Rick's Daily Tips

Do you own a Vizio TV? If so, it might have just been recalled.

Posted on August 12, 2014

vizio-tv TV maker Vizio has just announced a massive recall of almost a quarter of a million of their TV sets. The reason? They have a tendency to fall over, potentially crushing whatever they happen to fall on.

If you own a Vizio TV, take heed (especially if you happen to have small children or pets).

If your TV is an E390-B0, E390i-B0, or E420i-B0, you might have one of the recalled models. If so, I strongly recommend that you contact Vizio and arrange to have your TV repaired at no cost to you. [Read more…]

Defraggler – A faster, better way to defrag your hard drive

Posted on August 11, 2014

defraggler When Microsoft Windows saves a file to the hard drive, it is often saved in fragments that are scattered all over the drive’s platters instead of as a single continuous, unbroken stream of ones and zeroes.

This process is called fragmentation, and over time a heavily fragmented drive can slow down your PC to a snail’s pace as the drive’s read/write heads must travel hither and yon to find all of a file’s pieces and patch them back together before the file can be used by the CPU.

Every version of Windows includes a “defragging” tool that can rearrange all the files on your hard drive into nice, fast loading contiguous chunks of code, often speeding up your system considerably in the process. But the defragger built into Windows has a huge drawback: it’s slow! [Read more…]

2 popular alternatives to the Facebook Messenger app

Posted on August 9, 2014

A while back I wrote a post alerting users that Facebook is removing the messaging feature from the popular Facebook Mobile app and encouraging everyone to download the Facebook Messenger app to use in its place.

Since then several people have asked me if there are any alternatives to the Facebook Messenger app, so I decided to do a little research to see what’s available and which apps are the most popular among Facebook users.

As it turns out, there are several third party messenger apps that can stand in for Facebook Messenger. Below I list a couple of the most popular ones along with links to each app in both iTunes and the Google Play Store. [Read more…]

Microsoft to stop supporting older versions of Internet Explorer

Posted on August 8, 2014

Microsoft has announced that beginning in January 2016 they will stop supporting all but the latest version of Internet Explorer – which as of today is IE 11. Of course there could be an even newer version by the time 2016 rolls around.

This policy change means if you’re running an older version of IE you won’t receive security updates for your browser after that date. And as well all know, using an unsupported web browser is just asking for trouble.

Microsoft has two goals in mind with this new policy: [Read more…]

Facebook is removing the Messaging feature from its mobile app

Posted on August 5, 2014

Do you use Facebook’s mobile app to send and receive messages via your Android or iOS device? If so, you won’t be able to do it much longer.

Facebook has announced that they are now in the process of rolling out a new version of the Facebook app that doesn’t include the messaging feature. That means if you want keep on sending and receiving Facebook messages while on the go, you’ll need to download the stand-alone Facebook Messenger app. [Read more…]