Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Don: I have a 2TB external hard drive that I’ve used to back up my MacBook for a while. I just bought a 6TB drive to replace it.
I want to give the old drive to my nephew because he needs one and he can’t really afford to buy one.
How can I securely wipe that drive to make sure it’s completely empty before I give it to him? [Read more…]
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Question from Keith: Hi, Rick. I hope you can help me figure out what I just bought.
One of my neighbors sold me a used MacBook that she inherited after a family member passed away. She let me have it for $50 just to get rid of it!
She doesn’t really know anything about the model or specs of the machine, and I don’t either because I’m a Windows guy. All we know is it’s a MacBook.
What I’d like to know is do Macs have a ‘System Information’ screen like the one in Windows that’ll tell me what’s inside this thing? I plan to sell it (hopefully at a profit) so I need to know exactly what’s in it.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Marla: My 7 year old HP laptop quit on me the other day so I’ve been shopping around for a new laptop.
I noticed almost immediately that Apple’s MacBooks are more expensive than comparable Windows laptops.
And they aren’t just a little more expensive either. The MacBooks are about three times more expensive than similarly equipped Windows machines.
My question is why are people willing to pay a huge premium to buy a MacBook when they can get a comparable Windows laptop for so much less? [Read more…]
Like other popular web browsers, Safari allows you to choose the default search engine you want to use when you search for something on the web with your Apple device.
Safari comes pre-configured with Google set as its default search engine, but you can easily change that to Bing, DuckDuckGo or one of several other popular search engines if you choose to do so. [Read more…]
Question from Camilla: I’ve always owned Windows computers but my daughter talked me into trying a MacBook after my years-old Toshiba laptop died a few weeks ago.
I tried using Safari for several days but I just can’t get used it it.
I finally broke down and installed Firefox because I’ve used it for years and I’m just more comfortable with it.
Anyway, the links I click always open in Safari but I want them to open in Firefox instead.
How do I make Firefox the default web browser on my new MacBook?