Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Trevor: Rick, I have an HP laptop running Windows 11.
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…]
Question from Rita: My laptop has Windows 11 on it and when I turned it on yesterday morning I noticed that it had installed an update.
Ever since the update there’s been a little Weather icon on the Taskbar right beside the Start button.
Every time I move my mouse towards either the Start button or the icon just to the right of the Weather icon a screen pops up showing the weather along with what appears to be about a thousand news reports.
This is irritating me to no end. Is there any way to remove that Weather icon from the Taskbar? [Read more…]
The native Windows Task Manager has long been the go-to utility when we need to see which programs are running on our PC or kill a “hung” process.
While Microsoft has really expanded the features and power of Task Manager in recent years, it still has some serious limitations.
Luckily, there’s an awesome replacement for the Windows’ Task Manager that you can download right now, and it won’t cost you a dime. [Read more…]
The “Undo” feature is one of the handiest tools in Microsoft Windows.
If you make a mistake, simply click Edit>Undo in most Windows programs and the mistake will be washed away in an instant.
But did you know that there’s an even easier way to “undo” an operation?
Simply press the Ctrl+Z key combination and the last thing you clicked, typed or changed will be restored to its previous state.
What’s more, if your hands are already on the keyboard, pressing Ctrl+Z is a lot faster than grabbing the mouse and clicking Edit>Undo! [Read more…]
A while back I wrote a post explaining how to give an old PC new life by replacing Windows with Linux as a means of extending the useful life of older PCs.
After that post was published I received a number of emails asking for a list of Linux programs that can replace the Windows programs they’d leaving behind if they made the switch.
I decided that it might be a good idea to publish that list in its own blog post, and here it is: [Read more…]