Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
A while back I wrote a post explaining how to delete your entire search history that Google has collected and stored since the moment you began using their service way back when.
Several of you have since written in and asked me if there’s a way to prevent Google from gathering and storing that information in the first place? Well, the answer to that question is yes.
Google has built tons of nifty features into their popular search engine that do a lot more than just help folks find things on the Internet.
A couple of great examples are their instant instant weather snapshot and their handy dictionary service (simply type define:word into the search box, where word is the term you want to have defined).
Another of my favorites is the Google Timer. Here’s how to use it: [Read more…]
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
I know someone who recently bought a Windows laptop after her MacBook went belly-up on her.
She asked me if Windows would ever have a feature like the Macs that would allow the system to start up with the last-used programs and websites already open.
My answer: It already does!
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
Do you ever have any conversations with your Alexa device that you’d prefer that other family members or house guests not be able to hear?
Or do you occasionally prompt Alexa to answer a query late at night only to have her wake up everyone in the house with her reply?
Well, as luck would have it, your Alexa device has a nifty “Whisper Mode” that can prevent others from hearing (and/or being disturbed by) the conversations you have with the device. [Read more…]
I receive hundreds of tech questions every week, and the one I seem to get asked most often is how to retrieve the files from the hard drive after a PC goes belly-up.
My answer always depends on which part of the computer has failed.
If the hard drive itself is the component that died, you’ll have to either send the drive off to a data recovery service or purchase a data recovery software utility and attempt to recover the files yourself. [Read more…]