Tech Questions & Answers

There are certain problems we all deal with every day, but don’t know why. “How Do I Keep My Laptop’s Battery In Good Health? What happens when a site I use gets “hacked?” Whether you’re the tech-savvy friend that’s always answering these questions or the friend doing the asking, here are the answers to the most common conundrums.

How Do I Keep My Laptop’s Battery In Good Health?

You’ve probably heard some people say you should drain your battery completely before charging it, or that you should keep it between 40% and 80% all the time to make it last longer. Most of these rules are outdated, applying to older nickel-based batteries. Luckily, most or all of your gadgets these days run on Lithium Ion batteries, which are easy to take care of. We recommend reading our full guide on how they work, but the gist is: they last longer when you perform shallow discharges, keep them cool, and don’t leave them plugged in while they’re running at 100%. Honestly, though, batteries have a finite life no matter what, and your efforts will only go so far—so don’t stress about it. Focus your efforts on getting better battery life out of your iPhone, Android phone, or laptop on a given charge instead—and knowing how to replace the battery when it starts dying.

What’s Wrong with Using Public Wi-Fi?

Most of us put a lot of effort into finding free Wi-Fi, but public Wi-Fi networks have their own share of problems—particularly that it’s very insecure. Even if a Wi-Fi network has a password, other people on the network could see what you’re doing, or—if they were so inclinded—steal personal information and passwords. Luckily, there’s a lot you can do to stay safe: make sure sharing is turned off, use HTTPS whenever possible, and run your traffic through a VPN. Follow this guide for the details, and you should be a-okay.

Do I Really Need to “Eject” USB Drives?

Ever wonder why your computer warns you about ejecting those USB drives before you remove them? It’s because computers use something called write caching to improve performance: if you copy something to your drive, it’ll tell you it’s completed the task, but it’s actually waiting until it has a few other tasks to perform so it can do them all at once. Efficient, right? When you press eject, your PC finishes anything in the queue to make sure you don’t incur any data loss. Windows does a better job of avoiding problems than OS X and Linux, but we recommend ejecting all your drives anyway. It’s small price to pay for keeping your data safe. While we’re on the subject: if you’ve ever wondered why your external drives never have as much space as the box claims they do, we’ve got answers for that as well.

How Can I Tell if an Email Is Spam?

Some spam is obvious (“I lost 30 pounds and made $24356 in five hours by taking this special pill!”), but other messages are more subtle. A lot of spam relies oh “phishing,” in which a spammer will try to make their email look like it’s coming from a legitimate source in order to get your information. They may tell you to click a link that looks like it’s going to paypal.com, but if you hover over it, you’ll see that it’s really going somewhere else—likely a PayPal-disguised site where you willingly type in your information. Luckily, you can usually avoid those tricks by checking the URL and typing it in yourself instead. Be careful, too—sometimes those links will cause you to unknowingly spam one of your friends, which only spreads the scam.

Why Are Cables So Gosh Darn Expensive?

So you’ve bought yourself a shiny new Blu-Ray player, but you need an HDMI cable to go with it. The Best Buy employee hands you a cable and—what the crap—it’s $40?! But you buy it grudgingly because you need it. Well, never again: the reason those cables are so expensive? Because they know you’ll buy it anyway. The truth is, back in the old days, cables with gold-plated connectors or fancy shielding actually produced a better picture, but with modern digital cables—like HDMI, USB, and others—things are much simpler (and cheaper). A cheap cable from Monoprice will work just as well, so don’t waste your money. While you’re at it, buy refurbished and skip the extended warranty if you want to save even more money on your tech.

What Happens When a Site I Use Gets “Hacked?”

You’ve no doubt heard about all the sites that have gotten compromised in the last year, but what happens when they do? Usually those hackers are after your username and password, but whether they can get it depends on how a site stores your password, as well as your password’s strength (weak passwords are much easier to crack than you think). After you’ve read up on those things, get started on protecting yourself with a good password manager, a different strong password for every site you use, and backup plans in case someone gets into your account anyway.