Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Lenora H.: I recently bought a brand new Acer laptop that came with Windows 10 (which I had never used before).
I’ve been using this machine for almost a month now and I’ve discovered that I absolutely hate Windows 10!
If I buy a Windows 7 DVD can I wipe out the Windows 10 and install Windows 7 in its place? And if I can, do you know of any important reasons why I shouldn’t?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Emil P.: Ever since I updated my computer to Windows 10 it’s been hanging up at shutdown.
It displays a window saying that the system is closing X number of apps and shutting down.
But then it says that an app is preventing Windows from shutting down and asks if I want to shut down anyway or click cancel.
Sometimes it will name the app that’s hanging the shutdown but sometimes it won’t.
This is a screenshot of one of these messages: [Read more…]
Question from Lois P.: My computer (HP laptop with Windows 10) was working fine until it installed an update about a week ago.
Ever since that update was installed the computer won’t automatically connect to my Wi-Fi network when I turn it on.
I can connect to the network manually and it works perfectly until I shut the computer down. It just won’t connect automatically no matter what I do and I really miss having it do that.
I’ve searched Google from top to bottom and I haven’t found a solution to this that works. I even used System Restore to remove the update but that didn’t help either.
A friend told me about your website but I couldn’t find anything you’ve written about this topic on there. Do you know of a fix for this? You’re my last hope!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
As you probably know, Microsoft allowed folks using Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10 for free during the first year after it was released.
That blanket free upgrade offer ended on July 29, 2016, but Microsoft decided to allow users with a disability that requires them to use some form of assistive technology to keep receiving the free upgrades even after the July 29 cut-off date.
Well, that special offer is about expire very soon, and most people are unaware that it’s about to end. [Read more…]
If you’ve already installed the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update on your PC you might be wondering where a huge chunk of your free hard drive/SSD storage space went.
Well, when Windows Update installs a new major Windows release it automatically backs up the previous Windows installation just in case you need to revert back to it for some reason.
That’s a good thing because it provides a way to roll your system back to the previous version of Windows in case something goes wrong with the update.
But there’s a problem: It can take as much as 40GB of storage space to hold the files in that previous Windows version backup. That means dozens of Gigabytes of “wasted” space won’t be available for storing photos, Office documents and/or other important user-created files.
Of course if your system has a massive hard drive with tons of unused space available, you probably won’t even miss that “wasted” disk space.
But what if your hard drive was already close to being maxed out before the upgrade? Or maybe your PC has a relatively small solid state drive (SSD) (#ad) instead of a much larger hard drive?
If you find yourself running low on storage space after installing the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, you can easily recover dozens of Gigabytes of space by removing those old Windows backup files. Just follow the steps below: [Read more…]