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Showing posts from November, 2013

How to find free Wi-Fi during your holiday travels

A public Wi-Fi access point is like a public restroom. All kinds of businesses along travel routes offer restrooms to bring in customers. They offer free Wi-Fi for the same reason. The fact is, finding Wi-Fi on the road has become a lot easier over the past ten years. You just have to know where to look for it. Ronald will hook you up : As you get out into the sparsely populated areas on the way to grandma’s house, the McDonald’s at the end of an interstate off-ramp might be your best chance for connecting to the Internet. The chain offers free Wi-Fi in more than 11,500 of its restaurants. In some cases, you need only pull into the parking lot to get in range of the network. In most cases you’ll reach a McDonald’s splash page, and just have to click through to connect. It’s no surprise to find a McDonald’s within the cluster of gas stations, hotels, and truck stops at many interstate off-ramps. But over the past five years, I’ve noticed a lot more Starbucks alo

Speed Up a Slow PC without Buying New Hardware

If a once-fast computer has slowed to a crawl, you can't really blame the hardware. Sure, you may be able to improve speed by adding RAM, upgrading the CPU, or replacing the hard drive with an SSD. But none of those solutions--all of which cost money--address the underlying problem. Your hardware isn't underpowered. It's overloaded. Cleaning out Windows will very likely speed up a PC. And no, I'm not suggesting reinstalling the operating system. There are less drastic fixes. Look for hog processes Your computer may be running a poorly-written process that's hogging a lot of resources. To find out, right-click the taskbar and select Start Task Manager. Click the Processes tab, then the CPU column header. The top items will be the ones hogging the CPU. If you see an obvious culprit, close the program that's running the process (it's pretty easy to figure out what it is). If that doesn't work, click the End Process button and confirm tha