Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: How can I make Chrome stop asking for a password on my Linux laptop?

Posted on July 18, 2017

Question from Oliver: After reading your post about replacing Windows with Linux I decided to give to try it on an old Windows Vista laptop that I haven’t used in a while.

I took your advice from that post and installed Ubuntu. The installation went fine, and just as you predicted that old laptop now runs a LOT faster than it did with Windows!

Since I’m the only person that will use this machine I removed the password in the user settings and set it to boot into Ubuntu without having to enter a password.

Now the laptop boots up without asking for a password to log in, but every time I load Google Chrome I get a message telling me to enter the password, and I can’t do anything with Chrome until I enter the old password that I deleted from my user account. This is the message I get:

“Enter password to unlock your login keyring“

How can I stop Chrome from asking for a password?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Why is my laptop saying ‘Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC’?

Posted on July 18, 2017

Question from Caitlin: I have an HP Envy X2 laptop that came with Windows 8 originally.

I upgraded the Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, and eventually to Windows 10.

Everything was fine with Windows 10 until the last round of Windows Updates. Now all of a sudden it’s giving me an error screen that says “Windows 10 is no longer supported on this PC”.

Here’s a screenshot showing the error: [Read more…]

Microsoft is once again giving away a boatload of free eBooks!

Posted on July 14, 2017

Every year Microsoft updates their massive library of free eBooks, and the list of their 2017 offerings has just been announced.

You’ll find eBooks for virtually every Microsoft product and service, all the way from Azure to Windows 10.

While most of these eBooks were written for developers on topics that won’t interest the average user, there are several great titles that will benefit most everyone. [Read more…]

How to hide and password protect folders in Windows

Posted on July 10, 2017

Important update: Chrome and Firefox have both started flagging the tool I recommend in this post as malware. I believe this to be a clear case of a false positive but I have removed the links just to be safe.

Original post continues below… [Read more…]

Back up your hard drive a lot faster with an external SSD

Posted on July 9, 2017

By now you probably know how important it is to create regular backups of the data that’s stored on your computer’s hard drive.

You also probably know that it can take a good long while to create each of those backups.

Luckily, there’s a simple and easy way to greatly speed up the backup process (and the restore process as well, should it ever be needed)… [Read more…]