Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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Question from Benjamin: I need some advice, Rick.
I’ll soon be heading to the UK for a six week visit.
I’ll need a laptop to use while I work from my hotel room every day while I’m over there.
The problem is my laptop’s charger operates at 120 volts and there’s no switch to change it to 240 volts like there is with my desktop computer.
Is there any way I can use my existing laptop during my visit to the UK? [Read more…]
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Question from Keith: Hi, Rick. I hope you can help me figure out what I just bought.
One of my neighbors sold me a used MacBook that she inherited after a family member passed away. She let me have it for $50 just to get rid of it!
She doesn’t really know anything about the model or specs of the machine, and I don’t either because I’m a Windows guy. All we know is it’s a MacBook.
What I’d like to know is do Macs have a ‘System Information’ screen like the one in Windows that’ll tell me what’s inside this thing? I plan to sell it (hopefully at a profit) so I need to know exactly what’s in it.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Tina: I’m a single mom and I’ve started dating again after being divorced for two years.
I have some dating-related documents on my MacBook that I would prefer my 12 year old son not see while he’s using the computer.
There’s nothing of an “adult” nature on there but I would still prefer to keep those dating-related documents private for now.
I noticed that some of those documents are showing up on the ‘Recent Items” list. How do I clear the items from that list? [Read more…]
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Question from Shruti: Hi, Rick. I hope you’re doing well.
I have a Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultrabook. Everything was fine until this morning when my screen just turned grey-ish black.
I had dropped my laptop and slightly cracked the top right edge of the screen along with one of the hinges a few months back but everything seemed to still be working fine.
I don’t know why this suddenly happened.
I have important data on this machine so I’d like to know if there is any way to retrieve the data without fixing the screen? [Read more…]
Question from Mallorie: I need some advice Rick, and it’s sort of a touchy situation.
We live in a duplex and our neighbor has a 14 year old son who bought a Straight Talk phone from my daughter.
The thing is she didn’t reset the phone before she sold it to him because he said he’d like to just take over her phone number, and she said that would be fine.
This phone still automatically connects to our WiFi network, and I know for a fact that he uses our WiFi a lot because he told my daughter that he does.
My question is do you think he could cause us any problems by piggybacking off of our wireless network? [Read more…]