Category Archives: Tech Tips

How to format a hard drive

There may come the time in which you need or want to format a hard drive. In this guide, we take a look at how to do this in a few different situations. Before formatting your hard drive, it is important that you backup any files, docs, folders, etc that you wish to keep. When you go through the format process, it will completely clear your hard drive, thus clearing all files on the disk.

Formatting your hard drive could help you resolve issues that ordinarily cannot be fixed or repaired easily. For example, if you just can’t get rid of a virus, formatting will surely knock it out. I always like to consider this a last ditch effort after I have tried removing via my antivirus software. read more

5 Efficient Ideas for Low-Cost Printing at Home

So you have to do some heavy-duty, high volume printing? In that case, you may be planning to head out to a print shop, assuming that would be more cost-efficient that using your home printer. Well, yes… and no.

While printing at home does not usually yield a competitive cost per page, there are some strategies you can adopt to achieve higher cost-efficiency. In contrast, if you plan to print your books in bulk, or if you would like to get them bound (discover this here), then printing shops near you could be a preferred choice. You can even bargain with them to give you at a lesser cost. This article will point out several ideas that could help make it worthwhile to start printing reams of paper right from the comfort of your home office. read more

Surprising Apps That Transform Tablets (or Smartphones) into PC Peripherals

If you’ve had a tablet for some time, and assuming you have an inclination to explore the diversity of available apps – then you’ve likely realized how widely useful these devices can be. Even so, chances are you haven’t discovered some of the most techie-oriented and genuinely practical uses you can get from this kind of gadget, when coupled with a computer.

For example, did you know that your tablet can be used as a touch-pad to control your computer, or as an external screen? This article will show you how to turn your tablet into a PC peripheral, in ways you have never imagined possible. read more

Quick Tip: Finding Large Files in Windows 7

With some inspiration from Rick’s article about finding space hogs over at What’s on My PC, I figured I would post a quick tip on how to find large files using the Windows File Search feature. I want to add that the tool Rick talks about looks like a solid tool as well. I will be illustrating this in Windows 7, but the general concept will work in Windows 8.

Searching for Files larger than 1MB

Searching for large files in Windows is quite easy. In Windows 7, open up a Windows Explorer window. The icon looks like the following and it should be in your bottom task bar: read more

Creating a Hacker Proof Password

While checking out a blog I read often, pctechbytes, I noticed a pretty cool infograph talking about how quickly a pro hacker can crack an easy password. You can see the infograph here. As you can see from the infograph, an easy password can be cracked without a ton of trouble. This can be pretty scary. Let’s look at a few ways in which you can create a secure password that is really tough to crack.

First, don’t use any of the super common and easy to crack passwords such as “password”, “password123”, “12345”, etc. If you are currently using one of these, you are asking for trouble. read more