Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
External USB hard drives give us tons of flexibility when it comes to storing large amounts of data and sharing it among multiple devices, but they tend to be quite fragile.
Drop one on a hard surface and the drive will likely be damaged beyond repair.
Well, now you won’t have to worry about that any longer because the folks at Transcend have developed a 1 TB external USB hard drive (#ad) that can withstand a moderate drop without sustaining any damage. [Read more…]
A while back I told you about Manuals Online, a vast online library of user manuals for most any kind of product you can think of.
If you own it, Manuals Online probably has a digital copy of its user manual on their website for you to download at no cost.
Well, today I’m going to tell you about another great source for free user manuals, but this one offers manuals exclusively for tech products. [Read more…]
Important update: The browser extension mentioned in this post has been removed from the Chrome web store. It apparently morphed into malware so Google banned it. I have removed the links to it from the original post.
Have you ever tried to find a web page you’ve visited in the past by scanning your browser history? If so, you probably found the experience both difficult and frustrating.
Most browsers display your history items in a boring, confusing list that’s hard to read and even harder to understand, but a fantastic Chrome extension called Better History makes finding the URL you’re looking for a breeze!
Chrome already does a much better job at displaying your browser’s history items than most other browsers, but the Better History extension takes that already enhanced usability to an entirely different level. [Read more…]
Mid-range laptops keep getting better while prices are lower than ever, and that’s a great thing for consumers.
I recently had the opportunity to check out the HP 15-ay011nr 15.6″ Full-HD Laptop, a powerful new mid-range machine that offers plenty of bang for the computing buck.
The heart of this laptop is its powerful Intel Core i5 6200U, 2.3GHz, Dual-Core CPU and 8GB of RAM. This is a potent combination that makes Windows 10 really fly, and I found this to be one of the fastest sub-$500 laptops that I’ve used to date. [Read more…]
If you’ve already installed the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on your PC you might be wondering where a huge chunk of your free hard drive/SSD storage space went.
Well, when Windows Update installs a new major Windows release it automatically backs up the previous Windows installation just in case you need to revert back to it for some reason.
That’s a good thing because it provides a way to roll your system back to the previous version of Windows in case something goes wrong with the update.
But there’s a problem: It can take as much as 40GB of storage space to hold the files in that previous Windows version backup. That means dozens of Gigabytes of “wasted” space won’t be available for storing photos, Office documents and/or other important user-created files.
Of course if your system has a massive hard drive with tons of unused space available, you probably won’t even miss that “wasted” disk space.
But what if your hard drive was already close to being maxed out before the upgrade? Or maybe your PC has a relatively small solid state drive (SSD) (#ad) instead of a much larger hard drive?
If you find yourself running low on storage space after installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you can easily recover dozens of Gigabytes of space by removing those old Windows backup files. Just follow the steps below: [Read more…]