Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: How do I restore my Windows PC to the factory default settings?

Posted on February 3, 2013

Question from Lynn: How do I restore my laptop to the factory settings before I give it to somebody else?

Rick’s answer: Lynn, there are two ways to reset a Windows PC back to its factory settings. The first one is to simply insert the Restore disc into the optical drive and boot from it. You can reinstall Windows from there.

The second option is probably the most widely used one these days since most PCs come without a set of Restore discs and few people take the time to create one. Here are step-by-step instructions for resetting a PC that’s running either Windows 7 or Windows 8… [Read more…]

Google Goggles – Get instant information on virtually anything by taking its picture!

Posted on February 1, 2013

Imagine that you’re walking through your favorite store and an item catches your eye. You pull out your smart phone and take a picture of it and a description pops up with details on the manufacturer, retail pricing and more.

Or perhaps you’re walking through Paris and you come upon an interesting looking building, statue or other landmark. You snap a picture of it with your phone and you’re immediately presented with the details of what you’re looking at.

A bit farther down the street you see a sign written in French (of course), so you photograph it and your phone provides you with the English translation.

Sound like something out of a science fiction movie? Well, it isn’t. This technology is available right now, and it’s absolutely free. Just download a free app called Google Goggles and you’ll be doing just this type of thing in minutes! You can download Google Goggles for free from the Google Play Store.

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…]