Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If the hard drive in your computer is typical, it makes a distinctive sound that you probably learned to recognize once you had used your computer for a day or two.
The sound coming from your hard drive might be a quiet, smooth hum that you can barely hear (if you can hear it at all) or a slightly louder sound, but whatever sound it makes it should make consistently with very little deviation. [Read more…]
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Do you have an older laptop or desktop PC that you use exclusively for visiting websites, checking Gmail, Facebooking, watching YouTube videos or most any other Internet-based activity?
If the answer to the above question is yes, did you know that you would almost certainly enjoy a better user experience by running Linux on your PC instead of Windows?
Well, it’s true, and here are the reasons why: [Read more…]
If you’ve been paying attention to the news of late, you probably know that the number of successful ransomware attacks on computers and mobile devices are increasing by the day.
Ransomware is a particularly insidious form of malware that encrypts all the files on your computer or mobile device, then holds your precious data hostage until you pony up and pay a monetary ransom to the hackers.
Once ransomware has locked up your machine, you’ll have no choice except to pay the ransom or you’ll have to say goodbye to your data forever. But… [Read more…]
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Question from Jan: Hi there. I have a 13 inch MacBook Air that I bought way back in 2014.
Can you help me with a problem I’m trying to solve with it? [Read more…]
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Question from Kendra: Hi, Rick. I really love your blog, especially the section where you answer questions from your readers.
If you don’t mind I’d like to ask a question of my own.
Back in March of 2020 the tech guy I used at the time installed a Crucial 500GB SSD in my Acer laptop and it really made it run a lot faster.
I recently read on another site that all SSDs wear out over time because they can only be written to a certain number of times.
That has me sort of worried because this drive is now about four years old and I have a lot of personal files on it that I don’t want to lose.
My question is do you think this drive is likely to fail at some time in the near future? [Read more…]