Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Maurine: I bought a 2TB external USB hard drive to store my large collection of old family pictures on.
When I plugged the new drive into my computer I noticed that it has several files on it already.
One is a file with info about the warranty. Another is a user guide. I’m not sure what the other two files are.
My question is can I delete all these files or do I need to keep them?
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Question from Ariel: I have an HP dv6000t laptop that originally had Windows XP on it.
While my son was in for a weekend visit he installed Linux Mint on it after reading your article about replacing Windows with Linux.
I mainly use this laptop for reading my cooking groups on Facebook and printing the recipes that interest me.
The Linux is working out great but I’m having a problem with the USB ports.
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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 early 2018 the tech guy I used at the time installed a Crucial 250GB SSD in my Dell 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 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…]
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Question from Jeromy : I run a business that deals with some pretty sensitive customer data that I would really prefer not to have stored in the cloud.
I know that cloud storage is supposed to be encrypted and secure, but with all the hacking going on these days I just don’t trust it.
Right now we’re using dual 2TB external USB hard drives to back up all of our data but I’m worried that a fire could wipe it all out.
What I’d really like to get is a 4TB external hard drive that’s fireproof. Do you know where I can get one? [Read more…]
Question from Alan: I bought a new 4TB external hard drive to hold my photos.
I bought the new drive because the 1TB drive I’ve been using to store my photos is full and I have a lot more pictures to scan and store.
My plan is to give the 1TB drive to my niece so she can use it with her iMac, but I want to completely erase everything from the drive before I give it to her.
That way she can start fresh with a blank drive.
Can you tell me how to completely erase this drive with my MacBook?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]