Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
As many of you may have already noticed, Google recently changed the way Gmail displays images that are attached to the emails in your inbox.
In the past, the email would contain a short notification that the message contains an attachment, along with a link to click to display it. But now images are displayed by default, whether you want to see them or not.
There are several scenarios in which you might not want the messages in your emails to be displayed by default: [Read more…]
Question from Julie T.: I bought a Lenovo computer with Windows 8 on it in August and finally got around to upgrading it to Windows 8.1 just a few days ago.
After 8.1 was installed I noticed that the apps I had downloaded before I did the upgrade were all missing. I downloaded all of them again but they still aren’t showing up on the Start Screen.
What am I doing wrong? Are the apps not being installed even though it says they are?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
On January 1, 2014 it will become illegal to manufacture incandescent light bulbs in the U.S. or import them from other countries. This means if you use either 40 watt or 60 watt incandescent bulbs you won’t be able to buy any more of them once current retailer inventories run out.
This is all due to the passage of a 2007 bill that set minimum energy efficiency standards for light bulbs.
While the law doesn’t actually outlaw incandescent bulbs directly, it sets the standard for energy efficiency for each class of bulb so low that it would be impossible to design and make an incandescent bulb that meets them – which of course effectively makes it illegal to make them. [Read more…]
Question from Christopher: My neighbor gave me an old Gateway GM5442 desktop computer that has two 1GB RAM modules in it. The RAM should be good because he stopped using the computer after the hard drive died.
Can I pull the RAM from that Gateway and add it to my HP Pro 3500? (It has two empty memory slots.) I’d just throw caution to the wind and give it a try, but I really can’t afford to mess anything up.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Amazon has just announced a free financing deal on their popular Kindle Fire HDX tablets. It works like this:
1 – Choose the Kindle Fire HDX you wish to buy and add it to your cart.
2 – Complete the checkout process where you’ll be charged 25% of the purchase price plus applicable taxes and shipping charges. Your Kindle Fire HDX will be shipped to you right away. [Read more…]