Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Daneen: Hi Rick. I bought a couple of USB Flash Drives last night to put baby pictures on and give to my mom and mother-in-law, but I noticed after I got home that they’re USB 3.0 drives.
Will these drives work in USB 2.0 sockets or should I return them and buy USB 2.0 drives? I don’t want to damage my computer, and I REALLY don’t want to damage theirs! Thanks a lot for your help.
Rick‘s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Joyce B.: Hi Rick. I just moved from Des Moines, Iowa to Vancouver, British Columbia and of course I brought my new laptop with me.
I love the Windows 8 Maps app, but now that I’m living in Canada I need for it to display distances in kilometers instead of miles. How do I make it do that? Thanks.
Rick‘s answer: Hi Joyce! I hope you enjoy your new home north of the border. I have a feeling that you will since Canada is such a beautiful country and the people are sooooo nice!
To answer your question, here’s all you need to do to make the Windows 8 Maps app display distances in kilometers: [Read more…]
Question from Eric: My computer slowed to a crawl and I found out that it was eaten up with Spyware and viruses. I spent the better part of a day cleaning it all up but now I can’t load the Task Manager. It’s grayed out on the menus and I can’t click it. How can I get it back?
Rick‘s answer: Hi Eric. The miscreants who create spyware and viruses use all kinds of tricks to prevent us from discovering and disabling their insidious creations, and a couple of their favorite tricks are disabling the System Restore and Task Manager utilities. [Read more…]
Question from Randy F:. Rick, I took your suggestion and upgraded to I.E. 10 and it was a great move. It’s a lot faster than I.E. 9!
But there is one problem: When I.E. is loaded the first time it takes forever to load the first web page. But after that, every other page loads in a jiffy. This started when I installed I.E. 10. Do you know how I can fix this? Thanks!
Rick‘s answer: Randy, this is a common problem with Internet Explorer that goes way back to the earliest versions. For some reason some I.E. installations have trouble initially detecting the PC’s Lan settings. Here’s how to fix the problem of I.E. hanging on the first page load: [Read more…]
Question from Carla J.: I keep hearing how lots of people are dropping their cable TV and watching all their TV shows online for free. I only really watch 3 shows on a regular basis – Duck Dynasty and HGTV’s Curb Appeal and House Hunters.
It seems like I’m paying way too much just to watch 3 shows! I’d love to be able to tell Charter to stop my service and start watching my shows online, but this just sounds too good to be true. Is it?
Rick’s answer: No Carla, it isn’t. Millions of people around the world now watch their favorite TV shows over the Internet. And yes, many of those shows are absolutely free (not counting the cost of your Internet connection) and many others are available for a modest fee.
But before you call Charter and ditch your cable service, there are some things you need to consider: [Read more…]