Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Back in the golden age of personal computers virtually every PC had a Light Emitting Diode (aka LED) that would light up and flash every time a program accessed the hard drive. But many modern PCs don’t have a hard drive activity light. DiskLED is a free Windows utility that places a virtual hard drive activity light in your Windows system tray.
Why do you need to know when the hard drive is being accessed? There are actually several reasons: [Read more…]
In 2012 more text messages were sent via free texting apps on smart phones than by traditional SMS Text Messaging services, and the number of free texts vs. paid texts is growing at a fast rate. This is a great thing for consumers, but the cell carriers are taking a major financial hit because of it.
SMS text messages have always been a major source of easy profit for the carrier. They cost virtually nothing to transmit but bring in boatloads of cash.
But the immense popularity of apps such as Heywire, iMessage and WhatsApp have cut those profits by huge margins. And the bleeding is likely to continue and even pick up the pace as more users find out about these apps and begin using them. [Read more…]
Question from Anita P.: Hi Rick. I hope you can help me. I’m semi-addicted to Youtube and I watch it every day.
I like watching the videos full screen but about a week ago the full screen feature stopped working. Is there any way I can get it to work again? I use Google Chrome as my web browser.
Rick‘s answer: Hi Anita. I haven’t encountered this problem before, but after doing a quick Google search I found out that lots of other people have. Here is the solution that seems to work for most people: [Read more…]
If you have ever used Windows 7 you probably remember creating a System Repair Disc soon after setting up your new PC just in case it ever failed to boot up properly. You can create one for your Windows 8 PC as well, but you also have the option of creating a bootable USB Flash Recovery Drive instead.
You can use either a System Repair Disc or USB Recovery Flash Drive to boot a PC that fails to start up properly into an emergency troubleshooting and repair mode. They both do the job equally well, but I prefer the USB flash drive option for a number of reasons. If you do as well, here’s how to create one in Windows 8: [Read more…]
When Microsoft designed Windows 8/8.1 they optimized the boot process in order to make Windows load faster.
While this was a welcome change from previous Windows versions, the faster boot time made it impossible to use the F8 key to load the Boot Menu for booting into Safe Mode.
If you prefer the convenience of being able to boot into Safe Mode in Windows 8 by pressing the F8 key at startup over the faster boot process, you can re-enable the F8 key and have it work just like it always has. Here’s how: [Read more…]