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 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…]