Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Gillian S.: My Acer Aspire 5715z laptop won’t boot into Windows and my friend says I need to reset it back to the factory condition.
The problem is I don’t have a restore disc for it. Is there any way to restore this computer without a restore disc?
Rick’s answer: Gillian, if the hard drive is working properly and the recovery partition isn’t damaged, you should be able to easily restore your laptop back to its factory condition. Here’s how: [Read more…]
Since we now know that Microsoft is planning to scuttle the Windows 8 brand sooner than usual by releasing Windows 9 sometime in 2015, I think it’s safe to assume that they have learned a few lessons from the Windows 8 debacle. Well, at least one can hope.
While Windows 8.1 is a vast improvement over Windows 8, many irritants still remain that tend to frustrate seasoned Windows users.
Here are just a few of the lessons that Microsoft surely must have learned by now: [Read more…]
Question from Kenny: Hi Rick. First of all, I wa
nt to thank you for your generosity in posting all these amazing tips. You have helped so many people by posting them! Now, I have a question for you if you don’t mind.
I recently bought a new computer and decided to give my 2 year old Gateway laptop to my son. Since he’s only 8 years old I’d like to keep him from accessing the Control Panel and accidentally messing things up.
My question is can you tell me how to disable the Control Panel in Windows 7?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
I’ve never really been one to make New Years Resolutions, but this year I’ve come up with 10 of them that can help all of us keep our computers running smoothly and the hackers at bay. I hope you find at least a few of them useful.
Note: All of the links contained within the following list of resolutions will open in a new window. This will make it easy to return to the next resolution by simply closing the current browser window or tab.
Rick’s 10 New Years Resolutions for computer users: [Read more…]
If you have recently upgraded your Windows 8 installation to Windows 8.1, you can reclaim 6GB of hard drive space by removing the old Windows 8 files. Here’s a little background info for you…
When you upgrade to a newer version of Microsoft Windows, the version being replaced is retained in a folder called Windows.old just in case the upgrade fails or you wish to revert back to the previous version for some reason.
The amount of space required to store the previous version of Windows varies depending on the versions involved. Since you have just upgraded from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, you now have roughly 6GB of old (and now useless) Windows 8 system files just sitting there taking up valuable disk space. [Read more…]