Rick's Daily Tips

textPlus – Slash your cell phone bill by texting for free

Posted on January 31, 2013

text-plus If you send thousands of text messages every month but rarely actually talk on the phone, you can use a free app called textPlus to send and receive all the text messages you want for free.

textPlus works great with Andoid phones, iPhones and even iPads and iPod touch devices. This is a great way to downgrade your cell phone plan in order to save money, yet still have the ability to send unlimited texts.

There is one caveat to consider though. Whenever you aren’t connected via Wi-Fi, your text messages will be sent and received via your phone’s data pipe so you’ll need to keep an eye on your data usage. This shouldn’t really be a problem though unless you already max out your data usage each month.

Depending on your phone type, you can download textPlus for free from iTunes or the Google Play Store.

Would you pay $100 a year to use Microsoft Office?

Posted on January 30, 2013

The recent release of Microsoft Office 2013 also brought with it a new way of paying for it. Now, instead of paying a single fee upfront for the privilege of installing and using the ubiquitous office suite, you can opt to pay a yearly fee of $99.99 instead.

Yes, you read that right. You can now choose between paying $139.99 to $399.99 (depending on the version) just once like you always have or shelling out a hundred bucks each and every year.

The guys and gals in Redmond are calling this new subscription payment model Office 365, and for good reason. After the year is up you have to pony up another $100 if you want to keep using the software. Sounds like a pretty bad deal right? Well, it does have a couple of things going for it: [Read more…]

Q&A: Why is everything I click on trying to open in Notepad?

Posted on January 28, 2013

Question from Kim: Everything was working fine until this morning, but now every time I click on a file it tries to open in Notepad. I can’t open anything! Please help??? My computer has Windows 7 if that matters. Thanks!!

Rick’s answer: It sounds like your file associations have gotten messed up Kim. Your PC’s Windows installation associates virtually all common file types with a specific application that it uses to open that file by default whenever you click on it.

For example, files with the .doc extension are usually opened with Microsoft Word while .xls files typically open in Excel. There are literally dozens of other file types with different extensions, and Windows looks at the extension to decide which program it should use to open that file by default. [Read more…]

Make Process Explorer the default Task Manager in Microsoft Windows

Posted on January 27, 2013

process-explorer If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you might remember this post about Process Explorer, a powerful free replacement for the native Windows Task Manager utility. If not, I suggest you check it out because it is vastly superior to Task Manager.

If you downloaded Process Explorer and gave it a try, you might be wishing you could have it load automatically in place of the native Task Manager after pressing the Ctrl-Alt-Del keyboard combination. Well, you can, and it’s very easy to set up. Here’s how: [Read more…]

How to change the boot order on a dual-boot Microsoft Windows/Ubuntu Linux system

Posted on January 25, 2013

change-boot-order If you have a dual-boot system which lets you boot your PC into either Microsoft Windows or Ubuntu Linux, odds are the default O.S. is Ubuntu.

If you boot the computer into Ubuntu most of the time, this works out great. You can just press the PC’s power button and go grab a snack or something, then return to an Ubuntu Desktop ready and waiting for you.

But if you boot into Windows more than Ubuntu, you have to sit at the computer and wait for the Boot Menu to appear so you can instruct the computer to boot into Windows instead of Ubuntu. If you find yourself having to do this on a regular basis you can easily change the boot order of the operating systems on your PC and make Windows the default. [Read more…]