Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
There might come a time when you’ll need to log in to your router’s control panel to change a setting (most likely the password for your Wi-Fi network).
But what happens if you can’t log in because you forgot the router’s username and/or password?
As luck would have it, it’s very easy to reset a router’s username and password back to its factory defaults. [Read more…]
Question from Calvin: I have two 8GB DDR4 RAM sticks in my computer. They are identical to one another in every way (I bought them a while back as a 16GB kit).
When I log into the BIOS it says one stick is running at 2400Mhz and the other one is running at 2133Mhz.
I’ve always heard that all the RAM sticks in a PC should operate at the same speed or your system might crash.
There are times when we need to copy the entire contents of one hard drive onto another hard drive.
This process is called “cloning”, and it is most often done when upgrading to a larger drive or replacing a drive that is about to fail.
Cloning a hard drive isn’t all that difficult. All you need is both drives connected to the computer at the same time and a copy of a good hard drive cloning utility (I use and recommend Clonezilla because it works well and is available as a free download).
Here’s how to use Clonezilla to clone the contents of one hard drive onto another: [Read more…]
Although a fast CPU and plenty of RAM and hard drive space are important, the monitor is arguably the most important part of any computer system.
After all, you’ll be staring at the screen virtually the entire time you’re using your computer.
I recently received an ASUS VS228H-P 21.5-Inch Full-HD LCD Monitor (#ad) for review, and after working out a minor quirk I quickly came to realize that I really love this monitor! [Read more…]
Question from Ann H.: Hi Rick. I have an 8 year old HP ENVY 14 laptop.
It worked fine until a few days ago when it stopped charging the battery. The computer works fine as long as it’s plugged in, but dies immediately if I unplug it.
How can I figure out if it’s the charger or the battery that needs to be replaced?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]