Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
My column in this week’s ASKWOODY PLUS* newsletter discusses wired Ethernet vs. Wi-Fi security; provides information on Win10’s built-in “packet-sniffer” tool for examining raw network traffic; and discusses whether you can install Win10 via USB from an Android phone. Also in this week’s ASKWOODY PLUS* newsletter: WINDOWS 10: Cheap Windows 10 product keys — Are they…
Without explaining the no-doubt interesting context for his question, reader M.R. asked: “Will booting up from a USB drive leave any trace on the computer?” Yup. In fact, if you know where to look, every PC boot — even one that’s using an operating system installed on a USB flash drive — will normally leave at…
Windows’ system-managed “Known Folders“ (Documents, Desktop, Pictures, Music, Videos, etc.) rarely cause problems. But when they do, the fix can be messy, as longtime AskWoody subscriber Mark Guenin discovered: “I’ve been having trouble with my Dell laptop… intermittent app-lockup problems. For example, when using Chrome and downloading a PDF from a website, the browser will hang when…
Sometimes, Windows can’t or won’t delete old, no-longer-relevant log files. Worse, these files may be locked or still marked as in-use, preventing you from manually deleting them. There are several methods — including using Safe Mode — to rid your PC of old, hard-to-scrub log files, and to reclaim potentially large swathes of disk space. What’s involved,…
You may be able to extend the life and increase the speed of your SSD through overprovisioning — reassigning some of the drive’s file-storage capacity for internal use by the drive’s firmware. One significant gotcha: You may have to move or resize some hard drive partitions (but there are excellent tools available to make this…
The original Windows Secrets cast has joined forces to resurrect Windows Secrets, renovate it, and meld it into AskWoody.com. The FREE version of the AskWoody newsletter is open to all; no cost, no obligation. Plus, we don’t sell, give away, or trade our mailing list. Instead, we hope you’ll register on the AskWoody.com site (that’s free, too) —…
AskWoody Plus subscriber Dave Huch’s Win10 PC has become unusable due to an astonishing malfunction: A wild system error is generating some 600 EVTX files per minute — 10 per second! —totally saturating his entire drive system. Not surprisingly, his PC is totally unusable — even at full-throttle, it simply can’t keep up! My AskWoody Plus column this…
Two subscribers are having peculiar browser issues. In one case, Firefox is inexplicably slow on a very fast PC; in the second case, the mouse pointer disappears from time to time in Chrome and Firefox — and there’s no obvious pattern. Oddly, the solutions to both problems lie in totally opposite applications of the same…
You’ll get free news, tips, advice, and support for Windows and PCs, hardware and software guidance, tech help, and lots more — all with no bull. If you haven’t yet signed up for the AskWoody FREE Newsletter — the gussied up, re-thought and re-targeted reincarnation of the old Windows Secrets Free Newsletter — now’s the…
Writing from Bridgewater, CT, AskWoody subscriber Bill Chinn wonders why his copy of File Explorer gets confused. “Hi Fred! I have recently had an ongoing issue with the behavior of File Explorer in my version of Windows 10 Pro. “It seems that every time I open File Explorer and begin scrolling through the directories, after…
