Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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…]
Question from Kyle: When my computer was running Windows 7 I had an icon for the Registry Editor (Regedit) on my Start Menu.
But after I updated my computer to Windows 10 I noticed that it’s no longer there.
Can you tell me how to get it back? [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
In Windows 7 (and earlier versions) we could easily boot our computers into Safe Mode by repeatedly pressing the F8 key when Windows first started loading.
Starting with Windows 8, Microsoft disabled that option in order to help speed up the boot process. Personally, I have never been very fond of that change.
If you miss being able to press F8 to boot into Safe Mode on your Windows 10/11 machine, you can easily enable it with a simple command line entry. [Read more…]
If you ever have to call tech support for any issue that’s even tangentially related to networking or Internet connectivity, you’ll likely be asked to provide your machine’s MAC address.
Just so there’s no confusion, MAC addresses aren’t necessarily associated with Apple’s MAC line of computers.
Yes, Mac desktop computers and MacBooks have MAC addresses, but so do Windows PCs, Linux boxes, Android devices, iPhones and every other such device that connects to a network. [Read more…]
Question from Elian: Every time I open the Microsoft Store and try to search for an app it freezes up on me.
The only way it will close is if I kill it with the Task Manager.
How can I fix this? [Read more…]