Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Adware, viruses, trojans, spyware, ransomware and rootkits are everywhere these days, and keeping our PCs free of malware is a constant struggle.
Regardless of how diligent we are at preventing malware infections they can still manage to make their way onto our hard drives and into our computers’ memory banks.
Once a PC is infected, ridding it of every scrap of malware can be extremely difficult.
But it can be done! This post explains how, step-by-step. [Read more…]
Question from Keith: I updated my Windows 7 computer to Windows 10 a while back, and like a dummy I didn’t write down the license key for it.
The hard drive in this machine went bad and I replaced it with a 1TB SSD. The bad drive appears to be completely dead because it doesn’t make any noise at all.
I have already installed the SSD I and downloaded the Windows 10 files onto a thumb drive with the instructions they provided.
The thing is, I’ll need the license key to activate Windows 10 after I install it, right? [Read more…]
By default, Windows constantly checks to see if your hard drive is running low on unused storage space. If it determines that your drive is almost full, it’ll let you know by popping up a warning message.
While all of this checking for low disk space can be beneficial if your PC has a small hard drive/SSD or you tend to use up all available storage space.
The problem is, it comes at a cost in the form of a performance hit.
The fact is lots of modern Windows PCs have large hard drives and/or spacious SSDs and there’s a good chance that all of that vast storage space will never be used.
If you think you’ll likely never run low on storage space you can speed your PC up a bit by disabling ‘Low Disk Checking’ with a simple Registry tweak. [Read more…]
Question from Tim: I have three semesters worth of very important notes stored on a USB flash drive.
My friend wants to borrow that drive so he can use the notes to study for a certification exam.
I can’t afford to lose those files for any reason because they cannot be re-created or replaced.
Is there some way to prevent my friend from accidentally deleting the files from the drive? [Read more…]
If you use an Android device you might have noticed that there’s a mysterious folder named LOST.DIR on your SD card.
If you look inside this folder you’ll see that it contains a bunch of weird numbered files.
Many people end up deleting this folder, thinking it might be a virus, but truth be told, it isn’t.