Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you use Windows 11 you’ve probably noticed that you receive more notifications than you received from earlier versions of Windows.
This isn’t necessarily a bad thing because important notifications really do need to seen and dealt with, but getting a steady stream of unimportant notifications while you’re trying to work can be a real problem.
Luckily, Microsoft provides a number of settings you can tweak to limit the types of notifications you receive. [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…]
As you probably know, Microsoft has released a lot of buggy Windows Updates in recent years.
In fact, numerous Windows 10 PCs were rendered either unstable or unable to boot up into Windows just by one recent buggy update.
I still recommend installing critical security updates as soon as possible in order to quickly patch “zero-day” security holes before hackers have a chance to exploit them to break into your system.
However, I no longer recommend installing non-critical updates until Microsoft has had time to squash any bugs that might be in the updates’ code. [Read more…]
Question from Juliene: Hello, Rick. I’m a long time reader of your blog and I’ve read your posts about making System Image backups with Windows.
Your instructions are very good and easy to follow.
I’ve made three backups so far for my laptop but I just noticed that there’s only one backup on my external hard drive. I’m assuming it’s the last one I made?
My question is can I store more than one backup on the same drive? [Read more…]
Question from Amber: After my Windows computer has been sitting idle for a few minutes the hard drive just shuts down.
When I get back on the computer and press a key or move my mouse I can hear the drive starting back up again and I have to wait several seconds before I can do anything.
This is extremely irritating. I don’t mind the hard drive shutting down when the computer goes to sleep but I want it to remain active while the computer is up and running.
How can I fix this? [Read more…]