Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Michael: I just bought a Roku box I have the choice of connecting it to the Internet over Wi-Fi or with an Ethernet cable.
Which one should I choose?
The Roku box is close enough to the router to connect them with a cable and the Wi-Fi signal is strong there.
My question: Is there an advantage to using one method over the other? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Question from Fred: I have a 2 year old Lenovo IdeaPad laptop. It was working fine till yesterday evening but now the Wi-Fi won’t work.
I thought it might be a setting, but the Wi-Fi adapter isn’t even showing up in the Device Manager under Windows 10.
Since it won’t work with Windows, I tried booting into Linux Mint (I have a dual-boot setup). Mint won’t recognize the Wi-Fi adapter either so I’m thinking it must be a hardware problem.
Can this be fixed without costing me an arm and a leg? [Read more…]
Question from Deidra: I have grounded my 13 year old daughter for a month for getting into some pretty serious trouble at school.
Part of her “grounding” is a total ban on cell phone and Internet use of any kind.
To enforce that, I’ve had her iPhone shut off and I’ve also turned off the Wi-Fi on our router.
The problem is she’s still finding a way to get on Facebook and talk to her friends because I can see her “liking” stuff and leaving comments. How is that possible? [Read more…]
Question from Mitchell: Love your site, Rick. I have a question for you if you don’t mind.
I recently retired from a job that required me to travel frequently to multiple states.
As you can imagine, I stayed in a lot of different hotels and now my Chromebook has a long list of WiFi networks that pop up when I go to connect to a network.
Since I’m not traveling anymore I’ll never need to connect to most of those networks again. How can I remove them? [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Wireless routers make it very easy to share your high speed Internet connection with guests and family members.
They also make it easy to use your laptop or mobile devices in any room in the house without running cables all over the place.
But if you live in a large house and/or have multiple devices all using the Internet at the same time, chances are your WiFi connection is weaker and slower than it could be due to obstructions, distance and bandwidth limitations. [Read more…]