Rick's Daily Tips

Crucial to being selling DDR4 RAM by the end of December

Posted on November 16, 2013

DDR3 memory has been the standard for years, but that will soon change. Our friends over at Crucial Technology have just announced that they’ll begin selling DDR4 RAM some time before the end of December 2013.

DDR4 promises to be a major upgrade over DDR3. The new memory standard doubles the speed of its predecessor while also doubling the maximum storage capacity per module from 8GB to 16GB. And just as important, the new DDR4 RAM will operate on a meager 1.2 volts of electricity which means it should run cooler and save energy. [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I change the formatting of a word everywhere that it occurs in a MS Word document?

Posted on November 13, 2013

Question from Keith D.: Rick, I write rather lengthy documents in Microsoft Word on a regular basis, and I often go back and manually change the formatting of every instance of certain words or phrases (i.e. font color, italics, bold, etc.) to make them stand out from the rest of the text.

It would save me a ton of time if there was a way to change the formatting of every instance of a word or phrase at once. Is there a way to do that?

Rick’s answer: There sure is Keith, and it’s a fairly simple process: [Read more…]

Great deal: SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SSD for about $100 w/free shipping

Posted on November 11, 2013

sandisk-256-gb-ssd No other upgrade will speed up your computer as effectively as replacing the hard drive with a Solid State Drive (SSD). But there are a couple of caveats with such an upgrade:

1 – When comparing their relative costs per gigabyte, SSDs are considerably more expensive than traditional hard drives.

2 – Most affordable SSDs are quite limited in the amount of data they can store.

Right now you can get a great deal on the SanDisk Ultra Plus 256 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s 2.5-Inch SSD that helps mitigate both of the caveats mentioned above. Not only will they sell you one for about $100, they’ll also ship it to you for free! [Read more…]

How to protect yourself against the insidious CryptoLocker ransomeware

Posted on November 11, 2013

CryptoLocker is an especially insidious form of “Ransomeware” – malware that basically locks up all the user data on your computer’s drives until you fork over some cash to a far-away crook.

What makes CryptoLocker so bad is the way it encrypts the user data on your hard drive using a super-strong encryption method. This makes it literally impossible to access your own data without forking over a bundle of cash in exchange for the unlock key.

The key to protecting yourself from CryptoLocker lies in prevention because even though there are several “cures” being hawked on the Internet, their effectiveness varies when they work at all.

Here are are a few things you can do to prevent your PC from getting infected with the CryptoLocker virus, and recover from it if you still end up getting hit: [Read more…]

Q&A: Why did the Wi-Fi stop working on my Dell Inspiron 1545 when I removed the screen?

Posted on November 9, 2013

Question from David G.: I have a Dell Inspiron 1545 laptop that my sister accidentally sat on and broke the screen.

The computer still worked fine when it was plugged into an external monitor though, so I removed the lid to get it out of the way so I could use it as a desktop PC.

The problem is ever since the screen was removed I can’t connect to the Internet with the built-in Wi-Fi.

I reinstalled the drivers for the Wi-Fi adapter and checked everything I know to check, but it just won’t connect even though I can see the network in the list of available networks. Can you tell me what I need to do to fix it?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]