Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Lonnie K.: I paid a guy I know to build me a custom PC around a Gigabyte Intel H77M-D3H motherboard. We had a disagreement and now he won’t talk to me or give me any advice.
What I want to do is add a stand-alone video card. I found a really good deal on an “open box” ZOTAC GeForce GTX 660 Ti but before I buy it I want to make sure it’ll work with my motherboard. Will it?
Rick‘s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Anthony H: Rick, I have a favorite program that I’ve been using for many years, but they haven’t updated it since 2006 and it sometimes freezes up on me in Windows 7.
When the program freezes my mouse does too, and the only way to proceed is to unplug the power cable. I really don’t like doing that cause I’m afraid it’ll damage my PC. Is there any way to exit that program gracefully when it freezes using just the keyboard?
Rick’s answer: Hi Anthony. My first suggestion would be to ditch that old, no longer supported program and try to find a modern equivalent that won’t crash your computer when you use it. That being said, I understand completely why you’d rather not do that. In fact, I have a couple of programs on my Windows 7 PC that were released long before yours was and I won’t part with them until I absolutely have to!
To answer your question, there is indeed a way to “kill” a frozen program using just the keyboard. Follow these steps: [Read more…]
In Windows XP we could access the ‘Run’ box directly from the Start Menu, but for some unknown reason Microsoft chose to hide this indispensable tool beginning with the release of Windows Vista.
You can always display the ‘Run’ box by pressing the Windows+R key combination, but most Windows users would prefer to have it right on the Start Menu like it was in XP. If you’re one of them, here’s how to put it on there: [Read more…]
For many, the most dreaded “feature” of Microsoft Windows is the infamous “Blue Screen of Death” that tells you that Windows has crashed, without giving you the reason why it happened.
Yes, the Blue Screen provides you with a cryptic code that offers a subtle hint as to where to start looking, but that’s about all.
Windows 7 and Windows 8 are much more stable than previous versions of Windows, but the occasional Blue Screen still rears its ugly head from time to time. A wonderful free utility called BlueScreenView sheds light on the cause of a system crash by scanning the minidump file that was created when the crash occurred and helping you track down the particular driver that caused the crash. [Read more…]
Question from Connie D: Hi Rick. I recently set up a WordPress blog using your excellent instructions. You made it so easy! Thank you very, very much!
I’m having one issue that’s driving me batty though. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my posts I receive two identical emails letting me know about the comment. How can I make WordPress send me just one email?
Rick’s answer: Connie, when I first started blogging with WordPress I had the same problem, and it drove me batty too until I finally figured out what the problem was. The duplicate notification emails result from using two different email addresses when you post under a different user name than the one assigned to the primary Administrator account. Here’s how to fix it: [Read more…]