Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Marsha: I have a question about Windows licenses and I know you’ll probably be able to answer it.
I received an email from a man who said he has collected over 1,000 Windows 7 license codes from junked PCs over the course of several years.
He’s offering to sell all of those licenses to me for only $5 each. He said I can sell them online for at least $20 each.
What I’d like to know is does this deal sound legit to you? [Read more…]
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Question from Phillip W.: Rick, I have a Dell laptop with Windows 7 on it and I need your help fixing a problem I’m having with it.
I downloaded a game from a free games website and now some of the keys on my keyboard produce strange characters when I press them.
The letters look normal but they have various punctuation marks added to them almost like I’m typing in a foreign language. How can I fix this?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Liam: My wife and I recently went to a flea market to look for some things for our house.
I ended up buying a used Lenovo ThinkPad T400 with Windows 7 on it.
It’s obvious that it’s a pretty old laptop but it seems to work well.
I didn’t notice it when it was running at the flea market but there’s a message in the corner of the screen saying “This copy of Windows is not genuine”.
What does that mean? Is it a problem? [Read more…]
As you probably know by now, Microsoft will no longer be supplying security updates for Windows 7 after January 14, 2020.
In other words, they’re going to basically abandon Windows 7 and leave users to fend for themselves when it comes to the security of their computers.
Several people have asked me if it’ll be safe to keep using Windows 7 after the updates stop coming down the pike.
Microsoft will be ending support for Windows 7 in January 2020, and that move will leave Windows 7 users with a very important choice to make.
If you have a Windows 7 PC one of the choices you’ll have available to you is to take your chances and keep using Windows 7 even after Microsoft stops releasing critical security updates for it.
I don’t really recommend that due to the reasons stated in the post I linked to above, but if you decide to forge ahead with Windows 7 anyway you can reduce the significant security risk a bit by using a really good antivirus and anti-malware product.