Rick's Daily Tips

T-Mobile ‘Simple Choice’ customers can use their phones anywhere in North America for no extra charge.

Posted on July 13, 2015

Beginning July 15, all T-Mobile customers who have a “Simple Choice” plan will be able to use their phones to make voice calls, send and receive texts and use their 4G LTE data anywhere in North America with no roaming charges.

The need to pay expensive roaming charges after crossing the border into Mexico or Canada has always been a major issue for cellular customers who travel between the U.S. and our two neighboring countries. But after the 15th, that issue will no longer exist for “Simple Choice” customers. [Read more…]

Great news: You might be able to buy Windows 10 on a USB Flash Drive

Posted on July 6, 2015

If you have ever installed Windows from an optical disc, you surely know how slow the process is. That’s because by their very nature, even the fastest optical drive is a slug compared to virtually any form of solid state storage.

We have been able to download Windows over the Internet for some time now, but before we could use the software we still had to burn the ISO image onto either a DVD or USB Flash Drive.

Regardless of which type of media we chose to use for our installation medium, it was still a hassle getting the software onto onto it. And if we chose to put it on a DVD, actually installing Windows onto a PC was still as slow as molasses on a cold winter day.

Well, it appears that we just might have a much simpler and faster option for installing Windows beginning with the official release of Windows 10. [Read more…]

Q&A: Why do I get an erroneous “Out of Ink” error when using refilled ink cartridges?

Posted on July 5, 2015

Question from Alice S.: I went to buy new ink cartridges for my Canon MP495 printer, and while searching for the right cartridges I happened to notice that the store also sells refilled ink cartridges.

The prices of the refills were about half the price of new ones so I decided to give them a try. When I got home I installed the refilled cartridges and began printing several documents that I really need to get printed.

At first everything was fine, but after a few pages had been printed an error message popped up on the screen telling me the printer was out of ink and that I needed to order more. I know that both cartridges have plenty of ink, so why is the computer telling me otherwise?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Step-by-step instructions for performing a factory reset on dozens of popular smart phones

Posted on July 5, 2015

Today’s smart phones are actually small, but powerful hand-held computers that are subject to all the annoyances and dangers that can afflict their larger cousins like laptops and desktop PCs.

Indeed, phones often become bloated with unnecessary apps and corrupted files. And unfortunately, they can even become infected with malware.

Fantastic apps like Lookout Mobile Security and Clean Master can help keep your phone free of malware, bloatware and other junk, but phones can still occasionally get so messed up and unstable that they become virtually unusable. And in extreme instances, they even lock up completely.

When situations like these arise, the best (and sometimes only) option is to simply do a factory reset on the phone and start over from scratch. But what if you don’t know how to do a factory reset on your particular phone? [Read more…]

Microsoft is planning to roll out Windows 10 in ‘waves’ beginning on July 29

Posted on July 2, 2015

A few weeks ago I wrote a couple of blog posts about the upcoming release of Windows 10.

The first post explained how Microsoft is planning to release Windows 10 to the public on July 29.

The second post explained that the Windows 10 upgrade will be free for PCs running Windows 7 or 8.1.

A few weeks later Microsoft told us that Windows XP and Vista users can also upgrade to Windows 10 for free by jumping through a hoop or two.

Well, today they announced that not everyone will receive the Windows 10 upgrade on July 29 as we had been led to believe. Instead, Windows 10 will be rolled out to various classes of users in “waves”. [Read more…]