Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: What’s a good laptop cooling pad for gaming?

Posted on March 30, 2023

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

Question from Jarrod: I have a three year old Alienware gaming laptop that I really love, but there’s one problem that I’ve always had with it.

This laptop gets really hot after I’ve been playing a game for about half an hour and I’m afraid it’s gonna end up getting fried.

I think a good laptop cooling pad might help but there are so many to choose from. I don’t know where to start. Can you recommend one that works really well with gaming laptops? [Read more…]

Try this first if your laptop won’t turn on

Posted on March 30, 2023

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

If you ever press the power button on your laptop and it fails to power up, there’s a good chance that you won’t need to replace it or pay for an expensive repair.

A “dead” laptop can be caused by several different issues, but one common cause is a simple transient power issue or some other transient glitch.

If you ever find yourself facing a laptop that won’t turn on when you press the power button, try this before trying anything else: [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I disable the touch screen on my laptop?

Posted on March 29, 2023

Question from Rhonda: I have a touchscreen Windows laptop and my two year old loves reaching over me and touching the screen just to see what happens.

It tickles her to death, but it drives me nuts because it occasionally causes me to lose work.

Is there any way to turn off the touch screen? [Read more…]

4 Tips for storing and playing large media files on your phone

Posted on March 29, 2023

Smartphones are everywhere these days. In fact, I’m guessing that you don’t personally know all that many people who don’t own one.

Thanks to the massive library of apps that are available, modern smartphones have literally hundreds of uses besides simply placing telephone calls and sending SMS text messages.

One of their most common uses is playing multimedia files such as streaming videos, audio tracks and watching online movies.

But what if you want to save your favorite media files directly onto your smartphone so you can enjoy them while you’re stuck in a traffic jam somewhere out in the boondocks? [Read more…]