Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Melvin: I need help with a glitch that’s affecting my phone.
All of a sudden it started rotating the Home screen every time I rotate the phone (the same way pictures rotate).
I can deal with the pictures rotating but I hate it when the Home screen rotates. It just looks really weird.
Why is this happening and how can I put a stop to it? [Read more…]
Question from Beverly: Google sent me an email saying my Gmail account was caught sending spam.
They said I have to pay a $250 fine within 48 hours or my Gmail address will be permanently shut down.
This seems like a scam to me, but the email looks real and I can’t afford to take a chance on losing my Gmail address. Everything I do online is linked to that address.
My question: Is this email legit? [Read more…]
Question from Larry: I was digging through some junk in my basement and found my old 1990s era Gateway computer with Windows 3.1 on it.
Just out of curiosity I hooked it up and was surprised to see it come on and boot up.
I spent several minutes just fooling around with it and I noticed how fast it was running.
I have a four month old Dell laptop that has an Intel i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM but it seems to run a lot slower than that 20+ year old Gateway.
Why would a modern computer with supposedly much better hardware run slower than a PC that’s over 20 years old? [Read more…]
Question from Kellie: I have Xfinity Internet and the plan I’m on is for 200 Mbps download speed.
I used SpeedTest.net to run several speed tests yesterday and again this morning. The fastest speed I got was around 65 Mbps.
I called Xfinity this afternoon and they ran some kind of test from their end and said I was getting all the speed I’m paying for.
Is there something I’m doing wrong when I run the speed test or is Xfinity just blowing me off? [Read more…]
Question from Charise: I read that with all the hacking going on we need to check the strength of our passwords with an online password checker.
I did a Google search for the term “password checker” and a bunch of them came up. The thing is, I’m wondering if it’s safe to use them.
I’m a little leery of typing my passwords into a form on a website that I don’t know anything about.
Are those password checker websites safe to use? [Read more…]