Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Trevor: Rick, I have an HP laptop running Windows 10.
When I close the lid it goes into sleep mode, but I’d rather have it just shut down all the way because I’m usually going to just leave it in my laptop bag and not use it for a while.
Is there a way to make it do that? Thanks.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
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Question from Andie: I have a gorgeous photo of a sunrise over Lake Michigan as my desktop background.
The problem I’m having is all the icons scattered around the screen make it hard to enjoy the photo.
I know you can hide the desktop icons because my boss has them hidden on her computer screen.
Is there an easy way to hide them when I don’t need them and then make them reappear when I do? [Read more…]
Question from Marsha: I have a question about Windows licenses and I know you’ll probably be able to answer it.
I received an email from a man who said he has collected over 1,000 Windows 7 license codes from junked PCs over the course of several years.
He’s offering to sell all of those licenses to me for only $5 each. He said I can sell them online for at least $20 each.
What I’d like to know is does this deal sound legit to you? [Read more…]
Ok, I’ll admit it. I’m impatient. Well, at least when it comes to getting things done on my computer.
After all, there are only so many hours in the day, right?
With that in mind, one of the best tips I’ve learned over the years is that the keyboard is often a lot faster and more efficient than the mouse.
I used to get frustrated at having to click through multiple layers of menus, click on the program I want to run and then scroll through a couple hundred filenames until I find the specific file I need to work with.
But these days in most cases I can just skip the mouse altogether except for one final click and be working with my file in mere seconds. Here’s how it’s done: [Read more…]
A while back I wrote a post on securing your Wi-Fi network in which I briefly mentioned the importance of keeping File and Printer Sharing turned off unless you have a good reason for actually using it.
In a nutshell, disabling File and Printer Sharing will prevent a hacker from being able to access the files on your PC if he/she somehow manages to connect to your local network.
Well, it occurred to me last night that I probably need to write another post explaining how to disable File and Printer Sharing in your particular version of Windows.
Well, here it is… [Read more…]