Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Does it seem like your laptop’s battery charge runs out sooner than it should? Well, it seems like they always do to me.
Assuming that the laptop battery isn’t defective, there are a number of power settings that you can tweak in order to make a charge last as long as possible.
The key is determining which settings to tweak in order to gain the most benefit without hampering your ability to use your laptop effectively.
In Windows 7 and earlier versions of Windows it was easy to access a PC’s BIOS settings.
All you had to do was press a special key right after you pressed the power button and you’d be taken directly to the “BIOS Settings” screen.
Once on that screen you could make several changes to system behavior (choosing which drive to boot from, for example).
Likewise, you could display the “Boot Options” menu simply by pressing the F8 key immediately after pressing the power button.
But things are different with newer machines that were designed to run Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. [Read more…]
By now you are probably quite familiar with the onscreen keyboard that pops up whenever you access a text box on your mobile device.
What most people don’t know however is recent versions of Microsoft Windows come with onscreen keyboards as well.
You might be wondering why you would ever want to use an onscreen keyboard when your PC already has a full-size physical keyboard.
Well, there are several situations in which an onscreen keyboard can come in handy. Here are a couple that arise fairly often : [Read more…]
Question from Aldrena K.: I have an Acer desktop computer running Windows 10.
I have always just used the Administrator account for everything I do on the computer, but I read on your site why that’s a bad idea.
I created a Standard user account for myself, but it only gives me access to the same programs that my son uses on his account.
How can I create a Standard user account for myself that lets me use all of my installed programs?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
One of the most frequently asked questions here at Rick’s Daily Tips is how much RAM a particular version of Windows will support.
After receiving another such question this morning, I thought it might be worthwhile to put that info in a blog post.
Just scroll through the list below until you find the Windows version that’s running on your machine.