Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Carol: Hi Rick. I paid a man I used to work with $220 to install Windows 7 Ultimate on my Dell laptop (it originally came with Windows Vista). Now every time I boot the computer into Windows it tells me that my Windows isn’t genuine.
I tried to call him to ask him to fix this error, but his phone has been disconnected and I don’t know how to get in touch with him. What should I do to get this fixed? I really appreciate your help.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Camille I.: I have cable Internet through Charter and it’s usually pretty fast, but during the evenings it sometimes slows to a crawl. I read somewhere a while back that some web browsers work better on slow Internet connections than others. Can you recommend one?
Rick’s answer: I sure can Camille. For overall speed it’s hard to beat Google Chrome, but if you have a slow Internet connection Opera running in turbo mode is amazing! What makes Opera so much faster over a slow connection than other browsers is their data proprietary compression system. [Read more…]
Question from Ken L.: Rick, I need help big time my friend. I accidentally deleted all the files from my USB pen drive and I REALLY need to get them back. I checked the Recycle Bin and they aren’t in there. Is there anything I can do to get them back?
Rick’s answer: There’s a good chance that you’ll be able to recover at least some of your lost files Ken, and maybe even all of them if luck is on your side. Here’s what you need to do: [Read more…]
Question from Eric J.: I have an older Gateway desktop computer that came with a 320Gb hard drive, which is now full. I bought a new Seagate 1TB drive and installed it in the computer.
How do you recommend that I back up the smaller drive onto the larger one? Can I just copy my files from the small drive onto the new one and then delete them from the old drive to free up some space?
I want to make sure I do this right because I don’t want to lose any of my files. I’ll really appreciate any advice you can give me. Thanks.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Lexie V.: I get tons of messages from my Facebook friends, and I always try to read them as soon as possible.
That being said, there are times when I’d rather not let some senders know that I have read the messages they sent to me.
Is there any way to keep my friends from knowing that I have read the messages they sent me on Facebook?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]