Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Beverly: I just bought a new PC with Windows 11 and the time in the lower right corner is in military time.
How do I reset it to normal time (i.e. instead of 17:00, have it say 5:00 PM)?
I’ve tried everything but don’t know how to do it.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Countless articles have been written over the years on the topic of optimizing PCs that run Microsoft Windows in order to make them run faster.
Many of those articles offer a number of good tips, but they almost always include one that I don’t recommend: Optimizing the Windows Registry.
In this post I’m going to explain what Linux is, and more importantly, what it can do for you as the owner of an older PC that’s running a version of Windows that has been abandoned by Microsoft.
As you probably know by now, Microsoft is no longer releasing security updates for many versions of Windows, which means computers that are still running them are wide open to hackers and malware.
But an awesome free operating system called Linux can make using that unsafe computer safe again.
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
By default, when people call you on your smartphone the ringtone will sound the same regardless of who is calling you.
And that can be a problem if your phone starts ringing while it’s sitting on a table on the other side of the room.
The caller could well be someone you really want to talk to, but it could also be a call you’d rather skip for the time being.
Unfortunately, the only way to find out is to stop what you’re doing and go pick up the phone.
Well, there’s an easy fix or this problem… [Read more…]
Question from Evelyn: I have an Acer desktop computer with Windows 10 Home edition on it.
Everything was working fine this morning but when I came back from lunch my web browser was in full screen mode (maximized).
I thought that was odd because everything was normal when I left for lunch.
I tried to click the little square icon in the top-right corner to take the browser out of full screen mode but I couldn’t click it. It’s like it ignored my clicks.
Anyway, I was able to minimize the browser but then I noticed something else really strange. None of my open apps were showing up on the taskbar.
I don’t know how things got so messed up, but I hate it. Do you have any idea what’s going on, and what I need to do to fix it? [Read more…]