Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
A while back I found myself needing a wired Ethernet connection in my garage. I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on the project, but I knew it would some work.
The problem is the garage is on one end of my long ranch-style house while my cable modem and wireless router are located in my office near the other end of the house.
After a bit of reflection, this is the solution that I came up with: [Read more…]
Question from Andy T.: A few years ago one of my co-workers helped me build a computer from scratch and we installed a full retail copy of Windows 7 Home Premium on it. I recently tried to upgrade the memory but found out that I have already maxed out the RAM for this motherboard & CPU combo.
Since I really want to add an additional 8GB of RAM and run USB 3.0 natively, I’m planning to upgrade the motherboard and CPU. I’m just wondering if I’ll need to reinstall Windows.
Will I? Or should I, even if I don’t have to?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
You’ve probably heard by now that Samsung Smart TVs are capable of eavesdropping on the private conversations that take place in your home via their Voice Recognition circuitry.
There are conflicting opinions on just how big a deal this might turn out to be before all is said and done, but being a little on the paranoid side, I don’t much like the idea of my TV being able to spy on me.
If you own one of these TVs and feel the same way I do about the privacy thing, it’s easy enough to disable your Samsung Smart TV’s Voice Recognition feature. Here’s how: [Read more…]
Of all the upgrades you can make to a modern PC, the one that will provide the most bang for the buck, by far, is replacing your existing hard drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD).
If you’ve never used a computer that has an SSD, you’ll be absolutely amazed at how much faster your PC will boot into the operating system and load your programs.
Samsung’s 840 EVO-Series 250GB SSD (#ad) 
If you visited the popular financial news website Forbes.com between November 28 and December 1, 2014, your PC might possibly be infected with a virus.
First the good news: If you are diligent about keeping Internet Explorer up to date by installing all available updates as soon as they become available, you should be in the clear.
And still better news: If you use Firefox, Chrome, or any other non-IE browser you were definitely safe from this particular attack. [Read more…]