Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Anthony: I have no discs for windows 8.1, so is going back to factory mode a safe and easy way to restore my computer without the use of discs, and then just download the programs I had back on to my computer?
Rick’s answer: Anthony, you can certainly restore your Windows 8.1 computer back to its factory state using the Recovery Partition on the hard drive. [Read more…]
It seems like a new virus or trojan pops up every day, and they tend to get nastier as time goes on. The latest super-threat is the insidious Gameover Zeus virus.
Gameover Zeus is a particularly nasty form of malware. In addition to allowing other viruses (including the equally insidious CryptoLocker) to break into your system, it harvests every scrap of financial information it can find from your computer’s hard drive.
Approximately a quarter of a million people and institutions have fallen victim already, and the combined financial losses are staggering – and growing. [Read more…]
It seems that laptops are getting cheaper by the day, but most of the models on the lower end of the price scale are bare-bones machines that don’t have the power for serious computing tasks.
I recently had an opportunity to check out a great laptop that perfectly bridges the gap between low-cost entry-level PCs and the more powerful and more expensive ultrabooks. It’s the HP 15-d097nr TouchSmart laptop, and I really like it. [Read more…]
Question from Sean G.: I hope you can help me. Twice now I have lost work because my computer automatically rebooted after installing Windows Updates. It always catches me off guard and I don’t have a chance to save my work.
This is really driving me up the wall! Is there any way to keep it from happening? My computer has Windows 7 Home Premium.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
These days replacing your computer’s hard drive with a super-fast solid state drive (SSD) gives you more bang for the buck than just about any upgrade you can make.
Most people will tell you that once you’ve owned a PC that boots from an SSD, you’ll never want to be without one again!
I recently received a Samsung 840 EVO-Series 120GB 2.5-Inch SATA III SSD for review, and I decided to install it in my Gateway desktop PC. In this review I’ll give you my opinion of the drive. [Read more…]