Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Why can’t my Acer Aspire 5251 get past “Setup is starting services” message?

Posted on August 21, 2013

Question from Todd B.: Rick, I turned my laptop on yesterday morning and it suddenly shut off in the middle of the boot process. I turned it back on and it started to load Windows again, but then it displayed the message “Setup is starting services” and just sat there.

I finally gave up waiting for it to resume and turned it off, but now every time I turn it on it gets stuck at the same message.

I hope you can tell me how can I fix this? It’s an Acer Aspire 5251 running Windows 7. Thanks in advance for your help.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Why does the sound stop working when I rest my hand on my laptop?

Posted on August 19, 2013

Question from Darrell F.: Rick, I have a two month old Lenovo Y500 laptop that works great except for one problem…

When I rest my hands on the computer to type something on the keyboard, the sound cuts completely out just as if I had clicked the “Mute” button. When I remove my hands the sound immediately starts working again. Is this something that I can fix myself?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I determine the total up time for my PC since I bought it?

Posted on August 17, 2013

Question from Ron K.: Rick, this might seem like a frivolous question (and I admit that it is), but is there any way to determine the total number of hours and minutes that my Dell desktop computer has been powered on since I bought it in May 2008? No biggie if there isn’t, I’m just curious.

Rick’s answer: That isn’t a frivolous question at all Ron. Now you have me curious about how long my PCs have been powered up as well.

To answer your question, I don’t know of any way to use Windows itself to determine the total uptime of a computer, but I do know of a way to get a fairly accurate estimate: [Read more…]

How to center the open windows in Ubuntu

Posted on August 17, 2013

As I explained in this post, Ubuntu Linux is definitely worthy of consideration as a replacement operating system should you ever decide to ditch Microsoft Windows, but it does have a few quirks. Most of those quirks can easily be mitigated however.

One example is the way Ubuntu insists on placing every program window you open in the top left-hand corner of the screen and leaving it there. But there is a simple way to break those windows free of their constraints and move them to the center of the screen (a location that makes infinitely more sense in my opinion). Here’s how: [Read more…]