Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Aaron: The hard drive crashed on my Dell Inspiron 14z laptop so I took it to a guy I know who works on computers. He replaced the bad drive and installed a bootleg copy of Windows 7 since I didn’t have a set of recovery disks.
My question is if I buy a Windows 8 Pro upgrade will it make my Windows installation “legitimate”? I’m not out to rip off Microsoft, just get my laptop back “legal” with a fully working version of Windows.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Marcia N.: After using nothing but iPhones for years, I recently decided to give the Samsung Galaxy S4 a try after hearing a friend rave on and on about how great it is. And you know what? He’s right. I really do love it.
That being said, there’s something that really bugs me about the Galaxy S4. It has a ton of pre-installed apps on it that I’ll never use and are just taking up space in the internal memory, yet they can’t be uninstalled! What’s up with that?
Anyway, my friend told me that he “rooted” his phone and installed an app called Titanium Backup which he was able to use to remove some of the pre-installed apps. I’ve heard horror stories about phones being totally destroyed by rooting them and I’m really nervous about it. Should I be?
Rick’s answer: Yes Marcia, you should be. Why? Because in almost all cases rooting a phone immediately voids the warranty, leaving you without any recourse whatsoever should the phone develop a hardware problem during the warranty period. [Read more…]
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…]