Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Rick’s Tech Tips Newsletter
By now you probably know better than to click or tap on links in emails because that’s one of the easiest ways to infect your device with a virus.
After all, once you click a link and visit an infected website, the damage is done.
Well, the same thing is now happening on smartphones as well, only the malware is being spread via text messages. [Read more…]
As you probably know, the Internet is home to a lot of scammy and fraudulent websites.
Truth be told, the percentage of “bad” sites is actually fairly low compared to the number of legitimate sites.
The problem is there are literally billions of websites on the Internet, and that means even though just a small percentage of them are “bad”, that percentage still amounts to a LOT of scam/fraudulent websites.
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
There are billions of websites on the Internet, and unfortunately a great number of them are malicious in some way or another.
If you happen to load a malicious web page into your web browser, bad things can happen in a hurry due to malware and other nasties being downloading onto your computer.
Luckily, it’s usually possible to avoid landing on a dangerous site by simply being careful about the links you click, but there’s always a chance that it will still happen some day regardless of how careful you are. [Read more…]
As you probably know, malware infections can cause all kinds of strange problems on Windows PCs.
That’s why if your computer starts acting strange all of a sudden it could very well be infected with a virus or some other form of malware.
Most malware infections can be removed by running a thorough series of scans with the free tools mentioned in this post, but there are some strains of malware that might need to be removed by an experienced computer tech.
I recommend that you always run your own malware scans (if it’s possible to do so) before you take your PC to a repair shop for ANY type of service or repair, even if you don’t believe the issue is malware-related.
Question from Luisa: I’m hoping you can clear something up for me.
I’ve heard some people say we need to stop using Windows 7 now that Microsoft has stopped updating it because it’s no longer safe.
Others are saying it’s perfectly fine to keep using it as long as the computer has an antivirus on it.
This is really confusing to me.
My HP laptop is old but it still works fine even though it has Windows 7 on it. I really hate the thought of having to replace it, but I will if it’s really unsafe to use.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]