Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Travis H.: You give away some great prizes for your monthly tech giveaways. I’m a subscriber to your newsletter and I see them listed in every issue.
If you don’t mind my asking, where do you get the items that you give away every month? Just curious.
Rick’s answer: That’s a great question Travis, and I’ll be happy to answer it for you.
I typically get the items that I give away at the end of every month in one of three ways: [Read more…]
Now that virtually all new external USB hard drives and USB flash drives can connect at blazing USB 3.0 speeds, a quality USB 3.0 hub is now pretty much a necessity.
And if you own an ultrabook or other small device that has just a single USB 3.0 port, it’s virtually impossible to get along without one.
And since we all seem to have multiple mobile devices these days, we also need a handy way to keep them all charged up and ready for use.
In an effort to simplify things and keep my desk from becoming cluttered with a dozen boxes of various types, I’ve been on the lookout for a high-quality USB 3.0 hub and charger combo unit. Well, I recently found exactly what I’ve been looking for, and more. [Read more…]
Question from Andy S.: My Dell Inspiron 1300 has only 512 Megs of RAM. The machine is now very slow, I suspect that it’s due to lot of paging.
Would it make sense if I buy an Expresscard to USB 3.0 adapter so then I can add a USB 3.0 SSD, Flash Finger or M.2 to the machine? Would it improve the performance?
Thank you very much.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Carla V.: Every time I plug my iPhone into my computer it automatically starts syncing. I don’t want that because I have things on my phone that I don’t want on my other devices.
I know there has to be a way to disable the automatic syncing. Can you tell me how to do it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Chuck H.: A while back I bought a Windows 8.1 retail package (#ad) that contains two discs, one for Windows 8.1/64 bit and the other for Windows 8.1/32 bit.
I installed the 32 bit disc on my old HP laptop after Microsoft abandoned Windows XP. I have never used the 64 bit disc.
My question is can I install Windows 8.1 from the 64 bit disc onto my desktop computer? I had to replace the hard drive and I don’t have a set of recovery discs.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]