Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Have you ever upgraded your PC’s hard drive and sold the old one on eBay or given it to a friend to use in his/her PC? How about loaning someone a USB flash drive or memory card?
If you have ever given a used storage device to another person for any reason, chances are they could have retrieved your files from that drive, even if you had deleted them or formatted the drive before giving it to them! [Read more…]
Question from Aaron: I need your help Rick. I’ve been installing a bunch of free software and it appears that something I’ve installed has removed the “Power” icon from the Windows 8.1 Start Screen on my computer.
I tried using System Restore to get the “Power” icon back onto the Start Screen, but that didn’t work. Can you tell me how to do it?
Rick’s answer: Yes Aaron, I can tell tell you how to restore your Start Screen’s Power icon, but I must first give you my semi-standard RicksDailyTips Disclaimer: [Read more…]
Question from Anthony: I have no discs for windows 8.1, so is going back to factory mode a safe and easy way to restore my computer without the use of discs, and then just download the programs I had back on to my computer?
Rick’s answer: Anthony, you can certainly restore your Windows 8.1 computer back to its factory state using the Recovery Partition on the hard drive. [Read more…]
As you probably know, Apple is taking a ton of heat after several celebrities had their iCloud accounts hacked and risque photos stolen and published online. Well, the company is apparently taking steps to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
According to Apple CEO Tim Cook, the soon-to-be-released iOS 8 will include an option for enabling “Two-Factor Authentication” on all iCloud accounts.
Two-Factor Authentication has been around for some time now, so it’s something of a mystery why it took such a high profile security breach to prompt Apple to finally make it available for their popular iCloud service. [Read more…]
Question from Liam F.: I brought my old HP Desktop PC up from the basement so my daughter could use it while her laptop is being repaired, but I can’t remember the password for logging into Windows.
How can I reset the password so she can use this computer? It’s running Windows 7 Home Premium. Thanks in advance for your help.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]