Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you’re like me, every now and then you need to take a quick peek at the Desktop, but you don’t want to have to go through the hassle of minimizing all the open Windows or losing track of what you’re doing after having to re-open them all.
If you’re using Windows 7, you can always click the Show Desktop icon or right-click on the taskbar and click Show the Desktop, but if all you need to do is take a quick peek at the Desktop, you can simply do the following: [Read more…]
Question from Cale G.: Rick, I read your post about installing the Windows 10 Preview and I’d like to try it out on my old Acer laptop that’s currently running Windows Vista.
I checked and the machine seems to meet all the hardware requirements, so I figured why not install it and check it out?
The problem is I heard you have to have a Microsoft account in order to install the Windows 10 Preview, and sure enough when I went to install it I was prompted to either log in to an existing account or create a new one.
If I can possibly avoid it, I don’t want a Microsoft account, and I definitely don’t want to have to log into Windows on my laptop through one! Hence my question: Can you tell me if there’s a way to install Windows 10 without having to open a Microsoft account first?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Alice T.: Rick, I have an HP laptop running Windows 7, and I have a question for you.
I read somewhere that hackers can take control of your webcam and make videos and take pictures of you without your knowledge.
I NEVER use a webcam for anything so I’d like just disable it completely and be done with it. How do I do that?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Windows 8.1 is a huge improvement over Windows 8 because it fixes a number of the most despised “changes” that Microsoft made to the newly-designed Windows interface.
One of the most appreciated “fixes” is the ability to have Windows 8.1 boot directly to the Desktop instead of the Start Screen – but this isn’t the default. Follow these steps to make Windows 8.1 boot directly to the Desktop: [Read more…]
A few days ago I wrote a post about a bad Windows Update that was causing many Windows 7 PCs to go into a reboot loop. Inexplicably, Microsoft has yet to release a fix for the issue.
As I explained in that post, if your PC already has the bad update installed and it’s stuck in a reboot loop, you can probably use the System Restore utility to roll back your Windows installation to a point in time before the bad update was installed. [Read more…]