Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Sean G.: I hope you can help me. Twice now I have lost work because my computer automatically rebooted after installing Windows Updates. It always catches me off guard and I don’t have a chance to save my work.
This is really driving me up the wall! Is there any way to keep it from happening? My computer has Windows 7 Home Premium.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
As you probably know, Windows 8 has been a huge flop for Microsoft among laptop and desktop PC users. They simply made too many changes at once, leaving many seasoned Windows users feeling confused, alienated, and even insulted.
Sales suffered as a result, and Windows 8 will almost certainly go down in history as just as big a dud as Windows Vista.
To Microsoft’s credit, they did eventually start paying attention to the flood of user complaints and suggestions, and with the release of Windows 8.1 they mitigated much of the disaster that was plain vanilla Windows 8. In fact, in my opinion Windows 8.1 is vastly superior to Windows 8. [Read more…]
When Microsoft Windows saves a file to the hard drive, it is often saved in fragments that are scattered all over the drive’s platters instead of as a single continuous, unbroken stream of ones and zeroes.
This process is called fragmentation, and over time a heavily fragmented drive can slow down your PC to a snail’s pace as the drive’s read/write heads must travel hither and yon to find all of a file’s pieces and patch them back together before the file can be used by the CPU.
Every version of Windows includes a “defragging” tool that can rearrange all the files on your hard drive into nice, fast loading contiguous chunks of code, often speeding up your system considerably in the process. But the defragger built into Windows has a huge drawback: it’s slow! [Read more…]
By now you’re probably familiar with all the security holes that keep popping up in Flash, Java and other popular software, providing easy ways for hackers to install malicious software onto your computer.
In fact, Java alone is so insecure that I completely uninstalled it from my PCs a long time ago, and I recommend that you do the same. [Read more…]
You might have noticed that when you have two or more windows open at once, in order to scroll the contents of an inactive window you have to first click it to make it the active window. This can be quite annoying if all you want to do in that window is scroll the contents up or down a bit.
Well now there’s a nifty little free download that will make your mouse work the way it should have worked all along. It’s called WizMouse, and once it’s loaded your mouse wheel will scroll the contents of the window that’s directly under the mouse pointer without making that window active! What a time-saver! [Read more…]