Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Although a fast CPU and plenty of RAM and hard drive space are important, the monitor is arguably the most important part of any computer system.
After all, you’ll be staring at the screen virtually the entire time you’re using your computer.
I recently received an ASUS VS228H-P 21.5-Inch Full-HD LCD Monitor (#ad) for review, and after working out a minor quirk I quickly came to realize that I really love this monitor! [Read more…]
Question from Michael: Hi Rick. I hope you can help me fix a problem I’m having with a brand new PC I just finished building.
After I got everything put together I installed Windows 10 on it and made a few settings changes.
Everything seemed fine and the system booted up normally a total of three times.
But the next time I turned it on the screen stayed blank and the motherboard’s LED error code display stayed on.
I’ve tried turning it off and back on several times but it just won’t boot up.
Any thoughts on what could be causing this? I don’t think it’s a software problem because I haven’t even installed any programs on it yet.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Gill: On a whim I bought a used Mac Pro at a yard sale for a ridiculously low price. I figured it was worth taking a chance on.
When I got it home I plugged it in and it powered up just fine, but I found out there was no hard drive in it.
I had a used hard drive that I had removed from another computer so I installed it in the Mac Pro.
The problem is I don’t know how to install OS X onto the new hard drive. Can you tell me the best (and hopefully easiest) way to do that?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
I’m often asked if I’d be willing to recover the photos and other files from a “dead” laptop or desktop computer.
I typically refer them to this post that explains how to retrieve their files themselves, but some folks prefer to pay me to do the job for them because they don’t want to take a chance on accidentally trashing their files.
I provide this service because I know how important precious photos and other irreplaceable files can be to their owners.
Here’s the deal… [Read more…]
Many of the posts I publish on this blog are warnings about scams and hoaxes that happen to be making the rounds at the time.
Well, this post is sort of the opposite of those “Scam Alert” posts.
I’ve had several people message me to ask whether the “Time to Shift” notices from Microsoft are real or if they’re a hoax.
If you haven’t seen one of these notices yet, you surely will before long. The wording can vary slightly, but they typically read something like this: [Read more…]