Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Although computer memory is a lot more reliable today than in times past, memory sticks do go bad from time to time. They don’t go bad very often, but it does happen.
And if one goes bad in your PC you can expect to experience problems ranging from minor software glitches to a system that simply refuses to boot up.
If you suspect that your PC might have a defective memory stick you can test it with a great free RAM diagnostic utility called Memtest86+. [Read more…]
Adobe Lightroom has long been recognized as one of the world’s best photo editing programs.
In fact, I often recommend it over the full-blown Adobe Photoshop program for those who don’t really need Photoshop’s powerful graphic design capabilities.
In a nutshell, Lightroom is a lean, yet powerful program that includes all the best image editing capabilities of Photoshop without all the extras that many users will never need or use.
While Lightroom is a lot cheaper than Photoshop, if you want to install it on your computer it’ll still cost you a considerable amount in most cases. But now you can install it on your mobile device for free! [Read more…]
Important update: The browser extension mentioned in this post has been removed from the Chrome web store. It apparently morphed into malware so Google banned it. I have removed the links to it from the original post.
Have you ever tried to find a web page you’ve visited in the past by scanning your browser history? If so, you probably found the experience both difficult and frustrating.
Most browsers display your history items in a boring, confusing list that’s hard to read and even harder to understand, but a fantastic Chrome extension called Better History makes finding the URL you’re looking for a breeze!
Chrome already does a much better job at displaying your browser’s history items than most other browsers, but the Better History extension takes that already enhanced usability to an entirely different level. [Read more…]
I have often wondered why so many companies and individuals continue to pay big bucks for Microsoft Office when there are a number of outstanding free alternatives to choose from.
I haven’t owned a current version of either Microsoft Word or Excel for over a decade, and the free software on my PC can read and write those files just fine.
I have used Apache OpenOffice for some time and highly recommend it, but I recently downloaded and began testing Kingsoft Office. So far I find myself very impressed. Here’s why: [Read more…]
Your computer’s hard drive or SSD is one of the most important parts of it.
After all, it stores all of your valuable programs, data files, music and other miscellaneous pieces of your digital life in addition to the operating system itself.
Parted Magic is a powerful suite of Linux-based utilities for testing, partitioning, formatting and cloning your hard drive(s) and/or SSD(s).
Many computer techs (including Yours Truly) use it fairly often for setting up and maintaining the drives in our own machines as well as those of our customers. [Read more…]