Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Regular readers of this blog know that I often recommend replacing your computer’s hard drive with a super-fast solid state drive (SSD).
As I explain in this post, SSDs have several advantages over spinning hard drives.
But unfortunately they’ve always had one major disadvantage as well: SSDs have always cost a lot more than hard drives with the same storage capacity.
Well, thankfully that’s rapidly changing.
I’ve written several posts explaining the dangers of using a password manager to store the passwords to all of your online accounts.
Well, new information has recently surfaced that proves just how dangerous password managers really are.
The researchers at Independent Security Evaluators have just published the results of an in-depth study that tested how effective several of the most popular password managers are at protecting your passwords from hackers.
Well, the results are troubling to say the least. [Read more…]
Microsoft encourages Windows users to only download Windows apps from the official Microsoft Store because there’s no way to ensure the safety of apps that are available from third-party download sites.
Well, it appears that Microsoft needs to pick up their game a bit if they want to maintain the Microsoft Store’s reputation as a source for safe app downloads.
Security firm Symantec has just discovered that at least eight apps available from the Microsoft Store start engaging in crypto jacking operations immediately after they are downloaded and installed on a user’s Windows machine.
Question from Donna: I have a 27 inch mid-2011 iMac with 4GB of RAM. It’s running MacOS Sierra.
I’m thinking about taking it to the Geeks Squad and having them to upgrade the RAM to 8GB.
I was talking to them about it a few days ago and they said a RAM upgrade would help a lot since it started running slower after the upgrade to MacOS Sierra.
But the thing is they also quoted me a small fortune for making the upgrade.
My question is would the speed increase from an extra 4GB of RAM speed up the system enough to justify the expense?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Susan: Hi Rick. I have a really serious problem and I’m hoping you can help me solve it.
I’m a singer and I have a pretty sizable following in my local (parts of 5 states) region. You probably wouldn’t recognize my name if you heard it but most of the people in my region would.
Anyway, I use my Twitter account to keep my followers up to date on where I’ll be performing, when I’ll be releasing a new CD and other such “news”.
As of this morning I have approximately 36,000 followers.
The problem I’m having is someone has opened a fake Twitter account using my name and photo and they’ve been using that account to spread false announcements concerning me.
For example, just last week they said I was going to be singing at a county fair about an hour away in a neighboring state. I found out that at least 20 of my fans saw that post and drove long distances from their homes to see me at that fair.
Needless to say they were really upset when they found out I wasn’t there.
And they’re doing other things too like posting nasty things and getting my fans upset. I’ve actually lost several hundred followers on my real Twitter account because of some of the things that were posted on the fake one.
I don’t know why this person is doing this but it’s caused me a lot of heartache. My question is how can I report this fake account to Twitter and (hopefully) have them to remove it. I’ve tried just ignoring the other account but now I realize that I can’t.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]