Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Is is safe to replace a video card that literally burned up inside my computer?

Posted on December 2, 2018

Question from Telsi P.: I have a 5 year old gaming computer that came with a fairly weak video card.

About three years ago I replaced that original GPU with a MSI R9 390 GAMING 8G Graphics Card and it worked great until yesterday when it burned out on me.

And I do really mean BURNED OUT!!

This computer’s case has a see-through side panel and I literally saw the video card shooting flames.

I quickly unplugged the computer and removed the video card. One small section of the card was almost completely destroyed but there’s no damage that I can find anywhere on the motherboard.

The computer starts up fine and runs perfectly using the motherboard’s integrated video. My question is can I just replace the bad video card and everything will be ok?

I’m not all that concerned about the computer itself because I’m planning to replace it fairly soon anyway but I’d hate to burn out an expensive new video card by plugging it into a bad GPU slot.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Can I use my phone as a remote for my DSLR camera?

Posted on November 28, 2018

Question from Josie M.: I have a photographer friend who uses her phone as a remote for her Canon DSLR.

She said she’s been doing this for a couple of years and she doesn’t even know where her real remote is anymore.

Do you know if I can do the same thing with my LG Rebel 4 phone and Nikon D3400 DSLR?

If so, how does it work?

I really like the idea of being able to carry around one less piece of equipment. [Read more…]

How to replace the hard drive in a laptop

Posted on November 26, 2018

I have written several posts that discuss either replacing a bad laptop hard drive with a new one or upgrading the system with a larger drive or an SSD.

Last night I was answering a reader’s question about a hard drive upgrade when it occurred to me that I’ve never really explained how to physically swap out the drives.

Replacing the hard drive in most laptops is almost as easy as selling popcorn in a movie theater. Just follow the simple steps listed below: [Read more…]

Still using Windows XP or Vista? If so, you won’t be able to update Avast Antivirus when the next version is released.

Posted on November 20, 2018

Avast has announced that the current version of Avast Antivirus (version 18.8) is the last version that can be installed on PCs running either Windows XP or Windows Vista.

That means if your PC is still running either XP or Vista you won’t be able to update to the next version of Avast when it gets released next year.

[Read more…]