Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Darrell F.: Rick, I have a two month old Lenovo Y500 laptop that works great except for one problem…
When I rest my hands on the computer to type something on the keyboard, the sound cuts completely out just as if I had clicked the “Mute” button. When I remove my hands the sound immediately starts working again. Is this something that I can fix myself?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Letting other Dropbox users upload files to your Dropbox account is easy, but what about folks who don’t have a Dropbox account of their own?
Well, now there’s a free app called Dbinbox that lets you easily allow anyone equipped with a web browser to upload files directly into a special folder in your Dropbox account!
Setting up Dbinbox is easy. Here’s how: [Read more…]
Question from Ron K.: Rick, this might seem like a frivolous question (and I admit that it is), but is there any way to determine the total number of hours and minutes that my Dell desktop computer has been powered on since I bought it in May 2008? No biggie if there isn’t, I’m just curious.
Rick’s answer: That isn’t a frivolous question at all Ron. Now you have me curious about how long my PCs have been powered up as well.
To answer your question, I don’t know of any way to use Windows itself to determine the total uptime of a computer, but I do know of a way to get a fairly accurate estimate: [Read more…]
As I explained in this post, Ubuntu Linux is definitely worthy of consideration as a replacement operating system should you ever decide to ditch Microsoft Windows, but it does have a few quirks. Most of those quirks can easily be mitigated however.
One example is the way Ubuntu insists on placing every program window you open in the top left-hand corner of the screen and leaving it there. But there is a simple way to break those windows free of their constraints and move them to the center of the screen (a location that makes infinitely more sense in my opinion). Here’s how: [Read more…]
Question from Andrea L.: Hi Rick. I have a problem and I’m betting you might be able to help me solve it.
My 4 year old daughter likes playing the games on the PBS Kids website (http://pbskids.org). The problem is she isn’t the best at controlling the mouse yet and she sometimes accidentally leaves Internet Explorer and starts click in places where she doesn’t need to be clicking. Last night I caught her clicking around the Control Panel!
Is there a way to force her to stay within the confines of the web browser? The computer runs Windows 7 if that makes a difference. Thanks so much for your help!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]