Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
A while back I wrote a post explaining how hackers are using rogue apps and other forms of malware to spy on folks via their computers’ webcams.
That post also explains how to prevent it from happening.
As it turns out, some miscreants have been spying on us via our machines’ microphones as well. And in some ways that’s just as bad as having them spy on us via webcam. [Read more…]
If you have a WiFi-enabled Windows PC there might come a time when you’ll need to switch your connection to a different WiFi network than the one your machine is currently connected to.
For example, your laptop might automatically connect to a network with a weak signal when you know there’s another network available with a much stronger signal.
Or perhaps it automatically connected to an insecure unencrypted network instead of the secure network you intended to use.
Whatever the reason, you can easily switch your PC’s Wi-Fi connection from one network to another one with just a few clicks of your mouse. [Read more…]
Question from Keith: I updated my Windows 7 computer to Windows 10 a while back, and like a dummy I didn’t write down the license key for it.
The hard drive in this machine went bad and I replaced it with a 1TB SSD. The bad drive appears to be completely dead because it doesn’t make any noise at all.
I have already installed the SSD I and downloaded the Windows 10 files onto a thumb drive with the instructions they provided.
The thing is, I’ll need the license key to activate Windows 10 after I install it, right? [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
Microsoft automatically sets cellular Internet connections as “metered” in Windows 10 and Windows 11 because many cellular service plans have a data cap.
If you exceed the data cap on your plan one of these things will typically occur, depending on the terms of the plan: [Read more…]
Question from Evelyn: I have an Acer desktop computer with Windows 10 Home edition on it.
Everything was working fine this morning but when I came back from lunch my web browser was in full screen mode (maximized).
I thought that was odd because everything was normal when I left for lunch.
I tried to click the little square icon in the top-right corner to take the browser out of full screen mode but I couldn’t click it. It’s like it ignored my clicks.
Anyway, I was able to minimize the browser but then I noticed something else really strange. None of my open apps were showing up on the taskbar.
I don’t know how things got so messed up, but I hate it. Do you have any idea what’s going on, and what I need to do to fix it? [Read more…]