Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Elise: I hate it when I’m trying to type a comment or status update on Facebook and a tooltip pops up and won’t let me see what I’m typing.
I use Facebook with both Chrome and Firefox and the problem shows up in both of them. Is there any way to disable the annoying tooltips in those browsers?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
VTech is a major toy manufacturer, and if you have children chances are they own at least one of their toys. In fact, it’s a pretty good bet that they do.
If your kids do own a VTech toy, you (and they) might also have accounts with the VTech Learning Lodge, an online repository for educational apps and games.
Well, the VTech Learning Lodge’s computers have been hacked, and if both you and your child have accounts there the hackers now have your child’s name, age, birth date and mailing address. That means if your family’s mailing address is also your physical address, the hackers now know where your child lives. [Read more…]
Update: This is is no longer available.
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Your Android phone has a wonderful power-saving feature called “Doze”, and it’s really pretty amazing.
In a nutshell, Doze puts your phone into a deep sleep when it’s idle, preventing non-critical apps from transferring data in the background during the times when your phone isn’t being used.
Don’t worry, your phone will still ring when someone calls you and you’ll still receive incoming text messages, but pretty much everything else is placed in a holding pattern. And that helps your phone’s battery lost a lot longer than it would otherwise. [Read more…]
Hello everyone. I hope you all had a great week!
Now that Thanksgiving has come and gone, lots of folks have turned their attention to Christmas shopping. And especially at this time of year, we’re out to spend as little as we can get by with!
These days the latest tech gear tops many a Christmas wish list, but it helps to keep in mind that shopping for computers, smart phones, game consoles and such is a lot different from shopping for sweaters and neckties. [Read more…]
Question from Carol K.: I have an older 120GB external USB hard drive that I’ve used for years with my Dell desktop PC.
The Dell bit the dust a couple of weeks ago and I replaced it with a 3 year old Acer laptop that my son gave me after he bought a new one.
The problem I’m having is the old external drive has a bunch of files on it that I really need to access with the laptop, but I can’t get the drive to show up in Windows Explorer.
I know the drive itself is still working because it works fine when I plug it into my computer at work. I’m hoping you can tell me what I need to do to get my old USB hard drive to work with the Acer laptop?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]