Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
(Answer requested by Gabriel Yeung) Read multiple third-party SSD reviews from reliable sites and publications (examples)— don’t rely on “star ratings” on a vendor’s own site. Compare the manufacturer’s claimed SSD performance against the actual, delivered, real-world performance via sites such as https://ssd.userbenchmark.com/ and PassMark.com SSD ratings. Choose an SSD brand and vendor (they may…
(Answer requested by Ryan Nugent) In my experience, all of them. Windows 10’s various Reset and Fresh Start options can strip away most or all (your choice) of the preinstalled software on any Windows PC. You’ll be left with a PC running as “pure” and unmodified a Windows setup as your system allows. You may…
(Answer requested by Alexander Junior Souto) In smartphones, the width of the device — and therefore its screen — is more or less constrained by the width of human hands and pockets. Space not wasted on a needlessly fat bezel can be used to enlarge the display area, improving the user experience by making the…
(Answer requested by Nima Jooyandeh) Android, Apple, it doesn’t matter: Yes, any charger cord can wear out and lose effectiveness over time. Charger cords are technically cables — an assemblage of seperate wires wound together into a bundle;4 and coated with a plastic insulator. (The separate wires in USB charger are often literally only about…
(Answer requested by Elynn Quirk) Personally? Nope. Not at all. I doubt I use my keyboard’s backlight even 0.1% of the time. I’d probably feel differently if I were regularly using the laptop in situations with poor lighting. But if there’s enough light to work, there’s usually enough light for me to to see the…
(Answer requested by Jason Zimmer) Yup, almost surely, especially if you have any voice-enabled assistant or controls installed and enabled. Those services and features are designed to at least minimally listen all the time so that they can hear and can respond whenever you happen to say “Siri/Google/Bixby/Alexa/Cortana/whatever” or whatever trigger phrase your assistant uses….
(Answer requested by Nikola Cvetanovski) It’s probably not significant, but that really depends on a host of variables. Let’s try a thought experiment, where you can make assumptions about the variables: Let’s say the phone is on, but with the screen off. No non-system software is running (ie no other apps besides the stopwatch app);…
(Answer requested by Jack Miller) One easy way is to use Android’s built-in Reset network settings function: Open Settings; search for “reset” and select Reset network settings when it’s offered. (You can dig it out of the menus click by click, too, but the location has changed from version to version: In reasonably current Samsung…
(Answer requested by Edgar Ferrer) Yikes! If this actually worked on your laptop, you’re very lucky. The actual, true “put it in the fridge” advice is very old-school, and is/was a nothing-left-to-lose, last-ditch recovery option for malfunctioning spinning-platter hard drives. Deep-chilling a mechanical drive could sometimes free up stuck internal parts, via differential contraction/expansion of…
(Answer requested by Trevor Noble) Why does it take so long to paint a house compared to a garden shed? 🙂 Laptops are typically much more capacious than phones, and carry far more software and files. EG: My phone (an S10) has 128GB of internal drive storage, with 75GB currently in use (filled with files…