Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Darlene G.: I keep receiving a notification on my computer saying Microsoft is going to stop supporting Windows 7 in January.
I really like Windows 7 and I hate the thought of having to upgrade to Windows 10!
Is this really true or is it a scam?
I’ve learned from reading your blog that a lot of scams are spread by notifications like this.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Many of the posts I publish on this blog are warnings about scams and hoaxes that happen to be making the rounds at the time.
Well, this post is sort of the opposite of those “Scam Alert” posts.
I’ve had several people message me to ask whether the “Time to Shift” notices from Microsoft are real or if they’re a hoax.
If you haven’t seen one of these notices yet, you surely will before long. The wording can vary slightly, but they typically read something like this: [Read more…]
Avast has announced that the current version of Avast Antivirus (version 18.8) is the last version that can be installed on PCs running either Windows XP or Windows Vista.
That means if your PC is still running either XP or Vista you won’t be able to update to the next version of Avast when it gets released next year.
Question from Leonard M.: I have an HP laptop that recently got ruined when my basement bedroom flooded. I was told that it can’t be fixed.
I’m planning to build a new desktop PC from a bare bones kit and I’m hoping I can install the Windows 7 that came with the dead laptop on it because I really don’t want to switch to Windows 10.
Will I be able to install my old Windows 7 on the new computer? I have a set of restore DVDs that I made from the laptop when I first got it.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
A while back I wrote this post about how replacing the now-abandoned older versions of Windows (such as XP and Vista) with Linux can give an older Windows PC a new lease on life.
I’ve received a lot of great feedback from that post from readers who have given Linux a try. Most of them seem to be happy with it, but many others not so much.
Several folks from the “not so much” group have asked me if there’s a non-Linux alternative to Windows that will actually run Windows programs instead of generic Linux-based alternatives.
Well, as it turns out the answer is yes. [Read more…]