Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Have you ever had to reinstall Windows from scratch after replacing a bad hard drive, being hit with a severe malware attack or some other digital disaster?
If so, you probably remember having to type in your Windows Product Key so Microsoft could reactivate your Windows installation.
I have always considered having to re-enter the Product Key to reactivate a machine’s Windows installation to be an irritating waste of time. [Read more…]
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Buying a new computer
And if you don’t set it up correctly, you can open yourself up to having some real problems down the road.
I’ve been setting up new PCs for close to three decades, and during that time I’ve developed a simple step-by-step procedure that’ll have you up and running with your new computer as quickly a possible while avoiding the mistakes that come back to haunt so many others. [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
A while back I wrote this post that explains how to convert an unused internal hard drive into an external USB 3.0 drive.
That has turned out to be one of the most popular posts I have ever written, but a lot has changed since then.
Question from Robbie: A couple of days ago I updated my PC to Windows 11 expecting to have 30 days to change my mind like we had when Windows 10 came out.
But then I found out the window for rolling Windows 11 back to Windows 10 is only 10 days, not 30.
The problem I have is I’m going out of town on business tomorrow and I won’t be back until after the end of the month.
By the time I return the 10 day roll-back period will have expired and I’ll be stuck with Windows 11 even if I end up not liking it.
Is there any way to extend the Windows 11 roll-back period to longer than 10 days (to something like a month)? [Read more…]
I receive hundreds of tech questions every week, and the one I seem to get asked most often is how to retrieve the files from the hard drive after a PC goes belly-up.
My answer always depends on which part of the computer has failed.
If the hard drive itself is the component that died, you’ll have to either send the drive off to a data recovery service or purchase a data recovery software utility and attempt to recover the files yourself. [Read more…]