Rick's Daily Tips

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…]

How to back up your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to your iCloud account

Posted on August 22, 2017

Just as with a traditional laptop or desktop computer, it’s important to always have a current backup on hand for your mobile devices in case you ever have to restore your files.

Thanks to Apple’s popular cloud storage service known as iCloud, keeping your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch backed up is as easy as 1-2-3. And trust me, there will come a time when you will need it.

Here’s how to enable automatic iCloud backups on your Apple device: [Read more…]

Review: Acer Aspire TC desktop computer

Posted on August 21, 2017

Like my tips? Click here to sign up for my free Daily Tech Tips Newsletter and you’ll never miss one!

Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.

These days most people seem to prefer laptops over desktop computers, and for good reason. Laptops are portable and they can easily be taken along when traveling.

That being said, some people (myself included) still prefer using a desktop machine while we’re at home or working in the office.

There are several outstanding mid-range desktops on the market right now, one of which is the sleek and powerful Acer Aspire TC.

I’ve used and tested a lot of desktop computers in my day, and I can honestly say this is one of my favorites. It offers plenty of power for the money, and it’s a joy to use.

First, let’s take a look at the specs: [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I prevent ‘Offline Maps’ from automatically updating?

Posted on August 16, 2017

Question from Rina G.: I recently started running out of storage space on my laptop so I did some investigating.

Apparently the “Offline Maps” app is filling up the SSD every time it updates. The SSD is only 32GB so storage space is tight as it is.

How can I disable these automatic updates? This laptop is running Windows 10.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]