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 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…]
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Question from Kendra: Hi, Rick. I really love your blog, especially the section where you answer questions from your readers.
If you don’t mind I’d like to ask a question of my own.
Back in March of 2020 the tech guy I used at the time installed a Crucial 500GB SSD in my Acer laptop and it really made it run a lot faster.
I recently read on another site that all SSDs wear out over time because they can only be written to a certain number of times.
That has me sort of worried because this drive is now about four years old and I have a lot of personal files on it that I don’t want to lose.
My question is do you think this drive is likely to fail at some time in the near future? [Read more…]