Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Mark: I have a four month old Acer Gaming Laptop with a 32 inch monitor connected and set as the primary display.
I use the 32 inch screen for my games. The laptop’s built-in screen is always open with my email and a few other apps open on it.
What I need to know is could leaving the lid open all the time damage the laptop in any way? [Read more…]
Question from Vicky: I got my old laptop out of the closet this morning to see if it still works. I’ve forgotten exactly how old it is but it’s running windows 10.
It finally booted up into Windows but it seemed to be running very sluggish.
At first, it wouldn’t connect to the wireless or open my Chrome browser. I checked to see how full the hard drive is. Not quite 50% is used.
I restarted it again and it connected to the network and loaded Chrome, but it’s still very sluggish.
Do you have any suggestions for cleaning up and optimizing an older computer? [Read more…]
Question from Callie: I bought a new Windows laptop (an Acer) that has a camera built into it.
I don’t ever plan to use the camera for anything and I’d like to completely disable it.
I don’t want to just prevent apps from accessing the camera. I want to disable it completely.
Is it possible to do that? If it is, can you tell me how to do it? [Read more…]
Question from Brenda M.: I took my laptop to the shop because the screen stopped lighting up. They checked it out and told me the screen was bad.
They said it would cost almost $200 to replace the screen. I told them I couldn’t afford that so they told me I could still use the laptop by hooking up an external monitor.
I bought a monitor and hooked it up to the laptop with an HDMI cable, but I can’t get the monitor to show anything besides a blank screen.
How can I get the external monitor to work this laptop? [Read more…]
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Question from Linda: I’m looking for a new laptop Rick and I’ve noticed that the new ones on the market today don’t come with an optical drive.
I have hundreds of CDs and DVDs that are filled with photos that I need to access on occasion so my new laptop needs to have a DVD drive.
I know I can buy an external DVD drive, but I’d prefer to have it built-in.
Why on earth are they making laptops without optical drives? [Read more…]