Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Emil P.: Ever since I updated my computer to Windows 10 it’s been hanging up at shutdown.
It displays a window saying that the system is closing X number of apps and shutting down.
But then it says that an app is preventing Windows from shutting down and asks if I want to shut down anyway or click cancel.
Sometimes it will name the app that’s hanging the shutdown but sometimes it won’t.
This is a screenshot of one of these messages: [Read more…]
Although computer memory is a lot more reliable today than in times past, memory sticks do go bad from time to time. They don’t go bad very often, but it does happen.
And if one goes bad in your PC you can expect to experience problems ranging from minor software glitches to a system that simply refuses to boot up.
If you suspect that your PC might have a defective memory stick you can test it with a great free RAM diagnostic utility called Memtest86+. [Read more…]
Question from Kenny V.: I watched a Youtube video that showed how to build a gaming PC and it really intrigued me.
I decided to build one for my son so I asked the guy at Fry’s Electronics for recommendations on the parts. This is what he recommended (and what I ended up buying):
I put everything together according to the instructions but when I turn on the computer a light on the motherboard flashes and then everything immediately shuts down. According to the manual the light that flashes is the “CPU Warning Light”.
Just to be sure it’s not a bad connection I re-seated the RAM sticks and CPU. There were no bent pins that I could see. I also disconnected and reconnected all the power cables.
Do you think I might have received a bad CPU? That’s the only thing I can think of that could possibly be wrong. I don’t want to go back to Fry’s claiming they sold me a bad CPU unless I’m sure they really did.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’ve already installed the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on your PC you might be wondering where a huge chunk of your free hard drive/SSD storage space went.
Well, when Windows Update installs a new major Windows release it automatically backs up the previous Windows installation just in case you need to revert back to it for some reason.
That’s a good thing because it provides a way to roll your system back to the previous version of Windows in case something goes wrong with the update.
But there’s a problem: It can take as much as 40GB of storage space to hold the files in that previous Windows version backup. That means dozens of Gigabytes of “wasted” space won’t be available for storing photos, Office documents and/or other important user-created files.
Of course if your system has a massive hard drive with tons of unused space available, you probably won’t even miss that “wasted” disk space.
But what if your hard drive was already close to being maxed out before the upgrade? Or maybe your PC has a relatively small solid state drive (SSD) (#ad) instead of a much larger hard drive?
If you find yourself running low on storage space after installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you can easily recover dozens of Gigabytes of space by removing those old Windows backup files. Just follow the steps below: [Read more…]
Question from Michael D: My computer has a strange problem Rick, and it’s driving me up the wall.
When I shut the system down, everything that was open when I shut it down opens back up when I turn it back on.
Every program reopens, every browser and website reopens… It’s like I hibernated the machine instead of shutting it down. But that’s not the case. I always do a normal shutdown.
Can you help me resolve this? My computer is a Dell Inspiron 3464 with Windows 10 Home.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]