Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Shaina: I have a USB flash drive with several hundred photos on it that I scanned during a recent visit to my grandmother’s house.
These are precious family pictures that will be difficult to replace if something were to happen to them.
I really don’t want to lose these photos and I was wondering how long I can count on the drive retaining them if I lock it up in my little fireproof safe?
Rick’s Answer: [Read more…]
The typical computer keyboard uses dozens of black keys labeled with white letters, numbers and symbols.
Over time these labels fade out and eventually disappear as they are touched and pressed numerous times.
For touch typists, fading keys are no big deal, but for the countless “hunt-and-peck” typists in the world it’s a big deal indeed.
In fact, it’s a bit like turning off the lights and typing in the dark. [Read more…]
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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These days it’s hard to imagine taking a long drive without having a car charger on board to keep the battery in your cell phone topped off, but what about your laptop?
While some modern laptops can be charged with a standard USB-type car charger and a compatible cable, there are plenty of others that can only be charged using the AC power brick that came with the laptop. [Read more…]
Unless you enjoy “popping the hood” on your PC and getting to know its innards on a first-name basis, you probably have no clue what all is inside there.
Sure, you know there’s a CPU, a motherboard, a hard drive or SSD, RAM sticks and a number of other components, but you probably don’t know many of the technical details about those components.
Computer parts such as the ones listed above vary greatly in terms of speed, capacity, and software compatibility so it pays to have a handy reference just in case you ever need to call Tech Support or install a new piece of software (or even upgrade to a new version of Windows). [Read more…]