply is rated at 400 watts and the bad one is only 350 watts.

I read your post about replacing Windows with Linux and I’d really like to get one of these machines working so I can install Linux Mint on it.

What I need to know is will replacing a power supply with a more powerful one damage a computer?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Review: 2020 HP 15.6″ Touchscreen Laptop Computer

Posted on July 30, 2020

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

In times past, the typical budget and mid-range laptops came stuffed with cheap, inferior components that made for a frustratingly slow and inefficient computing experience. But times have changed.

Nowadays even many mid-range laptops offer plenty of speed and power at affordable prices.

I recently had the opportunity to check out a very affordable mid-range laptop from HP, and overall I believe it’s a great machine for the money.

The 2020 HP 15.6″ Touchscreen Laptop Computer is an attractive, sleek looking laptop that has everything the typical user will need in order to surf the Internet, peruse Facebook and Twitter, watch videos on Youtube, send and receive email, use Microsoft Office and edit photos and videos with Photoshop and other hardware-intensive apps. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware this new (and very dangerous) Netflix phishing scam!

Posted on July 30, 2020

The Netflix video streaming service has almost 200 millions paying customers.

As you can imagine, that makes them and their customers prime targets for hackers and scammers.

A while back I wrote this post warning you about a very dangerous phishing email scam that’s targeting Netflix customers, and now there’s a new one making the rounds that’s just as dangerous.

[Read more…]

Here’s the fastest way to shut down your PC in Windows 10

Posted on July 29, 2020

Those of us who use Windows have long been accustomed to having to make two or three mouse clicks just to shut down our PCs, but there is actually a much easier way…

Simply press the Power button!

Of course that doesn’t work by default on most systems because the Power button is typically programmed to place the PC into Sleep mode.

Luckily, it’s extremely easy to reprogram the Power button to shut the computer down instead of putting it to sleep. Here’s how: [Read more…]