Long gone, but now back… sort of. :)
A bad sector is a small area on the hard drive’s surface that’s unreliable or unreadable; and that the drive’s own software, or the PC’s operating system, has marked as off limits so no new data will be written there. By itself, it’s nothing to worry about. For example, one sector on a typical NTFS-formatted…
Reader Emily Long sent in this urgent note — from her smartphone, I presume! “A couple of hours ago I spilled water on my laptop, I’ve turned it off, dried the keyboard and it is currently sitting keyboard down while I wait for any possible water to drain out. Will it be fine when it…
No, of course it’s not safe! But if you’re patient, you can make it safe. Here’s how: First, scan the old, infected system using an external, self-contained, bootable, DVD- or flashdrive-based anti-malware tool. (Examples; many are free.) Boot and run the old PC from the anti-malware DVD or flash drive — not from its infected…
This week’s new AskWoody Plus newsletter is out; and for a while, you can read it for free, here. Here’s what’s inside issue 16.8.0: LANGALIST: Microsoft’s massive, four-month-long series of Windows update screw-ups and outages has left some readers’ PCs in the weeds. See if you’re affected in “Windows Update errors cause OS-version problems.” Plus: Whole-disk encryption options…
Removing active malware will stop it from doing further or future local damage, but that’s all. You may still have trouble left over from the original, now-removed infection source. For example, removing ransomware from your PC or phone won’t automatically decrypt your files — they’ll still be inaccessible. You’ll have to restore your device from…
How about $0.00? Plug the drive into any PC that’s on the network; use that PC’s built-in OS tools to “share” the drive on the net. For example, let’s say you plug the drive into a Windows 10 PC. When Windows recognizes the drive and assigns it a drive letter, right click on that drive’s…
Reader Sheldon Doskie asks: “Hi Fred, Great to see you back! Are you aware of a problem when trying to update the latest virus signatures of the Malwarebytes free version? I keep getting ‘unable to access update server,’ then after a minute or so, the current date followed by a 2-digit number is displayed as…
Keyboards are ultimately a trade-off between the number of letters and numbers in common use in the language being supported, and the size of human hands and fingertips. Ideally, you want the most-commonly used letters, numbers, and symbols to be immediately visible and accessible; but not have so many keys that the keyboard is huge,…
Reader Simone Paciaroni* asks: “Does it still make sense to buy external hard drives in the cloud era?“ I think so, yes. But not instead of cloud storage — with cloud storage. Local storage gives you immediate access to everything, regardless of the size or number of files you’re accessing. When you’re dealing with terabytes of…
Reader Doug* sent in this report after reading, “New, free Chrome extension checks for password hacks in real time.” “Fred …found this in a forum…..a security flaw in the Password Checker extension…from Google…unfortunately it is in German….but perhaps you can further research the security flaw:https://www.kuketz-blog.de/chrome-add-on-password-checkup-uebermittelt-domainname/andhttps://www.deskmodder.de/blog/2019/02/06/password-checkup-google-uebermittelt-doch-nicht-alles-verschluesselt/ “ Thanks, Doug! Yes, a German researcher looked at the datastream that…