Jesse Mueller The summertime heat has arrived! Here’s your annual reminder: Don’t Leave Laptops in Hot Cars. Same goes for your other tech items, like tablets, phones, portable game consoles. Computers and other devices are vulnerable to the extreme temperatures inside of a car’s cabin. In very little time, heat build-up in your vehicle can bake your … Read more
The hard drive in your computer is going to wear down some day and fail. Everyone hopes their hard drive will last a long time, and most do. But hard drive death is unpredictable, and your computer may give you no warning about what’s coming. As your computer ages and slows down, you can spot-check … Read more
When you want to dispose of a computer, you should recycle it. Your local landfill may come to mind for this task, but that’s often not the best idea. Besides the inconvenience of driving there, the landfill is likely to charge you recycling fees for some of your tech-junk. But there’s good news: Virginia passed … Read more
You can use your antivirus to scan any file on your system, and it’ll tell you if the file is safe or not. But sometimes, you might want a second opinion. No antivirus is perfect. If you want to double-check any file before you open it, head to www.virustotal.com . At this site, you can upload a … Read more
An email client is a program that is used to view your email on your computer. There are many email clients, like the Windows 10 Mail app, Mozilla Thunderbird, and Microsoft Outlook. But the one that many just can’t give up is Windows Live Mail. Microsoft made that program as a successor to Outlook Express … Read more
I’d like to mention a couple of my favorite “daily deal” websites, Woot.com and Meh.com . Woot.com started some 16 years ago as a site that sold just one item, each day. That item changed everyday — today it could be a vacuum, tomorrow it could be gourmet coffee from Guatemala. Whatever it was, it was offered at a truly … Read more
If you’re looking for the quickest way to contact a large company, check out GetHuman at https://gethuman.com/ . You do NOT want to Google for a support number, unless you really know what you’re doing. That’s how a lot of people find and call fake companies and scammers. But GetHuman is trustworthy, and will only show legitimate … Read more
Federal law makes it so you may obtain free credit reports, once a year. AnnualCreditReport.com is the easiest site for obtaining your credit reports. ACR is simple and straightforward, and will pace you through to each of the big 3 credit reporting agencies, to collect each record. There are other websites and companies that may offer … Read more
There are so many antivirus solutions out there for Windows Computers. I can’t possibly name them all, but I’ll try to touch on the ones I know and love. And I swear by free protection, so you should expect that everything I mention here has a $0 pricetag. Microsoft Windows Defender: this app is built-in … Read more
Macs get infected just as often as PCs. I know because I’m cleaning malware and baddies off of Apples these days, just as I do for Windows computers. Protect your system with a free antivirus for Macs: Bitdefender Virus Scanner for Mac: https://www.bitdefender.com/solu…/virus-scanner-for-mac.html AVG Antivirus for Mac: https://www.avg.com/en-us/avg-antivirus-for-mac Sophos Home Free Antivirus: https://home.sophos.com/en-us/download-mac-anti-virus.aspx These are full-time, auto-updating antiviruses. … Read more