Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Margaret L.: I have a serious problem Rick. I bought an HP laptop from Best Buy on February 6, 2012 and I also took the three year extended warranty. The laptop died and now I can’t find my receipt or extended warranty paperwork.
Best Buy said there’s nothing they can do without the paperwork except send it off to HP for repair at my expense. Is there anything I can do to get them to honor the warranty I paid for? I’m just so frustrated right now.
Rick‘s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Felipe G.: I have a Dell Inspiron N5110 laptop (Windows 7 – 64 bit) with a single stick of 4GB RAM installed from the factory.
I checked and there is one empty memory slot in this computer. Can I upgrade the RAM to 12GB by plugging a single 8GB DDR3 RAM stick into the empty slot?
Rick’s answer: Hi Felipe. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the answer to your question is no. The maximum amount of RAM supported by your laptop’s motherboard is 8GB. [Read more…]
Question from Miranda P.: Hi Rick. I just bought a Samsung Galaxy S4 and I love it, but the annoying clicking sound the keyboard makes when I’m typing is driving me crazy.
I’ve searched the menus from top to bottom and I can’t find a setting to disable the keyboards sounds. Can you please, please, please tell me how to do it?
Rick‘s answer: Indeed I can Miranda. The setting for turning off the key click sound on the Galaxy S4 is hidden under a set of nested menus. Here’s how to find it:
1 – Open the Settings screen, then scroll down and select Language and Input.
2 – Find Samsung keyboard and tap the gear-shaped icon.
3 – Tap Advanced.
4 – Uncheck Key-tap sound. Note: If you’d like to turn off the equally annoying Key-tap vibration, you can do that while you’re on this screen as well.
Here’s a screenshot: [Read more…]
Question from Mike D: Rick, a few days ago my Acer laptop running Windows 7 caught a couple of nasty viruses, but I was able to remove them by following the instructions in your great virus removal post. Thanks for the help!
Now that the viruses are gone however, I have a different, but related problem. The viruses apparently “hid” all the files on a very important USB thumb drive that was plugged into the PC when the viruses struck. These are documents that I use at school, and I really need to get them back if at all possible. I’m not really concerned about the drive itself. I just need the files back! Any ideas?
Rick‘s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Kenneth O.: I started using Google Chrome instead of Internet Explorer a while back, and I really like it.
But starting last night I can’t get to certain websites in Chrome even though I can get to them just fine in other web browsers.
As far as I know I haven’t changed any settings or anything. What could be the problem?
Rick’s answer: There are a number of possible causes for this problem Kenneth, but the two most common (and most likely) are having your browser set to use a proxy server or corrupted cookies on your hard drive. The following steps will eliminate both possibilities: [Read more…]