Rick's Daily Tips

Review: WD 1TB Black My Passport Portable USB 3.0 External Hard Drive

Posted on August 30, 2017

These days no computer system is complete without an external USB hard drive. These handy gadgets are simply perfect for making local backups and for handling so many other handy mass storage tasks.

External hard drives used to be quite expensive, but their prices have now dropped to where they are easily affordable, even with today’s massive storage capacities.

I recently had a chance to check out the WD 1TB Black My Passport Portable USB 3.0 External Hard Drive (#ad), and it didn’t take long to figure out why it’s the best selling external USB hard drive on Amazon.

This awesome drive from Western Digital easily fits in my shirt pocket, yet it’s super fast and stores a full terabyte of data. Thanks to its speedy USB 3.0 interface, it made quick work of backing up both the 120GB SSD and 750GB hard drive on my Desktop PC. [Read more…]

Q&A: Is it safe to max out my RAM’s clock speed in the BIOS?

Posted on August 28, 2017

Question from Nathan P.: I just finished building my first computer from a bare-bones kit.

Everything worked fine from the moment I first powered it up, but the BIOS says the RAM is running at 1333 MHz even though the RAM sticks are rated at 1600 MHz.

My CPU is an Intel Core i5 and the RAM sticks are Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 / 1600 MHz. Is it safe to bump up the clock speed in the BIOS to match the RAM’s rating of 1600 MHz?

This is my first build, and I seriously don’t want to fry anything by overclocking the RAM if there’s some reason the motherboard is running it at a slower speed..

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I reset a forgotten Windows 10 password?

Posted on August 28, 2017

Question from Gloria: I tried to log in to my computer for the first time in several months, but it won’t let me log in because I can’t remember the password.

This is a desktop computer with Windows 10? I can’t believe I forgot the password! Can you tell me how to reset it?

Rick’s answer: Don’t be too hard on yourself, Gloria. This happens all the time. In fact, rarely a week goes by without someone asking me how to reset a Windows password that they’ve forgotten.

As you might imagine, Microsoft doesn’t include an easy way to reset a forgotten password with Windows since that would defeat the purpose of having a password in the first place. But luckily there are third-party tools that we can use to reset them. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware the insidious ‘Locky Ransomware’ that’s being spread by Facebook Messenger

Posted on August 27, 2017

As you probably know by now, scams and viruses are constantly making the rounds on Facebook.

The latest threat is spreading like wildfire with the help of the ubiquitous Facebook Messenger app that runs on millions of smart phones and tablets.

Commonly known as “Locky Ransomeware”, this threat is especially bad because there’s no known decryption program available for unlocking a device once it has been encrypted. [Read more…]

Parted Magic – An awesome bootable CD for testing, partitioning and cloning hard drives

Posted on August 25, 2017

Your computer’s hard drive or SSD is one of the most important parts of it.

After all, it stores all of your valuable programs, data files, music and other miscellaneous pieces of your digital life in addition to the operating system itself.

Parted Magic is a powerful suite of Linux-based utilities for testing, partitioning, formatting and cloning your hard drive(s) and/or SSD(s).

Many computer techs (including Yours Truly) use it fairly often for setting up and maintaining the drives in our own machines as well as those of our customers. [Read more…]