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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.
Is there an easy way to hide those icons when I don’t need them and then make them reappear when I do? [Read more…]
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Folks often ask me to recommend a good book for helping them learn some new computer topic, and I almost always steer them towards the “for Dummies” series of books if there is a title available on the topic in question.
Although the titles in this series include the word “Dummies”, these books don’t speak down to readers or assume they are absolutely “clueless”.
Instead, they present the material in a clear, easy-to-understand way so that anyone can learn what they need to learn about the topic as quickly and easily as possible, even if the reader does happen to be “clueless” about the topic.
Question from Charles: I updated my PC from Windows 10 to Windows 11 a while back.
Ever since then I’ve been getting “User Account Control” warnings several times a month, and I ALWAYS get them when I’m trying to install something new or make a simple settings change.
I can’t seem to do hardly anything at all with getting hit with a warning.
I know that UAC is meant to prevent me from doing something stupid and trashing my system, but I’m an experienced user and I know which types of things I need to avoid.
My question is do you think it would be safe to disable UAC? I really don’t think I need it. [Read more…]
Question from Kevin: Hi, Rick. I recently bought a HP laptop running Windows 11, and ever since I first brought it home it’s been keeping the wrong time.
It’s always 1 hour behind, and if I change the time to the correct time it just reverts back to the wrong time all on its own. It’s about to drive me bonkers!
Do you think it might be a bad CMOS battery or maybe a bad motherboard? [Read more…]
As you probably know, Microsoft is constantly making subtle changes to the Windows user interface.
And as you also probably know, some of those changes make more sense than others.
In fact, some changes make you scratch your head and wonder just what the folks up in Redmond were thinking when they decided to make them.
One of the biggest head-scratchers of all is Microsoft’s decision to remove the Control Panel from the Start Button’s right-click menu (the menu that pops up when you right-click on the Start button) starting with Windows 10. [Read more…]