Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you enjoy getting great deals on tech items you should check out TigerDirect’s Daily Deal page every day. The items they offer there are usually overstock, closeout or refurbished items (the refurbs are always clearly marked as such), and it’s almost always great stuff!
These deals are only good for that day, and usually only for a few hours since they tend to sell out rather quickly. [Read more…]
Question from Evan: I have a Sprint Samsung Galaxy S II Epic Touch 4G that keeps turning the Wi-Fi on all by itself. I can go into the settings and turn it off, but the next thing I know the Wi-Fi is enabled once again. I’ve had this phone for a long time and it only started doing this about a month ago. Can you tell me how to fix it? It’s driving me bonkers!
Rick’s answer: Evan, this is a fairly common problem among Sprint Android phones, and it isn’t limited to your particular model. The culprit is a pre-installed app called Sprint Connections Optimizer.
Sprint’s stated purpose for this app is to automatically connect your phone to any available Wi-Fi connection that you have used previously whenever it becomes available in order to speed up your data service. But I believe the real reason for it is to keep you off the Sprint data network as much as possible, freeing up available bandwidth for other users. [Read more…]
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…]
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…]
Letting other Dropbox users upload files to your Dropbox account is easy, but what about folks who don’t have a Dropbox account of their own?
Well, now there’s a free app called Dbinbox that lets you easily allow anyone equipped with a web browser to upload files directly into a special folder in your Dropbox account!
Setting up Dbinbox is easy. Here’s how: [Read more…]