Computer Tips Archives - Page 185 of 227

Planning to upgrade to Windows 10? Back up your current Windows installation first!

Posted on July 23, 2015

Millions of people around the world are planning to upgrade their computers to Windows 10 after it’s released to the public on July 29.

Personally, I think that’s a good thing. After using the Windows 10 Preview for several months I honestly believe Windows 10 will be the best version of Windows ever.

That being said, I plan to make full backups of the current Windows installation on every PC that I plan to upgrade before installing Windows 10. I strongly recommend that you do the same. Here’s why: [Read more…]

How to manually check for new Windows Updates in Windows 8.1

Posted on July 15, 2015

windows-8-1 With all the malware, hackers and identity thieves out there these days, it’s more important than ever to install the latest Windows Updates just as soon as they become available.

Users of Windows 8.1 will find that it’s no longer possible to simply click Windows Update on the “Start Menu”. Instead, we have to manually check for updates in a different manner.

There are several ways to check for new Windows updates in Win 8.1, but this is the method that I use and recommend: [Read more…]

It’s finally official: You can now ‘Unsend’ an email in Gmail

Posted on June 25, 2015

gmail Way back in December of 2013 I wrote a post discussing a new experimental Gmail feature that would actually let us “unsend” an email if we had second thoughts about sending it after we had clicked the “Send” button.

Well, they have now finally made the “Undo Send” feature an official part of Gmail. [Read more…]

Why you should disable Adobe Flash on your PC (and how to do it)

Posted on June 12, 2015

Until fairly recently, Flash was required in order to properly display and use many of the world’s most popular websites. And since Adobe Flash is installed on virtually every PC in the world it has become a favorite target for hackers.

Adobe releases frequent security updates for Flash, but for varying reasons those updates often don’t get installed onto a PC in time to prevent hackers from exploiting the security holes the updates were intended to fix in order to attack the system. That’s why hackers love to use Flash to attack computers around the world. And that’s bad news!

But there is also good news: Modern web browsers that support HTML 5 have pretty much made Flash obsolete. If you are using the latest version of your preferred browser(s), you can safely remove Adobe Flash from your system and disable it in your browser and the websites you visit should still work just fine. And I strongly suggest that you do so.

With all of that in mind, I recommend following the steps below to remove Adobe Flash from your PC and disable it in your web browsers. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Be wary of those “Watch out for this creep!” posts on Facebook

Posted on June 9, 2015

Facebook is a wonderful venue for sharing our thoughts, ideas and photos with our friends and loved ones, but it also has a very serious downside. It’s ridiculously easy for false information to spread like wildfire by “going viral”.

Just think of all the “Free Gift Card” and “Click and share to get Facebook to donate to this great cause” scams. We see them every day. And make no mistake about it, these are very serious scams.

But there’s another type of scam that routinely takes place on Facebook that is perhaps even worse. Some folks use Facebook to falsely accuse innocent people of crimes and infractions they didn’t commit. [Read more…]