Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from William: Every time I check for new Windows Updates on my Windows 10 Lenovo laptop it tells me there are a couple of driver updates available as “optional” updates.
Should I go ahead and let Windows Update install those optional updates or should I just skip them?
I’ve been confused by this for a long time.
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Ellen: I need to purchase a new laptop. What are your thoughts on an SSD drive vs a regular hard drive?
Costco has two HP computers going on sale both with 12GB of memory. Both come with an Intel i5 CPU.
The difference between the two machines is the first one comes with a 512GB SSD and the other one comes with a 1TB hard drive.
They both are coming with Windows 11 (which I’m not thrilled about).
Which drive do you recommend? [Read more…]
Question from Bill: I have an Acer desktop PC with 4 GB of RAM that I updated to Windows 10 back when the update was free.
When I have all the programs and browser tabs that I normally use open at the same time the Task Manager says there is approximately 1.2 GB of RAM not being used.
I recently bought a brand new Dell desktop with 8 GB of RAM and Windows 10.
When I have the same exact configuration of programs and browser tabs open on the new machine it says there is still less than 2 GB of RAM that’s not being used.
How can this be? [Read more…]
Question from Sherry: Hi, Rick. I was typing a homework assignment in Microsoft Word when the doorbell rang.
It was the pizza delivery guy with the pizza I had ordered for dinner.
Anyway, I was away from the computer for maybe 2 minutes but when I got back my 2 year old was playing with it.
I about freaked out when I saw her playing with the mouse, but as it turned out my Word document was just fine.
The thing is she somehow managed to move the Taskbar from its usual place at the bottom of the screen all the way to the top.
She’s only 2 years old! How in the world could she have done that?
Can you tell me how to move it back to where it belongs? [Read more…]
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Ransomware is a very dangerous type of malware, but luckily most new strains are quickly mitigated thanks to the extra resources the antivirus companies have dedicated to eradicating them.
But that being said, the WannaCry Ransomware cyberworm is still going strong years after it was first discovered.