Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Have you ever upgraded your PC’s hard drive and sold the old one on eBay or given it to a friend to use in his/her PC? How about loaning someone a USB flash drive or memory card?
If you have ever given a used storage device to another person for any reason, chances are they could have retrieved your files from that drive, even if you had deleted them or formatted the drive before giving it to them! [Read more…]
TRIM is a feature in Windows 7 and above that immediately frees up the space on a solid state drive (SSD) that was previously occupied by a deleted file.
This allows Windows to re-use those no longer needed memory locations right away instead of having to search for unused locations elsewhere on the drive.
In a nutshell, having TRIM enabled keeps your SSD from slowing down with regular use, and it makes the drive last longer to boot. [Read more…]
If you’re the only person who ever uses your computer you can have Windows boot straight to the Desktop or Start Screen without prompting you for a password.
It’s easy to set up and the instructions below will show you how to do it. Simply skip to the section with instructions for your particular Windows version.
Windows XP
1 – Click Start > Run.
2 – Type control userpasswords2 into the box and click Ok.
3 – Uncheck the box beside Users must enter a username and password to use this computer, then click Ok. [Read more…]
Question from Manny P.: I use Dropbox to store some of my files, but only with a couple of programs that I only use once or twice a week.
Since I don’t use it that often, I don’t want the Dropbox app to load every time I load Windows. I’ve disabled automatic startup with Autoruns, but it always starts up automatically the next time I start Windows.
How do I prevent Dropbox from loading automatically? I’d much prefer to load it manually when I actually need to use it. Thanks in advance for your help!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
A couple of weeks ago I told you that Microsoft had hinted that they were planning to release Windows 9 in mid-2015.
Well, the timing was accurate, but the name was wrong. The new version of Windows will be Windows 10, not the wildly-speculated Windows 9.
Why they decided to skip the name Windows 9 and jump straight from Windows 8.1 to Windows 10 is anyone’s guess.
My own guess is they realized the name “Windows 8” left such a bad taste in the mouths of many users that they felt they really needed to distance the new version version of Windows from Windows 8 in name as well as in functionality.
At any rate, based upon the preview video they released this morning it looks like Windows 10 will indeed be a major improvement over Windows 8. [Read more…]