Windows Archives - Page 13 of 20

Q&A: How is my PC booting from an empty hard drive?

Posted on August 23, 2022

Question from Marvin: I read your article about upgrading a computer by adding an SSD to make it run faster.

The following weekend I went to Best Buy and bought a 1TB SSD and cloned the contents of the existing 500GB hard disk onto it.

I then wiped the hard drive and installed the SSD in the computer, leaving the now-blank hard drive in place to store my data files on.

Everything works perfectly but something has me baffled. When I look in the BIOS it says the hard drive is set as the boot drive.

How is this machine booting into Windows when the boot drive is blank?

[Read more…]

Q&A: How do you delete a document in WordPad?

Posted on July 29, 2022

Question from Stacey: Hi, Rick. I created a document in WordPad and now I want to delete it.

The problem is I can’t find any way to delete a document in WordPad.

I’ve looked everywhere and I can’t find a “Delete” button. Can you tell me how to do it? [Read more…]

Q&A: Why does Microsoft sell Office for Macs even though Apple is a competitor?

Posted on July 20, 2022

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Claude: I was looking at the various options for buying Microsoft Office on Amazon the other day and I saw they’re selling Microsoft Office that runs on Macs.

That really surprised me since Microsoft and Apple are direct competitors of each other.

Why do they make a Mac version of Office when that obviously encourages people who would buy a Windows computer to run MS Office on to buy a Mac instead? [Read more…]

How to switch a Windows PC to a different WiFi network

Posted on July 5, 2022

If you have a WiFi-enabled Windows PC there might come a time when you’ll need to switch your connection to a different WiFi network than the one your machine is currently connected to.

For example, your laptop might automatically connect to a network with a weak signal when you know there’s another network available with a much stronger signal.

Or perhaps it automatically connected to an insecure unencrypted network instead of the secure network you intended to use.

Whatever the reason, you can easily switch your PC’s Wi-Fi connection from one network to another one with just a few clicks of your mouse. [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I limit the types of notifications I receive from Windows Security?

Posted on June 16, 2022

Question from Danny: I’ve been reading your newsletters for over a year now, and I always learn something I can use from them.

I’ve read in several of your recent posts that Microsoft Defender and the free version of Malwarebytes make a good combination for security on a Windows PC.

When my McAfee came up for renewal I removed it and installed the free Malwarebytes, and so far I’ve been happy with that setup.

One thing I’m not happy about though is all the notifications I’m getting from Windows Security. Every day I get several of them, and most of the ones I get aren’t even important.

How can I limit the notifications I receive from Windows Security to just the ones that are truly needed? [Read more…]