The Computer Tutor

There are lots of things you can do to stay safe while using your computer. Probably hundreds. But a few things I keep seeing come up over and over. I really believe that if everyone at least kept these three rules while using their computers, a lot of problems would be avoided and everyone would be a happier computer user.   Tip 1: If you know a website’s address, don’t type it in the search bar A lot of people have their home page on their web browser set to be a Google search page. Nothing wrong with that. So whenever they open Chrome or Firefox, the first thing they see is the opportunity to do a Google search. The problem comes up when they are trying to access a specific website. For example, they might need to go to my own website, ComputerTutorFlorida.com. If I’m on the phone with them, I’ll give them that address so they can open their web browser of choice and go to my website. I wait a little bit on the phone, and in many cases the next thing I hear is, “Hmm, well I see “computer instruction”, “computer tutor jobs”… which one is your website?” That’s when I know they didn’t actually type the website address in the address bar; instead, they did a search on Google.   There’s a big difference in going straight to a website, and just doing a Google search. If you wanted to get to my website and you didn’t know the address, you might search Google for computer repair Safety Harbor and hopefully you would find me at or near the top of the results. But if you know the actual website address for the site you want to visit, like ComputerTutorFlorida.com, you can just type it in the address bar (at the top of the screen) and hit Enter, and you’ll be taken directly to that website. That way is much more reliable, because if you do a search, you’ll come up with a list of Google search results – and in many cases, most of those options are websites designed to infect your computer or scam you out of some of your money. The scammers are very excited for people to do a search – don’t let them catch you there!   Tip 2: Don’t search Google for anything free This is kind of related to the first one, because it’s a good example of the actual dangers awaiting you in the Google search results. These are some of the really common Google searches that people around the world do every day: free music free games free screensavers free wallpaper free video player free movies free audiobooks See any connection among those search phrases? You got it – everyone wants to get something for free. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with free things, but in this case it can really get you in trouble. You see, the scammers know that people search Google with these phrases many thousands of times each day. So they make websites that match those search, in order to come up at the top of the search results. The average person usually doesn’t know the difference between a legitimate website and a malicious one (since the scammers work very hard to make their sites look completely innocent). As an example, I did a Google search on the phrase “free screensavers” and checked all ten of the websites that came up on page 1 of the search results. SEVEN out of those ten were malicious and tried to get me to download junk software to my computer. So unless you are good at identifying those malicious sites, I would recommend you not do any Google searches that include the word “free”.   Tip 3: When an error comes up, don’t wait to tell your tech about it This one is unrelated to the first two, but still pretty important. Sometimes a client will come to me with a computer problem, maybe some oddball thing that their computer is doing that just doesn’t make any sense. Like it might restart at random times. Or a certain program won’t open (or won’t close). In some cases, the most practical way to fix this is through a Windows process called System Restore. As you use your computer, Windows can create “restore points” that allows you, if needed, to take the computer back to the state it was in on the date of that restore point. Usually there will be restore points available for the previous few days or a week or two (this can vary widely though). So, in looking at the problem, I might think it could be a nice quick fix if we just took the computer back a few days – before the problem started happening – and that might just resolve it. I ask the client, “Do you remember when this started happening?” (it really helps if they know the actual date and even the time they first noticed the strange behavior). But then, the response I often get is, “Well, I guess it was maybe 4 or 5 months ago. Could have been longer than that though, I don’t really recall.” So that kills the idea of u

One of the annoyances about chatting with someone in Facebook Messenger on your computer is the fact that they other person knows when you’ve seen their most recent message. So you kind of feel obligated to go ahead and reply sooner, since you know the other person knows you’ve read that last message. Too much pressure to keep the conversation going! Here’s how you stop that.   Since I’m at my computer much of the time, this happens to me fairly regularly. If a friend or a client sends me a message on Facebook, it’s often about a computer repair or to inquire about buying one of my refurbished laptops. I’ll see the message show up, and I know that if I don’t answer it then, I’ll probably forget about it until I happen to notice it a few days later and that’s not good. So I respond. Then the person sends a follow-up message or question. And now I’m in an ongoing chat, even though I might have lots of work to do and really don’t have the time available to chat. But when the other person sends a message and it shows up on my screen, that person gets the immediate notification that the message has been seen by me. Since he knows I’ve read the message, it looks rude if I don’t reply. But now there’s a way around that social awkwardness! It’s an extension for Google Chrome called Unseen. And what it does is pretty much exactly what you would expect it to do. It removes the “Message Seen” notification from the Facebook chat. And it does a few other things too. Here’s how you get it: Open Chrome, and go here. Click to install the extension in Chrome. It will tell you when it’s been installed, and you’ll also see a little blue and white icon, like this:   When you do one left click on that little icon, you’ll see what options are available to you in the menu:   You can play around with those various functions to see what they do, but really the first one is the one we’re talking about – you can read the most recent message, and the sender won’t get any notification that you’ve read it. I also like the “block the typing indicator” option too. My chat buddies don’t need to know when I’m in the process of typing a message! Let them wonder! I think there’s an extension like this for Firefox also, but I haven’t investigated that since I use Chrome almost all the time. BUT – since most people now use Facebook Messenger on their phone – you might be excited to know that there’s also an Android app that does the same thing this Chrome extension does. Just go to the Google Play Store and search for Unseen – No Last Seen. It’s free but of course there will be ads. I assume there’s also an app for iOS but I don’t use an iPhone so can’t really tell you about that. The post How to hide the fact that you’ve viewed a Facebook message first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

For a while, Adobe has proven that they are a software company not worthy of our trust or respect. And recently they provided us with another reason to question their integrity. This applies mainly to people using the Chrome web browser.   For quite some time, Adobe has been trying to sneak unwanted software on to all of our computers. If you go to their website and install Adobe Flash, or Adobe Reader, partway through the installation process you have to be careful to UNcheck a couple of boxes that they have “conveniently” pre-checked for you. If you don’t notice that (as they are hoping you won’t) you’ll end up with extra junk software on your computer. Of course, they make money from that so it doesn’t really matter to them that you didn’t want those programs installed. In addition to this, one of the ways you can keep your computer running fast is to make sure no programs are running in the background other than the ones that NEED to be running all the time (such as your antivirus, your online backup, etc.). When you check that list of auto-startup programs, you’ll see Adobe Reader in the list. No problem, just uncheck it so it doesn’t run all the time, right? That’s fine, until the next time it updates – then it goes right back on the list so it’s running in the background and slowing down your computer. Adobe doesn’t really care what you want. And now their newest scheme…Adobe adds their own browser extension to your Chrome web browser. You read that correctly. When you go to Adobe.com, and choose to install the latest version of Adobe Reader, we already know you have to be very careful to UNcheck those checkboxes. Otherwise you’ll end up with stuff from McAfee and other companies installed on your computer. So you go through the whole process, and not a word is said about putting other things on your computer. Of course, Adobe puts the useless “Adobe Reader” icon on the desktop, but that’s easily deleted right after the installation is done. But watch what happens next time you open Chrome. Up in the top right corner of the Chrome web browser, you’ll see Chrome’s security pop up and alert you that a new browser extension has been added:   Remember, this is not Adobe telling you about the sneaky installation – it’s Chrome telling you. And they’re warning you that the extension is not only already added, but what the Adobe extension is able to do. This is unbelievable. For 99% of the population, the only reason we want Adobe Reader on our computer at all is to be able to open PDF files. Do you really want this program to be able to “Read and change all your data on the websites you visit”? Not a chance. When you see this alert come up, all you have to do is click on “Remove from Chrome”. Just speaking for myself here, but I personally don’t need or want this extension. When you remove the extension from Chrome, Adobe Reader will still be on your computer, and you’ll still be able to click on PDF files and open and read them. We don’t need Adobe infiltrating Chrome to do those things. And what if you already saw that warning come up, but you clicked “Enable extension”? No problem, you can still get rid of it. Open Chrome, and click the 3 little dots up in the top right corner. In that drop down menu, click on Settings, and in the new window click on Extensions (over on the left). Find the Adobe Reader extension in the list and trash it. Always gotta stay one step ahead of these guys! If you need computer repair in Safety Harbor, Florida or Palm Harbor (or any nearby location) just give me a call. I also do Remote Support repairs for clients all over the U.S. Happy to help if you need me. The post Watch out for Adobe’s latest trick first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Recently I had a client with a Windows 10 computer that would power on, but it wouldn’t boot all the way into the Windows operating system. Sometimes Windows will run self-diagnosis and repair the problem and reboot. But what if you reboot, and it just keeps coming up to the same error screen? That’s when you need a Windows 10 recovery drive.   If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about with that bootup error screen, here’s what it might look like:   Of course, the one you might see may not look exactly like that. Especially the error code, since there are lots of different ones. But what this type of error message means is that without some type of repair, the computer won’t be able to boot into the Windows 10 operating system. Unless… unless you have a Windows 10 recovery drive. Here’s the catch – if you see that error screen and you haven’t created your recovery drive, it’s too late to create one using this computer (though you could go to a different Windows 10 computer and create one). So the best time to create one of these is right now, while your Windows 10 computer is booting up and working properly. You only need two things to create this recovery drive – your working Windows 10 computer, and a flash drive. One of these:   A 16 gb flash drive should be plenty big enough (here’s a 16gb flash drive on Amazon). Even 8 gb would probably be okay. That is, unless you’re going to back up the system files from your computer to the flash drive (that might sound complicated but it’s just a matter of checking a box – you’ll see in the process below). If you want to do that, you should probably get a 32 gb flash drive (here’s a 32gb flash drive on Amazon). Keep in mind, you may not be creating this recovery drive with plans to use it yourself. You might not know how to get your computer to boot up to a flash drive, and you might not know how to use it once it is booted up. That doesn’t matter – even if you see that error code and have your computer tech come over to fix it, it will be a help to him if you have this recovery drive already created. Or if you have everyone over to your house for Thanksgiving dinner and your computer gives this error message, there’s a chance that one of your family members might know enough about computers to use this recovery drive and solve the problem. Here’s how to create the Windows 10 Recovery Drive 1. Insert your flash drive into a USB port, and once it is recognized, note what drive letter gets assigned to it (such as drive E, drive F, etc.). 2. In the search field (lower left area of the screen), type: recovery drive. It will come up in the search results:   3. Now you’ll see the window where you’ll actually start the process to create the recovery drive. Either check the box or don’t check it, and click Next.   (If you don’t choose to back up the system files to the recovery drive, that’s fine. Without the system files, you can still repair Windows with this recovery drive. The advantage of having the system files copied to the recovery drive is that you can then actually reinstall Windows from that flash drive if you ever needed to. As I mentioned earlier, if you opt for that, it will take more space on the flash drive so you’ll need a bigger one. If the one you have isn’t big enough, you’ll get an alert about that.) 4. Now you wait for a few seconds while your computer looks for your flash drive   5. Now it finds the flash drive (and maybe some other drives you might have connected). Choose the flash drive and make sure there’s nothing important on there, because whatever is on there will be wiped out when the recovery drive creation process kicks in. Then click Next.   6. You’ll get another warning about all of the files on the flash drive being deleted, then click Create:   7. You’ll see the progress bar as the Recovery Drive is created on your flash drive:   This will take several minutes. Go walk your dog, or just walk yourself to take a break from the computer for a bit. Might take maybe 15 minutes (just a rough guess). When you come back, you’ll see that it’s all done:   Now just label that drive as “Windows 10 recovery drive” and keep it in a safe place, where you can access it easily. But hopefully you’ll never need it! The post How to create a recovery drive for Windows 10 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I use my Google calendar for just about everything that goes on in my life. This includes all of my onsite computer repair appointments here in Safety Harbor of course, but also birthday and anniversary reminders, dentist appointments, online webinars, etc. So I don’t like it when I get an email to remind me of an appointment, and it automatically ADDS that appointment to my Google calendar. Here’s how to disable that from happening.   Here’s what usually happens. I’ll go to the dentist for the 6-month checkup, and before I leave, we set an appointment for the next visit. So I enter that in my Google calendar on that date 6 months into the future. That way I won’t accidentally book anything else into that time. Then, 5 months and 3 weeks later, my dentist office sends me an email to remind me of that appointment. And just to double check, I go to my Google calendar and look, and in that time slot I now have TWO appointments booked for the dentist at that date and time. One is the appointment I entered 6 months previously, and the other one was just put there by that email that came in. So I have to delete one of them. The same thing happens when I sign up to attend an online webinar. I’ll put it on my calendar so I don’t forget, but inevitably the webinar system automatically sends out a reminder to everyone that registered. So I end up with two entries for that one event again. I just want these “convenient” reminder emails to leave my calendar alone! Fortunately there’s an easy solution. You can just disable Gmail from being able to add those events to your calendar automatically. Here’s how: 1. In your Google Calendar, click on the Settings gear icon in the top right corner, and click on “Settings” in the drop down menu:   2. Scroll down until you see “Events from Gmail”, and UNcheck the box next to “Add automatically”: 3. You’ll get this little warning pop-up, so you should obviously click on “Continue”: 4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click Save. All done! Now the only entries you’ll find in your Google Calendar are ones that you deliberately created yourself. The post How to stop Gmail from adding events to your Google calendar first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Did you know there’s a free program you can run, and it will check your computer’s hard drive to see if it’s showing any signs of failure?   Disclaimer: This software is not foolproof, it’s just one of the best at detecting signs of hard drive failure. The program I’m referring to is called Crystal Disk Info. It’s actually the hard disk checking program that many computer techs use, especially when the test is being done remotely. You can check the website here. The download you want is the Standard Edition (3.8 MB). It’s super simple to run this software and do this test. In fact, when you run the software, you are actually doing the test so the first thing you’ll see is the test result, telling you if your hard drive has any issues. It looks like this:   The “health status” indicator is the primary thing you want to look at. There are 3 main possible statuses:   You can probably guess that the one you really want to see is “Good”. If that’s the case, you’re all set and you can just close the program. If you don’t have a backup, get one. Your hard drive can go from good to bad very quickly. If you see “Caution”, this means that your hard drive is showing early signs of failure. I always see this as a friendly warning or alert. If you have important files or folders on this computer, you should make sure they are backed up. Then you should plan on at least replacing the hard drive. Depending on the age and condition of the rest of the computer, it might make sense to just replace the whole computer. There are several factors to consider in this decision (I can help with that). If you see “Bad” that means that the hard drive is on its last legs and could finally crash at any time. If you are able to get a backup from a drive such as this, consider yourself lucky and go ahead and save whatever files you can. Then, make the decision to replace the drive. When you install Crystal Disk Info, at the end it gives you the option to create a desktop icon. I recommend doing that so that you notice it sometimes. When you think of it, just click to run the program and do a quick check on the hard drive. Can’t hurt to do it once a week, but you could even do it every day if you wanted to. Just don’t assume that you’ll have time to do a backup AFTER you find out the drive is failing – because sometimes there is no warning. The post How to check your computer’s hard drive for failure first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Sometimes there are things that on the surface seem to be true, but when you dig a little deeper you find out they aren’t true at all. Or, there might be something that you know in your head is false, but your mind still thinks about a different way. For example – what’s the moon made of? Obviously you know it’s not made of green cheese, but for most people that’s the first answer that pops in your head.   In the world of computers, there are things like that as well. Here are a few. Myth: “I can’t have a virus. I have an antivirus program!” The facts: Unfortunately, no antivirus is 100% effective. There are a few reasons for this. First, there are new viruses every single day. The best antiviruses do update their list of known viruses (also called “definitions”) multiple times each day, but there is always that chance that a brand new one will slip through. The other big reason is that even the best antivirus can’t completely protect against bad behavior by the computer user. If you deliberately open every email attachment, search Google for “free games” and click on every link, and allow strangers (scammers) to access your computer remotely, you’re very likely to have virus or malware problems. It’s kind of like if you bought the best, most expensive tires for your car – if you drive through a pile of nails, you’ll still get a flat tire. Myth: It’s good to move files from the computer to an external drive to save space The facts: There are a couple of problems with this idea. First, if you’re trying to save space, my first response would be, “Why move those files somewhere else? Why not just delete them?” If you delete them, you are definitely achieving the goal of saving space. But your response might be “But they are things I want to keep.” If that’s the case, then they should be backed up. And if you simply move them from your computer to an external hard drive, they’re still only going to exist in one place – which means you don’t have a backup. If you don’t want to lose them, you have to back them up. This means your important stuff is on your computer AND stored somewhere else as well. Second, for most people, deleting the whole Documents folder contents on the computer wouldn’t really free up much space. Word documents, text documents, PDF files – they just aren’t that big (usually). Even pictures, unless you have thousands of high-resolution images, won’t free up enough space on your hard drive to make a difference. If you’re running out of space, you need a bigger hard drive or a new computer. Myth: No one would ever guess my password The facts: Yes they would. Sometimes people will tell me that their password includes random things such as a city they lived in as a child combined with the name of their cousin’s cat. From a simple human perspective this seems like it would be foolproof, because another person would never guess the combination of those two words. But a guy that’s trying to get your password isn’t just sitting at a desk somewhere trying to come up with these things. They do it with very powerful software. A computer can try hundreds or thousands of combinations of words and numbers every minute, around the clock, without ever needing to take a break or sleep or eat. This strategy is called a “dictionary attack” because it can try every word in the dictionary in a very short amount of time. In most cases, the hacker’s work is easy since so many people use very simple passwords (like “password” or “123456” or “monkey”). And they use the same 1 or 2 passwords for all of their accounts. You need to be smarter than that. If your password is easy to remember, it’s easy for a computer to figure it out. Myth: I plug in my portable drive, so I must have a backup. The facts: Unless you can view the contents on that portable drive and see all your stuff there, you cannot assume you have a backup. When you buy a portable drive, most likely it will already have some software on it that’s ready to be installed on your computer when you plug it in. This software is supposed to automatically run and back up your data every time you connect the drive to your computer. I recommend that you DON’T use that software as your backup program. When I talk to someone who is using that drive manufacturer’s backup software, I ask them: Is the backup working? What files are being backed up? Does it backup just your files, or does it backup your programs also? What do you do when your hard drive crashes and you have to restore from the backup? Every time I ask those questions, the answer is either “I don’t know” or “I hope it’s working…”. Not good! A backup is supposed to give

If you’re still using Windows Live Mail as your email program, you need to be aware that Microsoft support for this program ends on January 10, 2017. This means that there will be no more security updates – so when security problems are discovered, they won’t be patched. Translation: it’s time to go to an alternative.   You know the email program that lots of people really loved? Outlook Express. It was easy to use, didn’t have a lot of confusing bells and whistles, and millions of people used it. Unfortunately, it ended with Windows XP. But Microsoft offered a replacement, which was Windows Live Mail. It worked pretty similarly to Outlook Express so a lot of people made that switch. Windows Live Mail is actually just one component of a group of programs that Microsoft called Windows Essentials. Those programs are: Windows Live Mail Movie Maker Photo Gallery OneDrive Family Safety Live Writer So after January 10, 2017 you won’t be able to download those from Microsoft and install them on your computer (though there are other ways to get them if you really need one or more of them). That may not be important to you, if you already have Windows Live Mail installed (so you don’t need to download it again anyway). But what IS important is the fact that Microsoft will no longer be supporting it from a security standpoint. New security holes are discovered pretty regularly in all software, particularly programs that are in such wide use around the world as Windows Live Mail. But now, instead of patching those security problems, they will just be left unfixed – and ripe picking for hackers to exploit. That’s not good in any software, but it’s especially dangerous in an email program. So if you have to stop using Windows Live Mail, what are your options? Well, there are a few. First, you could switch to a web-based email such as Gmail. Or even Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail/MSN/Live). On any web-based email service, you can log in to your account from any computer in the world and get your emails, see your contacts list, and of course send and receive messages. Web-based email has become extremely common since people see how easy it is, and the fact that it doesn’t require a special “email program” (such as Live Mail) to be installed. Second, If you’re using Windows 8 or 10, both of those come with a “Mail” application that’s built in to the operating system. Frankly, I have not used that Mail app for either Windows 8 or 10, so I really can’t say anything good or bad from personal experience. I’ve heard from some reliable sources that both are pretty good, and other people have told me they’re awful. But at least it’s an option, if you really need an email program. Third, if you have Office 365 (or an earlier “Business” version of Office), you might consider using Microsoft Outlook. I’ve been using Outlook for years and I like it. You should keep in mind that Outlook has LOTS of features that you will probably never use. It’s designed so that the busiest professional person can use it for a thorough contact list, email communication, and a full-featured calendar system. But you don’t have to use all that it offers if you don’t want to. Just set up your folders, keep your address book, and send and receive emails. In that way, it works fairly similarly to Windows Live Mail, so the learning curve isn’t too steep. And finally, you could just go out and get one of the third-party email programs that are free to download and use. Probably the most popular one in this group is Thunderbird (created by Mozilla, the same people that give us Firefox). I have a few clients that use Thunderbird, but personally I’ve never really been a big fan of it. Can’t really say anything specific against it, just that I didn’t find it to be very intuitive when setting up an email account. But you might like it, who knows. So those are your options. One thing to note – Windows Live Mail isn’t just going to stop working on January 10. You will still be able to send and receive emails just like you already do. But as more time goes by, it will become less and less safe to use. So don’t procrastinate in finding another solution. I do computer repair here in Safety Harbor, Florida and I’ve been in the computer repair business since 1999. I also work with clients all over the country (through remote access) so wherever you are, I can probably help! The post Using Windows Live Mail? It’s now dead – time to switch first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I use the Copy – Paste process every day, and you probably do as well. For the most part, it’s pretty straightforward – you choose a word or section of text and copy it from one location, then you go to another location and paste it. But when you’re pasting into a Word document, there’s another thing that comes up – the “Paste Options” box. What is that thing?   You’ve probably seen this thing, even if you don’t know it by that specific name. Let’s say you get something in an email, like an address of a person, and you want to copy it from the email and paste it into a Word document. When you right-click in Word to paste it, you get something like this: How do you know which one you want? The first step is to just move your mouse over each of the little clipboards. When you do that, you’ll see the name of each of those options: So now you know what your 4 options are – but what do those titles mean? Use Destination Theme: This means that the text you are copying will take on the theme that is already being used in the Word document. Keep Source Formatting: This means that whatever formatting was in the original (in this case, the email), that formatting will be brought over with the text that is being copied. Merge Formatting: This means that the text being copied will not necessarily take on the look of the entire Word theme, but that it will take on the formatting style of the text that surrounds it (if any). Keep Text Only: This removes all of the formatting, and just brings over the content in plain text format. The best way to really see how this works and what those options mean in practical, daily use is to practice. Copy and paste and try out every one of those. Also, keep in mind that those four options that I listed are not the only four options you’ll ever get when you do a Copy – Paste into a Word document. Microsoft goes into more detail on all of the options you might see, here. But what if you just don’t want to see the Paste Options box at all? It’s easy to get rid of the Paste Options box. In Word, click File – Options – Advanced and go to the “Cut, copy and paste” section. Find the box next to “Show Paste Options” and just uncheck it. If you need help with your computer on this subject or anything related, I do computer repair here in Safety Harbor, Florida and all around the country via Remote Support. Just give me a call.  The post What does the Paste Options box do in MS Word? first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I created my first Yahoo email account back in the late 1990s, but I stopped actively using it when Gmail introduced their email service and I made that switch. So that Yahoo account is still there, just not being used. I recently got an email from Yahoo that was pretty outrageous in light of recent events. That email started like this: “Dear Scott, We’re committed to your account security…“. If there’s any company that is unable to keep my account secure, it’s Yahoo.   A few months ago, I wrote about Yahoo’s revealing that they had been hacked by some other country’s government back in 2014. Over 500 million Yahoo users had their data potentially stolen. This included email addresses, passwords, and security questions. This was not revealed to their user base until 2016. It has also been revealed that Yahoo built a software tool that allowed them to search through their users’ private email messages, at the request of some of our own US government agencies. And now, most recently, Yahoo has admitted ANOTHER attack on their servers that resulted in the private information of more than ONE BILLION of their users being compromised. So, dear Yahoo, I hope you’ll forgive me if I question how committed you really are to keeping my account secure. In fact, at this point, I’ll be actually deleting my Yahoo account and all of the data contained in it – and I recommend you do the same. In the past, I’ve told my clients that if you want to switch email addresses you don’t really need to do anything with the old email account other than just don’t use it any more. But with Yahoo demonstrating time after time that they are incapable of keeping anything secure, we need to take it one step farther and just get rid of those accounts completely. Important note: before you delete your Yahoo account, it’s a good idea to check and make sure you don’t need it any more. For example, on my Gmail account, I still had the Yahoo email as the alternative email address to use for account recovery (in case I forgot my password, for example). You need to check this and make sure you definitely don’t need to use this Yahoo account for anything whatsoever. Another important note: when you abandon your Yahoo account, there is the possibility that someone else could come along and create their own account with that email address. Just something to be aware of. And – when you delete your Yahoo account, you are also deleting your Flickr account. With all that being said, here’s how to delete your Yahoo account: 1. Go to their termination page – https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user (you’ll have to sign in to your account) 2. Then you’ll see all of the warnings and disclaimers, so read that and then they’ll ask for your password once again:   3. And finally, you’ll need to enter the “prove you’re human” letters and click the “Terminate this account” button: If the termination was successful, you’ll be taken to a confirmation screen that tells you the account is scheduled for deletion and you no longer have access to it. It actually doesn’t get deleted from Yahoo’s servers for about 90 days. What if you want your data removed from Yahoo sooner than 90 days? In that case, go through your emails and folders and whatever information you want gone and delete it manually before you actually delete the account itself. The post Time to delete your Yahoo! account and all the data first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

One of the changes Microsoft made with Windows 10 was how to create a shortcut to a file or a program and have that shortcut on the desktop screen.   A lot of people – myself included – weren’t too happy the first time we tried to make a shortcut to the desktop using Windows 10. The “old” way, which was used for years with Windows XP and Windows 7, was to just find the file or the program in the “All Programs” list on the Start menu, do a right click and choose “Send to” then “Desktop – create shortcut”. Try to do that with Windows 10, and you’ll see that you can still right click on a program name in the “All apps” list, but there is no more “Send to” option in the right-click menu. For a while in the beginning I just wrote it off as Microsoft taking away something handy for no good reason. I actually figured out a different (more complicated) way of putting shortcuts on the desktop – until I discovered the better and easier way to do it. This is so simple it’s ridiculous: Click the Start button and All Files, then find the program you want to make a shortcut for. Then, use your left mouse button and just drag it to the desktop area. Done! You can do the same thing with any of the tiles that are in the Windows Start menu – just drag them to the desktop. BUT – Microsoft actually has not completely done away with the old process. If you have a file in your Documents folder, or a picture in your Pictures folder, or any other type of file or sub-folder in one of those areas, you would use the old process for making a shortcut to it on your desktop. Just do a right-click, put the cursor over “Send to”, and in the menu that slides out, choose “Desktop – create shortcut”. The post How to create a desktop shortcut in Windows 10 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Today’s tip came about as a result of a question from a reader, Mike. He wrote: “A topic for your podcast: How to limit search results. I use Google, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo for making searches. Today I happened to search for “episodic dvd ripper” and got many hits as old as 15 years back. Is there a way to limit searches to only posts from 2015 and newer? The older stuff is out of date, wrong, or misleading. Thanks.” Yes, you can narrow down your searches based on lots of different criteria.   For Google searches, this is really easy. Just go to Google.com and before you type anything in the search field, look down in the bottom right corner of the screen and click on “Settings”:   Then, in the little menu that comes up, click on Advanced Search:   Here’s the fun part! You’re going to see a whole lot of options to filter or narrow down your search results:   The top section is where you specify filters for your actual search word or phrase. The bottom section is to narrow down your search results to a specific language, geographical region, last update date and more. When you have the filters you want, click the Advanced Search button at the bottom and see what comes up. For Yahoo, it doesn’t seem quite as easy or as thorough as that, but you can still narrow down your searches. You need to go to search.Yahoo.com and just do a regular search. In this example I did a search on computer repair in Safety Harbor, Florida. When you see the search results come up, look just under the search field and you’ll see that you can narrow down the results based on how recent they are:   This of course isn’t nearly as specific as you can be with Google, but it may be sufficient if you like using Yahoo for web searching (most people don’t). And finally, DuckDuckGo. For anyone concerned about online privacy, DuckDuckGo.com is a great option because the searches are not tracked and your personal information is not stored anywhere. This one is also not nearly as customizable as Google, but there are some options. At the main home page, look in the top right corner for the 3 horizontal lines. Click on that and choose “Settings” and you’ll see what your choices are:   These filters are more general and are mainly designed to apply to ALL searches, not specifically to a particular search. I’m guessing there is probably some way for Yahoo and DuckDuckGo search results to be filtered more specifically than what I showed above, but if there is, they don’t make it very obvious. So, if you really want to be exact in your search results, Google is your best choice. That could be why they currently have about 76% market share for searches, and the other search engines are just scrambling for the leftovers.  The post How to get super-specific Google search results first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

One of the most commonly-used processes on my computer is the ability to create a shortcut icon on the desktop. Just right-click on a a file and choose “Send to” and then “Desktop-create shortcut”. But sometimes that little “create shortcut” item can disappear from your “Send to” menu. Here’s how to get it back.   If there’s a particular program or file that you need access to all the time, the easiest and quickest way to get to it is if you have an icon for it on your desktop. But that icon should not be the actual file or folder – it should just be a shortcut to the file or folder. So you just do a right click on the file name, then you put your mouse over “Send to” and in the menu that appears, you click on “Desktop – create shortcut”. And like magic, there is now an icon on your desktop for quick access to that program or file. This is something I do all the time, either for my own for computer or for a client, and it’s really handy. But at some point when you try to do this, your computer might throw you a little curveball. You put your mouse over “Send to” – but in the Send To menu, there is no option to create a shortcut on the desktop. It has just disappeared. The other items are listed there, but not that one. What’s going on? Why is it gone? Where did it go? I wish I could tell you. I don’t see this happen all that often, and I don’t know what causes it to disappear. But I do know how to get it back. If this happens to you, here’s how to add “desktop shortcut” back to your “Send to” menu: 1. Hold down the Windows key on your keyboard, and tap the letter R to bring up the RUN dialog box.   2. In that box, type shell:sendto and hit Enter. This opens the “Send To” folder. In the computer’s file structure, that Send To menu is just that, a folder. Which means you can put things in it. 3. Somewhere in the blank area of that folder, do a RIGHT click and select New – Text document.   Now you’ll have a new text file there with the name New Text Document.txt. 4. Final step is to right click on that new text document, and choose Rename. Then you rename it to Desktop (create shortcut).DeskLink Note: on that rename process, you have to make sure you rename the entire file AND the “.txt” extension. You will probably get a warning that changing the extension of a file might make it work differently, etc. but that’s fine. So when you’re done, this file won’t end with “.txt” any more – it will just be “Desktop (create shortcut).DeskLink”. And that’s it. Try it out by creating a desktop shortcut to a program or file, and you’ll see that you have that great feature back again and available to be used. The post How to add “Desktop shortcut” back to your “Sendto” menu first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Want to check your hard drive for problems and have your computer fix them? Today I’ll show you how to do this using a method that’s usually only used by technicians, because the typical computer user is not aware of it. Maybe you are a geek after all!   At my computer repair office here in Safety Harbor, Florida, I regularly have people that bring me their computer because it won’t boot up. Or it suddenly started running very slowly. Or it has lately been doing some very odd, random things. These things are often evidence of a hard drive that is failing (or has crashed completely). If I test the drive and find that it is indeed failing, the repair for that situation is to just replace the hard drive. Hopefully the computer’s owner has a recent system image backup (a backup that saves EVERYTHING on the hard drive) so we can put all of the important documents, pictures, etc. on the replacement drive. BUT – did you know that you can actually do regular maintenance on your computer’s hard drive, to help it last longer? It’s true. When you run this process, you are going to feel like a True Geek! And it’s surprisingly easy! The process is known as CHKDSK, an abbreviated form of “Check Disk”, because that’s what it does – it checks your hard disk for problems, and fixes them. Here’s how you use it (and this applies for Windows 7, 8 or 10): First, click the Start button (the MS logo in the bottom left corner). For Windows 10, just click in the “Search” box in the bottom left. Then type these 3 letters: cmd You’ll see the “Command Prompt” option come up at the top of the Start Menu:   Now do a RIGHT click on that Command Prompt menu item, and choose “Run as Administrator”:   You’ll need to click to approve that it should run as administrator, then you’ll see the Command Prompt window:   You can see that the cursor is flashing at the end of the line so you can just start typing. Here is what you need to type: chkdsk c: /r To clarify, that’s “chkdsk”, then a space, then “c:”, then another space, then “/r” (of course without the quotation marks).   This tells the computer to run the chkdsk, and the drive to run it on is drive C, and if it finds any errors, to repair them. When you type that line and hit Enter, you’ll get a message that CHKDSK cannot run right now, but you can request that it runs the next time you restart the computer. Click Y for Yes, and hit enter. Final step is to restart the computer, so do that now. This will not be a normal computer restart. When the computer comes back up, before going into Windows, it will tell you that disk checking will run in X seconds unless you hit a key (any key) on your keyboard. If you do that, of course, it will skip the disk check and just boot into Windows. So in order to have the CHKDSK process run, just let it run. If your computer’s drive does not have any errors, disk checking will be done pretty quickly (a few minutes or less). I’ve had some computers with lots of hard drive errors take several hours to run. If that happens, don’t be surprised if the percentage showing seems to be stuck at a certain level for quite some time. It’s just finding problems in a certain spot on the hard drive and fixing them, so it has to spend some time there. When it’s done, the computer will just continue and boot into Windows. If you find that your computer does take a long time to run CHKDSK because it is fixing lots of problems, it might be an early sign that the hard drive is failing. That means you better make sure you have a good backup NOW. You should have a good backup anyway, but when your hard drive is trying to tell you it’s having problems, it’s that much more important to make sure your critical files and folders are safely stored somewhere else so you don’t lose anything. The post Use CHKDSK like a geek to fix hard drive problems! first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Millions of people use the service called “Web of Trust”. It’s a crowdsourced process that is supposed to tell you if a website you’re about to click on is trustworthy or malicious, based on the input of the other Web of Trust users. Recently, information has been uncovered about Web of Trust that indicates this service itself is not to be trusted. I tried Web of Trust a while ago but stopped using it after a short time. However, I know a lot of people do use it. The theory behind it is good. It’s based on a large group of people, pooling their information. If you visit a website and find that it pops up a fake virus alert, or tries to sneak software on to your computer, you can give it a negative rating in the Web of Trust browser extension database. Presumably, lots of other people are doing the same thing with websites they visit. So when you do a Google search and you see all the search results listed there waiting for you to click on them, each one of them has the little Web of Trust indicator right next to it, telling you if other users have determined it’s safe to click through, or a site that should be avoided. As I mentioned, this is a great idea in theory. The problem comes up when there are humans involved, and they get tempted by cash. It appears that this is what has happened with WOT. Web of Trust claims that their browser extension has been downloaded by over 140 million users:   When a database is that large, it is very attractive to companies that want to target those users with advertising. Web of Trust was clear up front that some information about users was collected, but that it was collected anonymously. That information included geographic location, websites visited, computer operating system, IP address and other details. But it turns out that linking that data to individual users of the WOT service was very simple to do. This means Web of Trust users could have a lot of private information divulged about them, including: confidential information about work future travel plans medical history sexual preference use of drugs criminal investigations mailing address Not good! Think about how valuable it would be to have that kind of specific information for 140 million people. From what we can tell, WOT could not just keep it to themselves. They sold this information (which could then be connected to specific individuals) to third parties. When confronted with this, Web of Trust responded with a statement that really didn’t do much. The statement said they are taking the following steps: Reviewing our privacy policy to determine which changes need to be made in order to enhance and ensure that our users privacy rights are properly addressed. For the user browsing data used to enable WOT’s website reputation service, we intend to provide users the ability to opt-out from having such data saved in our database or shared. This opt-out will be available from the settings menu, as we want to provide each user with a clear choice at all times. For people who agree to let us use their browsing data in order to support WOT, we will implement a complete overhaul of our data ‘cleaning’ process, to optimize our data anonymization and aggregation objectives to minimize any risk of exposure for our users. That’s fine, but it’s probably too late for that. Trust is earned, and it’s not easy to recover once it’s lost. I recommend that you uninstall the Web of Trust browser extension. The post Web of Trust – no longer worthy of your trust first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Outlook has so many great features, and a lot of Outlook users are not aware of many things that Outlook can do. One of the greatest time-savers is the ability to delete large amounts of email in a very short time.   If you use Outlook for your email, and your inbox or some other folder has gotten out of control with too many emails, today’s tip is for you. Sometimes email can get a little out of control. Or maybe a LOT out of control. And suddenly you see your inbox or one of your email folders have hundreds of emails that you don’t need or want. And at that point it might appear to be such an overwhelming project, it’s easier to ignore the growing mess and vow to deal with it another day. But it only gets worse because the emails just keep coming. But guess what – it’s not as bad as it seems! When I’m dealing with a client who has this problem, and they show me the only way they know to solve it, I can understand why they would feel so discouraged. That’s because they think they need to click once to highlight one email in the list, then click Delete. Then when the pop-up asks “Do you really want to delete this email?” they click “Yes”. There it goes, one email gone. 857 emails to go. Hey, if that was the only way to do this, I would feel discouraged too! But there’s a faster way – much faster. Here’s an image of an old folder of emails in my Outlook. These are 27 emails that I no longer need, but what I’m going to show you could just as easily apply to 270 emails or 2700 emails.   Yes, I could delete them one by one. But instead, I can: click on the first email in that list to highlight it. Hold the SHIFT key and click on the last email in the list See what that does? Every email in between the first one and the last one is now highlighted.   (Hint: you can achieve the same effect by holding down the CTRL key and tapping the letter “a”.) Now, since they are all highlighted, whatever action I take will apply to all of them instead of just a single one. If I hit the Delete key, they will all be deleted. MUCH faster than doing it one at a time. One word of caution – if you have a folder with a HUGE quantity of emails, like more than 10,000, you might not want to do all 10k at the same time. Maybe do 3,000 or 5,000 at a time. The number of simultaneous deletions your computer can handle depends on your computer (memory, processor speed, etc.) so if you try to do too many at once, your PC may not be able to handle it and might freeze up. Or it might take so long to do all those emails at one time, you might THINK it has frozen even though it’s still working. The post Outlook – how to delete lots of emails with a couple of clicks first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Time for another set of cool websites! I like to do this every once in a while, just to tell you about some websites I’ve run across that I think you might find interesting, informative or entertaining.   1. Online solitaire for free http://solitaireforfree.com/ Everyone’s favorite game – and now you can play directly on a website. In the early days of computers, I remember browsing the local office supply stores and computer stores for software that was delivered via a CD that you would use to install whatever program you wanted. Then everything migrated to the download option, which was much more convenient but also brought with it some downsides. Now, you don’t even have to download or install anything – just play your Solitaire right there on the website.   2. All PDF tools online http://www.ilovepdf.com/ Just discovered this one recently. This is an amazing resource. This is the website to go to if you need to: Merge two or more PDF files into one Split a PDF into two or more separate files Convert a PDF to Powerpoint Convert PDF to Excel spreadsheet Convert Word to PDF (this can be done from MS Word itself though) Convert PDF to JPG Add page numbers to a PDF file Add a watermark to your PDF file Unlock a PDF file Rotate a PDF (landscape to portrait or vice versa) And that’s not even all the options! All kinds of stuff you can do with PDFs at this site.   3. Old cereal boxes http://theimaginaryworld.com/cbarch.html Wow, did this bring back some memories. When I was a kid I often had cereal for breakfast (like most kids in the US I guess). And what was there to do while eating a bowl of cereal, other than read the cereal box. No wonder the cereal manufacturers market to kids – that’s who’s reading it in the store, and again at the breakfast table. This website is an archive of many hundreds of cereal boxes. I remember a bunch of these.   4. Dumb laws http://www.dumblaws.com/ Every state has laws that defy explanation. This site has collected lots of those seemingly idiotic laws so that you can see them all gathered in one stupid pile. For example, any resident of Hawaii may be fined for not owning a boat. In Augusta, Maine it’s illegal to stroll down the street while playing a violin. And in Carmel, California, a man cannot go outside while wearing a jacket and pants that do not match. Check your state and find out how your tax dollars have been spent by the politicians that come up with this stuff.   5. Convert YouTube videos https://www.convyoutube.com/ This is pretty handy. I’ve talked about some other online services that can help you in downloading YouTube videos to your computer, but this one seems to be more all-encompassing. You just go to the website and enter the YouTube URL. You have the option to convert it to an MP4 video which you can download and save to your computer, or an MP3 (audio only) file that you can put on your phone or your iPod to listen to, or a GIF if you want to just grab part of the action and no audio. It’s nice to be able to do all that at one place.   6. Iditarod film http://outthere.canada-goose.com/ One of my passions is endurance sports. In fact, this past weekend I was scheduled to do my first 100-mile ultramarathon. Unfortunately, a family event came up unexpectedly and I was not able to attend. This website is not about running though. It’s about another extreme endurance event – the Iditarod. Just click the link and watch the movie trailer and see if you get a little dose of adrenalin like I did. Looks like a great film.   7. Test your internet speed https://fast.com I have traditionally used a different website, speedtest.net, to test my internet connection speed. But here’s a little secret – many internet service providers give preferential bandwidth treatment to that website, so that your actual connection speed might seem faster than it normally is. When you go to Fast.com, there is nothing to click, nothing to configure. You just go there and it checks your speed and displays it on the screen.   8. Making things fun http://thefuntheory.com I love this idea. If doing the right thing were actually fun, wouldn’t more people choose to do the right thing? I think so. This website is a showcase of ideas like that. Here’s a video that tells about one of them. Check the website for several more. We need more of this kind of thing!   Do you know of a really cool website? Let me know about it and I might include it in my next list.  The post More cool websites to check out first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Last week we talked about all the nonsense things that are thought to be the “magic pill” to speed up your Windows computer (clean the registry, defrag, etc). Today we’ll talk about what actually DOES speed up your Windows computer.   1. Stop programs from running in the background When you install software, in many cases it designates itself to start up and run every time you turn on your computer. You might not see a window on your screen that shows it running, but it’s running. And the more programs you have running at the same time, the slower they ALL run. So you need to tell your computer that when you boot it up, it doesn’t need to run all those programs. In Windows 7, click the Start button and type MSCONFIG and click that when it shows up in the menu. Click the Startup tab, and uncheck anything that doesn’t always need to run. In Windows 8.1 or 10, hold down Ctrl + Shift and tap Escape. If necessary, click “More details”. Click the Startup tab, then right-click and disable anything that doesn’t always need to run. Now the big question – which programs need to run all the time and which ones don’t? I can’t really answer that specifically for you, since your list is specific to your computer. Of course you want to always have your antivirus program running, and probably your automated backup software, and programs that are related to the actual functioning of your computer (such as the audio, the touchpad, etc.). If you’re not sure about something, better just leave it there. I can take care of this remotely if you want.   2. Remove viruses – malware – browser junk If you don’t have a good antivirus program, you might have all kinds of viruses and malware running on your system. These things will really slow things down. If you’re using Norton or McAfee, you need to replace that with a good antivirus. Has your browser home page changed recently? Have you noticed that your searches that used to be on Google are now using some search engine site you’ve never heard of before? Does some odd site show up when you click to open a new tab? These are all signs that your browser is infected with this junk. You need to get rid of that stuff. There are lots of programs that are designed to remove viruses and malware from your computer. But most of them are created with the idea that it will probably be a technician using them. If you don’t know how to do this, there is the possibility that you could mess things up. This is a process that I can handle for you remotely if you aren’t familiar with how to do it.   3. Add more memory Memory (also known as RAM) is a different thing from storage space. If you want to know how much memory you have, open File Explorer (Windows key + E) and do a right click on “Computer” or “This PC” and choose Properties. Most computers being sold today have at least 4 gb of memory. In general, the more memory your computer has, the faster it will run. Most machines will run okay on 4 gb, but if it’s in the budget and you can get 8 gb, that’s even better. Doubling the memory will usually create a noticeable increase in speed. Memory isn’t something you can download. It’s a physical thing that goes inside the computer. It looks like this:   And you will probably be surprised at how easy it is to install. You can go to YouTube and look up videos on how to install memory in laptop or desktop computers and you’ll see the process is not difficult at all and only takes a few minutes. Definitely worth the effort.   4. Upgrade your hard drive to a solid state drive You might say I’ve saved the best for last. One of my favorite upgrade projects is replacing a traditional hard disk drive with a solid state drive, because I know the client’s reaction will be amazement at how much faster the computer operates. Your current desktop computer’s hard drive is basically a metal box, about the size of a paperback book, with some spinning platters on the inside. That’s where your data is stored. If you use a laptop, the drive is smaller but the same mechanical principle applies. With those moving parts, the computer takes longer to boot up and longer to open programs and access your data. A solid state drive has no moving parts. The data is stored in flash memory, kind of like the storage that’s on your thumb drive. They’re still more expensive than a regular disk drive, but those prices continue to come down and a lot of people are making the switch. So how much faster is it? Well, think about when you turn on your computer – how long does it take from the time you hit the power button, until the computer is completely booted up, everything is displayed, all of the programs that are supposed to be running (such as your antivirus) are running, and you’re connecte

For a long time, there have been programs advertised on the internet that promise to speed up your computer. They usually go by names like “PC Optimizer”, “Perfect Speed”, “Ultimate Optimizer” or other similar sounding names, and they want you to think that if you just buy this program, your computer will be SOOO much faster. Sorry, not true.   Here are 5 common things these junk programs offer to do: Clean the Registry. Ah, of course, the infamous Windows Registry. Most people don’t even know what the Registry is, but some program says it needs to be “cleaned” so it must need to be cleaned, right? No. Virtually every Windows computer has stray registry entries or other little inconsistencies, but the effect of this on your computer’s speed is trivial. You don’t need to clean your Registry. Update the drivers. “Drivers” isn’t really a descriptive name for what these things are. It really just means the software that lets your computer communicate with other devices such as your printer, your monitor, your mouse, etc. I’m a pretty firm believer in “if it’s working, leave it alone”. So if you get something that says “you need to update your drivers to speed up your computer!” I recommend just ignoring it. In fact, sometimes “updated” drivers actually do more harm than good. Clean out temp files. Another mostly useless task. “Temp” files are just what the name implies – temporary. When you view a web page, your computer might be storing all of the images on that page temporarily on your hard drive. That means if you go back to that same web page tomorrow, it will load more quickly because the images are being pulled from your hard drive instead of downloading from the internet again. But you could have hundreds or thousands of temp files on your computer, and getting rid of them won’t usually make any noticeable difference in speed. Not that it’s a bad thing to do; it just doesn’t do a lot. Clear your website history and search history. This is basically just a list of websites you’ve visited and searches you’ve done. This information takes up virtually no space on your drive, so deleting these things won’t free up any space. And sometimes it’s handy if you’re trying to think of something you saw on a website a few days ago, to go back in your browser history and find it. Of course, deleting your website and search history would keep other people on your computer from seeing it, which might be a reason. But it’s not going to improve your computer’s performance. Run a separate defrag program. If you’re running Windows 7 or later, your computer defrags itself on a regular basis. No need to have a third-party software installed to do this. So when you see these junkware programs telling you to do all these things, just ignore them. If you do want to do these things anyway, you could do it yourself from within Windows. Or, if you are dead-set on having software to do it for you, you can do it with CCleaner – which is free here. But be careful installing it, because it will try to put other stuff on your computer. And when you’re done with it, uninstall it or it will want to run in the background all the time. It will clean your registry, and remove temp files, and delete your history, but since none of that has any real effect, why bother? The post 5 Things you DON’T need to do for your computer first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

A lot of major corporations these days are doing some pretty sketchy things. Recently HP confirmed that they are definitely on the list of companies who don’t mind doing sneaky/slimy things to their customers just to make more money.   I’ve been wary of HP for a long time, mainly because of what I see when I install an HP printer. They use the same subversive methods as a lot of other companies do, in trying to sneak software on to your computer. If you just go through the “default” installation process, you’ll end up with the “Shop for HP Supplies” icon on the desktop, the Yahoo toolbar in your web browsers, and a few other things that most people would decline if they were aware of the option to decline. To avoid those things you have to find the “customize” link during the installation and UNcheck all those things you don’t want. It’s the same slimy method used by the people that put malware and adware on the computers of unsuspecting people. But a few weeks ago, HP really let their true colors shine through. A little background first. Do you know why inkjet printers are so cheap these days? It’s because all the profit is made through the ink cartridge sales. HP doesn’t really care if they practically give away the printers, since they are planning on making such a huge profit on that darn ink. To put this in perspective… Human blood costs about USD $1500 per gallon. Not that it’s expensive to acquire, but the processing after the acquisition is what comprises a lot of that cost. That makes paying $3 for a gallon of gasoline seem really cheap. But regular black ink – the kind you purchase by the ounce wherever you buy your inkjet cartridges – comes in at a whopping $2700 per gallon. No wonder HP wants to sell a lot of that ink! And of course they want you to keep buying it regularly. What HP really hates is when those high profit margins are cut into by the non-HP ink cartridges. You know, those third-party cartridges that are much less expensive but in many cases produce just as good a result as the high-priced “genuine” HP ink cartridges. So, HP came up with this scheme to make their printers actually NOT WORK when a non-HP ink cartridge is used. And they even took it a step further by implementing a time-delay feature. They sent out what they called a “security update” this past March, which had the “printer time bomb” in it, but didn’t activate it until just last month (September). When this was activated, users who had third-party ink cartridges in their HP printers found themselves with a printer that would only display error messages. HP effectively broke their printer. Obviously this resulted in a LOT of very angry and frustrated customers. And rightly so. The good guys in this situation is a group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (you can learn more about this great organization at www.eff.org). EFF wrote an open letter to HP very quickly, pointing out the problems with what HP had done. The major points of the letter are: HP deprived its customers of a useful, legitimate feature. HP customers should choose HP ink because it’s the best, not because their printer won’t work with a competitor’s brand of ink. HP abused its security update mechanism to trick its customers. People expect a “security update” to be a necessary patch to prevent security problems, not a tool to deliver an anti-feature. This means that many people will now doubt the patch process (as they should). The time-delay feature was a bait-and-switch. People bought HP printers with the assumption that they would work with third-party ink cartridges. Now they are left with a less-useful printer, and perhaps a pile of useless competitor cartridges. In response to all the backlash to this stupid move, HP has been forced to announce that they will offer another firmware update (optional of course) that would reverse the one that broke a lot of printers last month. But in true “corporate” fashion, they defended this dumb move by saying they only wanted the “best printing experience” for their customers, and they were trying to protect consumers from “potential security risks”. Yeah right. What should you do? I can only tell you what I’ve done and what I recommend: I use a Brother all-in-one printer and love it. No more HP printers for me. Sign the EFF petition here to tell HP what you think of this. Get away from buying ink cartridges completely, by using a laser printer. My Brother is a laser printer that only uses black toner, which is MUCH cheaper than ink, and I only replace the toner cartridge maybe once every 12-18 months (that might be different for you, depending on how much printing you do). You can also get laser printers that print in color if you need that. The post The HP printer fiasco and what I

Most of us are on Facebook every day and pretty much do the same things – look at what our friends have posted, maybe post a new status of our own sometimes. But there are some things you can do with Facebook that a lot of people don’t know about. Today I’ll show you 3 of them.   1. Get a copy of everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook For some people, that’s a TON of stuff – photos, videos and status updates. Just click the drop-down menu that shows the “Settings” option, click on that and look at the “General” tab: When you click that, you see this: Click “Start my Archive”. You’ll have to enter your Facebook password again, then Facebook will start organizing your entire archive of content and they’ll send you an email when it’s ready for you. Mine took about 10 minutes. When it’s ready, click the link in the email to download, enter your password again, and you can download everything in a .zip folder. Open it up and there’s all your stuff!   2. Designate what happens to your Facebook account after you die If you have had a Facebook friend who has passed away, you might have wondered this yourself. Wouldn’t it be ideal to have some kind of final post on your Facebook status to let all your friends know when you have died? I mean, obviously some of your real-life friends and family would already know, but a lot of them would have no idea. In anticipation of this, you can designate someone to be what Facebook calls your “Legacy Contact”. You just choose someone who will be able to log in to your account and write a pinned post (meaning that post stays at the top) to let everyone know you are no longer around. To do this, log in to Facebook and go to Settings -> Security -> Legacy Contact. Find the Legacy Contact “Edit” option and you can enter one of your friends to have this job. Of course, it needs to be someone you trust.     3. Upload a 360 degree picture or video You’ve probably seen some of those cool pictures or videos that a friend has uploaded to Facebook. As you move your phone around, you can see a full 360 degree view – just like you’re standing where the person was when they took the picture. This doesn’t require any expensive equipment. You just need your smartphone and the Google Street View app (free for Android and iOS). Basically you just run that app and open the Camera option within the app. Then you take a picture, move to the right a little and the app takes a picture on its own when it’s lined up properly with the previous one. You just keep doing that, save the file, and then upload the picture to Facebook. Here’s a video showing how to do this:  The post 3 little-known things you can do with Facebook first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Yahoo recently announced that hackers were able to get into their system and steal a lot of personal information. Here’s what you need to know, and what you need to do.   When did the data breach take place? This is one of the more concerning factors about this problem. Yahoo says that the hack into their servers actually happened back in 2014 – 2 years ago. This means that the 500 million users that were affected by this have gone for two years not even knowing there was a problem. The real question is, when did Yahoo find out about it? If they knew about it in 2014, then they have acted quite irresponsibly in not announcing it. If they just found out about it, how can their security systems and processes be so lax that a breach of this magnitude can go unnoticed for two years? What information was stolen? Yahoo has concluded from their investigation that these things may have been stolen: User’s names User’s email addresses User’s dates of birth User’s telephone numbers User’s passwords User’s security questions and answers Does this only affect Yahoo email users? Unfortunately, probably not. Yahoo owns several other popular websites, including Flickr and Tumblr. They also own the popular fantasy football site called Rivals. If you currently have, or have ever had, an account at any of those sites, you need to change your password and security questions right away. What do you need to do? If you have ever had a Yahoo account, or an account with any of the sites mentioned above, yes you need to do a few things: 1. Change your password This might seem obvious, but it is something you need to do. And as long as you’re changing your password, make it a strong one (just random letters and numbers that don’t have any meaning) and don’t use any password that you’ve used on any other account. 2. Create new security questions You might be prompted to do this anyway when you change your password. But if not, it would be a good idea to change those questions that are used to confirm your identity (like your mother’s maiden name, what was your first car, etc.) since the hackers could have those questions (and the answers). They could potentially still use those questions and answers to get into some of your other accounts, but changing them on Yahoo is just another precaution. 3. Change password on other sites where that password was used This might be the most important step. Think about the original password that you had with Yahoo (before you just changed it). If you have used that password on any other online accounts, you need to go to THOSE accounts and change the password there as well. Think about it. If your Yahoo email was “[email protected]” it’s possible that you used that email as the user name on lots of other accounts, such as Facebook, your bank account, YouTube, medical records, the power company, etc. So the hacker will use software to try logging in to tons of other accounts using that email address and the password they stole from the Yahoo records. This is the danger of using the same password across multiple accounts. I know it’s much easier to just remember one password for everything, but it also makes it a lot easier for the hackers. 4. Don’t use Yahoo If this were the only data breach Yahoo has had, that would be one thing. But this happens repeatedly to them. They have proven that they are incapable of keeping your data private and secure. I would even go so far to say Yahoo may be almost as incompetent as AOL. I opened a Yahoo account many years ago, before Gmail even existed, and one of the big reasons I switched to Gmail was because Yahoo’s email spam filters were worthless – my inbox was constantly filled with emails that were clearly spam, but Yahoo couldn’t figure out how to filter them out. That was just one of several reasons I switched to Gmail in 2004 and have been very happy with Gmail since then. The post The Yahoo data hack – what it means to YOU first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

It’s one of the most frustrating things about Windows. You go to shut off your computer, and rather than just shut down, it decides it’s time to install a bunch of updates. So you wait and wait while this happens, all the while wondering why your computer is forcing you to stand there and watch it until it says you can go. There’s an easier way!   Don’t get me wrong – Windows Updates are important. They are sent out on the second Tuesday of each month, which is called Patch Tuesday because most Windows Updates are little pieces of code that patch up security holes or software bugs that have been recently discovered. In a few rare cases, a Windows Update has been known to cause a problem, but that’s very uncommon. So you should get those updates when they come out, in order to keep your computer as safe and secure as possible. There are two steps in the Windows Update process: Downloading the updates Installing the updates The downloading part of the process you probably don’t even notice, since it happens in the background even when you’re using the computer. Or it might happen overnight, when you’re not using the computer. So the updates are downloaded, and then they’re just sitting there waiting to be installed. At this point, if you don’t do anything with your computer, those updates will be installed automatically at 3 am the next day. BUT – if you happen to decide to shut down your computer or restart it before that, the updates will want to install right then. For me, this usually happens at a really inconvenient time. Like when a client is coming to pick up their computer and they’ve checked it all out and everything is repaired and working properly, so we go to shut it down and now we have to wait for the updates to install. I actually try to get any Windows Updates while I’m working on it, but sometimes that happens. Or, if I hear thunder or see lightning, I immediately go around and unplug all the computers from the wall in order to avoid any voltage surge problems. At a time like that, I really don’t like waiting for the computer to finish getting all the updates while there’s an electrical storm happening. Fortunately, there is a way to turn off your computer and SKIP installing those updates. You’ll still need to get them, but you just don’t have to get them right that minute. Here’s how you shut down your computer and skip the installation of Windows Updates. Close all open windows so you are just looking at the desktop with the icons. Hold down the ALT key and tap the F4 key. This brings up the Windows Shutdown dialogue. In the drop-down menu, just choose “Shut down”. If there are updates waiting, there will be other menu options such as “Update and shut down” or “Update and restart”, which of course you don’t want to use. This is the menu in Windows 10 (just not showing those other two update options since my computer isn’t currently waiting to install any updates):   This is what it looks like in Windows 7:   What you DON’T want to do is to get in the habit of just using this shut down menu to continually put off getting those Windows Updates. This is just a way to get around it at the moment if you’re in a hurry and can’t wait for them to install. The post Shut down your Windows computer WITHOUT waiting for updates to finish first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Last week we talked about a “low-security” way to keep someone out of a particular file or folder, just by “hiding” it. Today is part 2, and this procedure uses a separate program to provide a much higher level of security.   Rather than just protecting a file by making not readily visible, this process encrypts it so that in order to be viewed, a password needs to be entered. The program we’re using for this is called AxCrypt, and you can download it at AxCrypt.net. AxCrypt has both a free version, and a paid version. Obviously you get more features with the paid version, but the biggest difference I can see is that the paid version allows you to encrypt entire folders, whereas the free version only allows individual files to be encrypted. The paid version is 24 Euros per year, which currently converts to about $27 in US dollars. So, in order to use the free version, you just need to encrypt all of your individual files (pictures, documents, spreadsheets, etc). You might find it easier to just create a folder for all of those files. Someone would still be able to get into the folder, but they wouldn’t be able to open any of those files unless they have the password. Here’s how you get AxCrypt set up on your Windows computer: 1) Go to the website AxCrypt.net and click the Download link at the top 2) Click the download button that is appropriate for your computer. For most people it would be 64 bit, unless you’re using a computer that is pretty old. 3) After the download has completed, double click to run it and follow the standard installation process:   4) When AxCrypt runs for the first time, you have to enter your email address: 5) Then you’ll get an email with a 6-digit code to confirm that it’s actually your email: 6) This is the email: 7) After you have confirmed your email, you’ll need to create a password. Remember, as with all passwords, it should be strong and unique (not a password you have used anywhere else). That will activate your account.   8) Finally, you can now sign in to your account:   Now you can start using the program. To try it out, create a test file such as a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet, or just a regular text file with Notepad. Save that test file in your Documents folder. In the example below, I created a text document called “TEST FILE.txt”. When you right click on that file, the menu that comes up will have an entry for AxCrypt. Just mouse over that menu, and another one will fly out to the size, and you can choose to Encrypt that test file.   When that file becomes encrypted, you will notice two things about it. First, the icon changes to the AxCrypt icon (the padlock). And the file extension changes to “.axx”. These things are how you can tell at a glance that a file has been encrypted with AxCrypt:   Whenever you’re working on your computer, it’s good to make sure you are signed OUT of your AxCrypt account. You can do that by right-clicking on a file and this time choosing “Sign out”. That way, if someone tries to get into any of your encrypted files, they will need to sign in with your password in order to gain access. And of course, you can decrypt a file by going through the same right-click process and choosing “Decrypt”. You’ll be asked for your AxCrypt password, and that file will be decrypted and viewable by anyone. If you have a need to encrypt a specific folder, or multiple folders, it might make sense for you to get the paid version. Otherwise, for most people with just a single file or a few files that need to be protected, the free version is sufficient. Here are a couple of videos from the AxCrypt website that show more detail. The first one is for setting up your AxCrypt account, and the second one is getting started with using it. https://youtu.be/grEu_gglHB4 https://youtu.be/FXa7RnikL7Q The post How to password protect a Windows file or folder – part 2 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I recently got this email from a podcast listener: Dear Scott, I live in Dubai and I enjoy your weekly podcast, which is simple and informative. Please keep up the good work! Scott, could you please cover in a future podcast how I can create (in Windows 10) a normal file folder but one that can be password protected. So, for example, if I hand over my laptop to a friend or colleague, I can simple shift my personal files to that folder and then move them back when I need to. Or else, all those files that are private I can file in my password protected folder and not have to worry about password protecting each and every file. Can you help? Best wishes and thanks once again for a great podcast. Regards, Faisal   Thanks for the great question, Faisal! I know the podcast is heard all around the world but I’m still a little taken aback when I hear from listeners from so far away as Dubai. There are actually a couple of ways to protect a file from being viewed by some other person – a low-security way, and a high-security way. Both are free, and neither one is very difficult. I’ll talk about the low-security process today, and next Monday I’ll go over the more secure process. The low-security way to protect a file or folder This process does not require any other software other than Windows, and it will work on Windows 7, 8 or 10. It is based on the premise that a nosy person can’t peek at a file if they don’t know it exists. Now, I should say up front that this method will not stop anyone that is even a little bit tech-savvy or knows a little bit about how Windows works. But it would be effective for a large percentage of computer users. Let’s say if you go into your computer and open the Documents folder, you see the following folders: Does anything there stand out to you? Of course, the “Private files” folder. Anyone who’s even a little curious would probably click on that to see what’s in there. Which is exactly what you DON’T want them to do. So what you need to do is HIDE that folder so that it’s still there, just not visible in that list. It’s easy to do that. Just do a RIGHT click on the folder name, and choose Properties at the bottom of the menu. In the new window, under the “General” tab, check the box labeled “Hidden” and click OK:   Now if you look at that same list of folders, this is what you see:   Keep in mind, you didn’t DELETE that private folder, you simple designated it as HIDDEN. So no one sees it, not even you. “Great, Scott. But now how do it get it back?” In order to see it again and access it, you have to tell your computer that you want it to display any files or folders that are designated as “Hidden”. To see the “hidden” files and folders, go to Control Panel and click on Folder Options (in Windows 10, it’s called File Explorer Options). Then click the View tab, and check the button that says “Show hidden files, folders and drives” and click OK:   Now go back to the list of folders and here’s what you see:   You can kind of see that the “Private” folder is visible, but the icon is a different color than the other icons. That is just the indication that the folder is designated as “hidden” but you can still see it because you told the computer to show you the hidden files. If you want it to not be seen at all, just go back to the previous step and choose “Don’t show hidden files, folders or drives”. Like I mentioned earlier, and you can probably tell, this is not a very secure way of keeping someone out of your private files and folders. Anyone that knows how to tell the computer to display hidden files will be able to find that private folder. Only you can decide if this method is sufficient for you. Two factors to consider: How critical is it that no one sees that file or folder? How “computer smart” is the person you’re trying to hide it from? If the file is super-duper private, or the person might know how to do what I just showed above, you probably won’t want to use this method. A week from now, I’ll show you another process that uses a free piece of software and it’s much more secure. The post How to password protect a Windows file or folder – part 1 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

For some of my clients, I have a hard time convincing them that they need to have a backup process in place. Usually these are people that have not (yet) experienced a hard drive crash and lost some, or all, of their important files. Their computer is working fine at the moment, they’ve never had a problem, so setting up a backup is not very high on their priority list. Those people are likely to have an unpleasant surprise some day.   So you can imagine, if they don’t think a backup process is all that important, there’s no way they would see the need to have TWO backups in place. But for a lot of people, having two different backups is definitely the right solution. That’s because they do two different things. The two types of backups are local backup, and cloud backup. Local backup means you use a portable hard drive that sits next to your computer, and it plugs into a USB port to do the backup. I usually set this to happen overnight, like from 1 am to 3 am, while the computer is not being used. This local backup takes everything – EVERYTHING – on your hard drive and puts it into a single file on that portable drive. So this means your Documents, your Pictures, your wallpaper, your MS Office software, your antivirus, everything on that hard drive is backed up. For the local backup, you just need a portable drive like the one I linked to above. The software I use for this, Macrium Reflect, is free for personal use. And if you want me to set it up for you, I can do that remotely (takes about 30 minutes). Cloud backup means you are backing up your important files on a different computer. That’s really all “cloud” means – it’s storage space on a computer other than your own. Cloud backup is completely automated. Once it’s set up, you don’t have to do anything. This type of backup safely stores your important files, such as Documents, Pictures, Music, Videos, Outlook emails, that kind of thing. It does not backup your software such as MS Word or your antivirus program. For the cloud backup, your cost for your personal computer is $60 per year (that goes to the backup service I recommend, which is Carbonite). Now back to the initial question: why do you need both of these backups? Why not just choose one of them? To answer that, let’s say you only have one of these backups when your hard drive crashes: If you only have the cloud backup, your documents and pictures and other files are safe. So you just take out the crashed drive and put in a new one, but before you can do anything, you have to install Windows. Do you have your Windows installation disc? Do you have the product key required to activate Windows after it’s installed? Do you have your installation disc for Microsoft Office? You can download Office and install it – but for that you need your user name and password for the Microsoft account. And you need to install all the other software, such as Chrome or Firefox, your antivirus, and any other software you normally use. THEN you can go to your cloud backup service and download all of your files such as documents and pictures. As you can imagine, this whole thing is quite a lengthy process and it can be a while before your computer is back up and running with all of your programs and important data. If you use your laptop for your everyday work, you might find that you don’t have use of it for a few days while all of this is being restored to the new drive. So it’s good to have the cloud backup service, but it’s not that convenient if that’s the ONLY backup you have. On the other hand… If you only have the local backup to your portable drive when your computer’s hard drive crashes, you can just put in the new replacement hard drive, and then restore everything from the last local backup to the new drive. Everything will be there – all of your programs, your documents, your screen saver, everything is exactly like it was when that most recent backup was done. But what if you haven’t done a local backup in a month? or 6 months? The process for doing a local backup is simple – just plugging in the USB cable at night and unplugging it in the morning – but you do have to remember to do it. If you don’t, your most recent backup might not be very recent. And here’s another factor. Usually, that portable drive is going to sit next to the computer. So the original hard drive (in your computer) is right next to the backup drive. What if you have a fire? The computer AND the backup could get destroyed at the same time since they’re in the same place. Or remember the recent massive floods in Louisiana? Lots of computers were destroyed, and if the portable drive with the backup was in the same location, the backup was destroyed as well. Also, that portable drive can get lost, stolen, dropped, stepped on, etc. even under normal conditions

If a friend sends you a Facebook message, you see the notification at the top of the Facebook page, click on it and read it. Simple. What if someone sends you a message, and you actually do know that person in real life but you aren’t yet Facebook friends? You might never even realize that message exists, unless you know where to look for it.   This happened to me a few times before I got wise and started checking it regularly. It would be nice if Facebook popped up some kind of notification that there was a message waiting for you somewhere other than your “regular” inbox, but they don’t (as far as I know). When you check this, you might be surprised to find messages that people sent to you months or even years ago! There are a couple of types of messages that you won’t be notified about: Filtered Messages, and Message Requests. If Facebook’s algorithm detects that the message might be from a spammer or a scammer, they just put it in the Filtered Messages area. If you get a message from someone you might know, that one will go in the Message Requests area. The sender might be someone you aren’t friends with, but maybe you have some mutual friends so there’s a connection. Or maybe both of you are also members of a few different Facebook groups. Every so often, I’ll get a reply from someone on Facebook, and it’s a reply to a message I sent them a LONG time ago (sometimes more than a year). That just means that person just now figured out how to see those hidden messages. Here’s how to check for these messages: Open Facebook, and click on the “Messages” icon in the top right area of the page:   When you click on that, you’ll see a list of your most recent messages. At the bottom, click on “See All”:   Then look up in the top left area. When you click the “More” button you’ll get a drop-down menu and one of the options is “Filtered”. If there’s a number in parentheses there, that’s how many Filtered messages are waiting for you.   Just to the left of the “More” button is the “Message Requests” button. When you click that, you’ll see a list of the people that have sent you a message, along with the message they sent.   At this point, if you have messages in either of these categories, you can respond to them, ignore them, or delete them. This is a good thing to keep in mind when you send someone a Facebook message, but you’re not friends with them on Facebook. They might not be ignoring you – they might just have no idea that your message is sitting there in hiding, waiting to be read! The post The personal Facebook messages you didn’t even know you had first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

What a week this has been. It started with a simple process: replacing a monitor. By the end, I had to replace my primary computer. And I discovered something very important for you to know about Windows – especially Windows 10.   I’ll give a brief summary of what happened. I use 2 monitors on my main desktop computer. I’ve done this for years. If you ever set up your computer to use dual monitors, you’ll never go back to one because it’s so nice to have all that space for everything. My left monitor had been dying a slow death for several weeks. I knew it was going bad, because every time I restarted my computer, the right monitor would come on fine, but the left monitor would come on for about a half second, then shut off, then come back on for a half second, and that cycle would continue. When it first started doing that, it would go through that cycle for about 30 to 60 seconds before it would come on and all would be fine. But as time went by, that cycle would last for a longer period of time. Last week it had gotten to the point where I was waiting about 10 or 15 minutes for it to be completely powered up, so I decided to go ahead and switch it out. I had another set of dual monitors that I really like, so I went ahead and switched out both of my current monitors for this other matching set. Got them all hooked up, and got no video signal from the computer to either monitor. I knew the monitors were working, so this was kind of odd. Tried various connection changes, still no luck. So I tried putting a different video card in my computer. In fact, I tried a few video cards. Not only did this not work to get a video signal, now my computer won’t boot up properly. It would start up, run for about 30 seconds (with no video signal), then power down and start up again. This cycle continued indefinitely. So now this has gone from a simple monitor switch to a major computer issue. And this was on Friday. I usually write my blog and record my podcast on Saturday, for publication on Monday. Looked like that was going to be a tough deadline to meet now. As a side note, I’ve had some people ask, “Why not just use a different computer to do the blog and podcast?” It’s true, I have other computers, including the ones I have for sale. The problem is the software. I use Adobe Audition to record my podcast, and I also use Photoshop to edit the photos on my blog. Getting those installed on different computers, as well as the time it takes to write the blog and record the podcast, was just too much to fit in while I was in the process of buying a new computer and getting it all set up. So I just sent out an email to my subscribers (and posted on my website and on Facebook) to let everyone know there would be no blog or podcast on Monday. First time I’ve ever had to do that so it felt kind of weird. Finally found a computer on Sunday night. This was a Craigslist ad and it was about 20 minutes away from me. The seller was nice enough to let me come and look at it even though it was like 9 pm on Sunday night. I verified it had all the specs I needed (including the option to use 2 monitors) and brought it back home that night. Looks like this:   Even before this purchase, Lenovo has been becoming my favorite brand of computer. They look nice and they work so well. This desktop computer (so far) further confirms this and I’m very happy with it. It has an i5 processor, and although I got it with 8 gb of memory (RAM), I took some of the memory sticks from my old computer and upgraded the memory on this new one to 20 gb. Nice and fast, and very quiet. Fan noise is a factor, since it sits on my desk and I really don’t want the sound of computer fans to provide the background noise for my podcast. The only thing that made me hesitate about buying this computer is the operating system on it: Windows 10. You probably already know my feelings about Windows 10. For over a year I’ve been telling people to avoid upgrading from Windows 7 or 8.1 to Windows 10. Partly this was because of the obnoxious practices Microsoft was using to get Windows on every computer. Partly it was because Windows 10 has caused compatibility issues with so many of my clients. And partly it was because I just don’t like the user interface (mainly the Start button/Start menu). I’ve also said that for some people, Windows 10 functions properly. Fortunately I can (so far) count myself among those people. My printer was compatible with it (I’ll come back to that in a minute) and all of the drivers were there with no issues. And from a practical standpoint, I needed a computer sooner rather than later, and Windows 7 computers are gradually becoming harder to find. This Lenovo met all of my other requirements, so I went ahead and made the decision. I also knew that if it were a total disaster, I could at least try to wipe it and install Windows 7 on it (th

If you ever have a need to publish photos online, such as on your website or a social media account, you need to be VERY careful to make sure you have the right to do that. Otherwise, it could be a very expensive lesson.   When you need a picture for some project such as a business website, or your blog, or a Twitter post, what’s the easiest way to find that perfect image? Google image search, of course! I mean, Google has many millions of images indexed so you’re sure to find LOTS of photos that will serve the purpose. But you better not do that. There’s a company called Getty Images, and their entire business model is based on catching people who use digital images online without having the right to do so. Getty has purchased the copyright license to a huge collection of images, and they spend their days searching websites and blogs and social media sites looking for any of “their” pictures that are being used without authorization. If you are using one of their images, they’ll find you and the first thing you’ll get is a very direct letter stating that they own the rights to the image, you don’t own the rights, you used the image without permission, you owe us money. The amount being demanded can range from $100 up to thousands of dollars, depending on the image and the usage. I had a client who received a letter from Getty demanding $700, and they ended up just paying it rather than trying to figure out who was right or wrong in the situation. And I would guess that’s what most people or companies do – for a payment of a few hundred dollars, it’s cheaper to just pay it rather than hire a lawyer to fight it in court. So Getty probably goes unchallenged in most of these cases. And really, even if you do have the rights to the photo, could you actually come up with the proof of that? Or could you produce evidence that you purchased the usage rights from the actual owner? If you can’t (or don’t want to bother with it), the only other option is to just pay the bill and get on with your life. So today’s tip is just that – only use images that you have the right to use, and keep the paperwork and proof of purchase in case your rights ever get challenged. (Thanks to reader Tim, who recommended this article on how to respond to a Getty letter: read it here.) As you might imagine, Getty is not very popular with a lot of people. They make their money by sending large invoices to people that aren’t expecting them, so many of their transactions involve parties that are very upset at this unexpected bill that they’re being forced to pay. That’s what makes this recent story so wonderful. One of Getty’s recent targets was Carol Highsmith. Highsmith runs a nonprofit called the This Is America! Foundation, and posted an image on the group’s website. Getty Images sent her a letter, just like they usually do, accusing her of copyright infringement, and demanding a $120 “settlement payment”. Except this situation was a little different. In this case, Carol Highsmith actually DID have the rights to publish the image that the Getty letter referred to. And how did she have the right to publish the image? Because she was the photographer that created it. Yeah, you might say that Getty Images kind of stepped in it that time. This is the image that was the subject of that demand letter:   Carol Highsmith is a professional American photographer who has traveled across the country, documenting life in America through her amazing images. The photo of the abandoned gas station at the top of this article is one of hers. And she doesn’t even do this to make money – she is actually donating all of those images to the general public, through the Library of Congress. So anyone can go to the Library of Congress’ website and access any of the pictures in that archive, completely royalty-free. So it’s kind of ironic that she would donate this collection of her images for anyone to use, and then Getty Images accuses her of copyright infringement and demands payment for her use of her own photo. In fact, there are several publications that have used her images and credited Getty Images since Getty claimed the rights and required the purchase of a copyright license. This is kind of like if I stole a book from the public library, then threatened the author of the book with a lawsuit if he claimed any rights to “my” book. The fun part of this story is that Carol Highsmith has filed a lawsuit against Getty Images in federal court. She accuses Getty Images of illegally claiming the rights to her 18,755 donated images, and the lawsuit is asking the court for over $1 billion in damages. This is not the first time Getty has been accused of doing this (last time it cost them $1.5 million). It will be interesting to see how this one turns out. So remember to never use images if

For many people that use Outlook as their email program, it’s very frustrating when you get an email that’s supposed to have pictures in it, but Outlook doesn’t display those pictures – it only shows a red “X”.   And in all of Microsoft’s wisdom, they didn’t create a clear or intuitive way to fix this problem. But here’s how you do it. (Note: the instructions and screenshots here are for Outlook 2016, but they are very similar for Outlook 2013 or 2010. If you are using an older version than that, you really need to upgrade anyway.) In Outlook, click on File, then Options.   In the new window, click on Trust Center:   Then click on Trust Center Settings:   Now go to the “Automatic Download” section and UNcheck the box that says “Don’t download pictures automatically in HTML email”   Then click OK in the two open windows, and you’re back in Outlook. You might need to restart Outlook in order for this to take effect. And, this change may only apply to new emails that come in from now on, not the emails that are already downloaded. But that should solve the “Red X” problem in Outlook. The post Why is Outlook not showing images in your emails? first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

After last week’s post about a big reason WHY you should use an ad blocker when you visit websites, I got several inquiries asking, “What ad blocker should I use? Where do I find it? How do I get it on my computer?”. So this week we’ll talk about a couple of the popular ones, including the one I use on my own primary computer.   For either of these ad blockers, you’ll need to install them as an extension to your web browser(s). That just means it will run as sort of an “add-on” feature of Chrome or Firefox. So you can either get the ad blocker from within Chrome or Firefox, using this basic procedure: In Firefox: Click the icon in the top right that looks like 3 horizontal lines and choose “Add-ons” Type the name of the ad blocker in the search bar in the top right area When it comes up in the search results, click the “Install” button and follow the prompts   In Chrome: Click the icon in the top right that looks like 3 horizontal lines and choose “Settings” On the left side, click “Extensions” At the bottom of the list of current extension, click on the link that says “Get more extension” Type the name of the ad blocker in the search bar in the top left When you see it in the search results, click on “Add to Chrome” and follow the prompts   (If you use Internet Explorer, the first step is to quit using Internet Explorer. But if you do want to keep using it as your web browser, you can go straight to the AdBlock Plus website and click on the green button that says “Install for Internet Explorer”. I don’t think uBlock Origin is compatible with Internet Explorer.)   uBlock Origin Website: https://www.ublock.org/ uBlock Origin is the one I have been using for quite some time. It does a great job keeping the ads from popping up on the various websites I visit. It also knows to alert me when I click on something in Google search results that is actually an ad. Like if I search for “Altra Instinct 2.0” (the running shoe that I use), Google displays these offers from various vendors because it knows I’m probably shopping for shoes:   But when I click on one of them, uBlock alerts me that I just clicked on an advertisement and shows the following options. I usually just click on “Temporarily” so I can go through and see the website. But if I wanted to just always allow ads from Google searches such as this, I could click on “Permanently” and the ads would take me straight to the website. Or I can just click “Go back”.   AdBlock Plus Website: https://adblockplus.org/ AdBlock Plus is an ad blocking program that has been around for a long time. In fact, it may have been the first ad blocker available. It also works well. One thing to keep in mind with this one though – you might notice that the tag line does not say “surf the web without ads”. No, instead it says “Surf the web without annoying ads”. This might seem like an insignificant distinction, but it does have meaning. AdBlock Plus, by default, lets SOME ads be displayed – the “nice” ones. If an ad has obnoxious blinking text or it’s jumping around on the page or it’s otherwise too distracting, it will be blocked. So you will see a few ads still, unless you go into the configuration and tell it, “No, I don’t want to see ANY ads”. At least they do give you that option. The one you end up using would just be a personal preference. You might want to try one of them for a week, then remove it and put the other one on for a week. No matter which one you use, your web experience will be much more enjoyable (and safe) with most or all of the ads not displaying. Here’s a video talking about these two ad blocking extensions: The post Recommended ad blockers first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I’ve used ad blockers for years. If you’re not familiar with that, what this means is that when I visit a website that has advertising, I don’t see the ads. I just see the website content.   As you might know, ad blocking software has generated a controversy. Website visitors like the blockers because websites are so much more pleasant without all the obnoxious ads in your face all the time (sometimes even obscuring the content). Website owners dislike them because ad-viewing is what brings revenue to their website. One large newspaper site (you may have heard of it – The New York Times) has gone so far as to say this: “No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of high quality journalism has the right to consume it.” That’s a quote direct from the President and CEO of The New York Times Company, Mark Thompson. You can read his full content here. I’m not writing this piece to weigh in on the traditional pros and cons of blocking ads. There are good arguments to be made on both sides. What I want to make known, however, is that there is another very good and valid reason to block ads, aside from the fact that you just don’t want to see them. Ads can deliver malware – viruses – ransomware – all kinds of bad stuff to your computer. If you click the link above and read the full statement by Mark Thompson, he fully addresses the need for users to view ads in order to help cover the cost of the website and the creation of good journalism. But he fails to mention the fact that many visitors to the New York Times website earlier this year were infected with ransomware, which was delivered directly from ads on the site. Here’s the basic process: The website contracts with an advertising network, who handles the creation and insertion of the ads. The ad network gets compromised and malicious code is included “behind the scenes” in the ads that are displayed. A computer user visits the website, using a computer that is not completely up to date with third-party security patches (have you ever ignored the common little pop-up that says “Adobe has an update”?) The malicious ad uses the unpatched security hole to infect the computer with ransomware (note: you do NOT have to click on the ad for this to happen). The computer’s files are all encrypted – Documents, Pictures, Music, Emails, etc. All the stuff that’s important to you. The bad guys then display a message that if you want your files back, you have to pay 1-2 bitcoins (as of this writing, 1 bitcoin is equal to about $660 in US dollars). So you either pay the criminals and hope they come through and give you your stuff back, or you just lose all those files. I can’t let this opportunity go by without saying – if you had a backup before you got infected, you could get all your stuff back (including all of your programs) without having to pay the crooks anything. You do have a backup, right? In fact, to be fully protected, you should have TWO backups (and they are mostly automated, and I can set it up for you, so no excuses). And, if your other software (Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Firefox, Chrome, Windows Updates, etc. etc.) were all up to date, you would have been much less likely to get infected. This can be automated too, through the Managed Service Plan. But do you know how ELSE you could have avoided this mess? By using an ad blocker, and not allowing those infected ads to be displayed in the first place. To be fair, the New York Times was not the only high-traffic website that got hit with this problem a few months ago. Also included were the BBC, the NFL, and good old AOL. By the way, here’s what AOL looks like if you block all the ads:   (Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.) So, even though the debate will continue to rage about how annoying the advertisements are, but how website users should recognize their social responsibility to not block the ads, this fact remains. Website owners that depend on ad revenue cannot expect their users to just blindly “hope” that the ads are safe. There need to be much more serious safety measures in place to prevent these infections. It’s kind of like when you go out to eat. The owner of the restaurant can give you free samples, but if you go there for a full meal he expects you to pay the regular price for it. In return, you expect the food to be safe to eat and not give you food poisoning. What do you think? Leave a comment below. The post Another big reason to use an ad blocker first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Mostly, Word works well. I’ve used it for many years and been pretty happy with it. But ever since I first started using it, there has been this one thing that has driven me nuts until I learned how to fix it.   What happens is this. I’ll be typing along in MS Word, everything seems to be working fine, no problem. Then I decide I need to have some kind of small divider in between a couple of paragraphs. Nothing big, just a few dashes to separate those paragraphs. So I hit Enter to go to a new line, and I hit the old “hyphen” key 3 or 4 times, and I hit Enter again to start the next paragraph. But when I look up and see what’s on the screen, what is there is definitely NOT what I typed. Instead of the 4 “dashes” to separate those two paragraphs, there’s a solid line all the way across the document – from the left margin to the right margin. How in the world did that happen?? I know for sure I didn’t type it that way (you don’t plan to type the hyphen key 3 or 4 times and “accidentally” hit it 50 times!). Here’s what has happened: Microsoft Word is trying to give you what it THINKS you want (a solid line). Why it would think that, I can’t really tell you. But the odd thing is, that thing that looks like just a regular line is not really a line at all. Or I should say, Word doesn’t picture it as a standard “line”. To verify this, go up to that line and try to highlight it so you can delete it. Or try putting your cursor at the end of the line, so you can backspace and delete it. You can’t. Although, if you hit backspace immediately after that line appears on the page, you can get rid of it – but that doesn’t keep it from happening again in the future In order to understand how to get rid of that thing, you have to know what Word thinks it is: a border. Huh? I know, it doesn’t really make any sense. But that’s the way it is. We just have to work around it. So when you find yourself with that long, silly line in the middle of the page that you don’t want, put your cursor on the line ABOVE that long line, then find the Paragraph section in the ribbon above and click the drop-down menu in the “Borders” icon:   When you choose “No borders” that line disappears. So your problem is solved – but only for this specific Word document. Next time you type those 3 dashes on a line again, the same thing is going to happen. Chances are you don’t really want to have this happening all the time. Fortunately, you can change your preferences in Word so that this doesn’t happen again. To do that, click File – Options – Proofing and click on the button called “AutoCorrect Options”. In the new window, click the tab called “AutoFormat as you type” and UN-check the box next to “Border lines”, then click Ok:   The steps I just listed above are based on Word 2016. If you have a previous version, your steps might be somewhat different, but if you can at least get to the “AutoCorrect” options you should be able to figure it out from there. What’s kind of ironic is that Word sets it up to do that document-wide line by default, and has done it that way for years. The idea is that it’s trying to predict what you want and be helpful by providing it immediately and saving you time. The irony is that this “time saver” that’s built into Word has been an annoyance for a very long time for lots of people, and you end up wasting time just trying to figure out how to fix it. Now you know how! The post Fix one of MS Word’s most annoying problems first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I use Google Chrome as my primary web browser, and not long ago I came across something I could do with Chrome that I thought was pretty cool. And sometimes even useful.   A little background first. Practically since the beginning of time, computer users have known about the keyboard combination CTRL + ALT + Delete. If your computer has a problem, or a window freezes, or just about anything, that’s what you try (or used to try anyway). That 3-key combination had the nickname – it was called the “3 Finger Salute”. Usually, when you click CTRL + ALT + Delete, you then clicked on “Start Task Manager” to show a list of the processes running on the computer. You could find the one that froze up in that list, then click on it to close it so that you could use your computer again. It was just quicker than doing a full power down and starting up again (especially in the old days when computers would take forever to finish booting up). What a lot of people don’t know is that you can get directly to the Windows Task Manager without doing the CTRL + ALT + Delete key combination. All you have to do is hit CTRL + Shift + Escape. And there it is, Windows Task Manager right in front of you immediately. Look at that, I just saved you that extra click and added years of productivity to your life. Now, back to Google Chrome. What most people don’t know is that Chrome has it’s OWN Task Manager. Try this out. Open Google Chrome, and open a few tabs to various websites. Now, hit Shift + Escape. You’ll see something like this:   It actually looks almost identical to the Windows Task Manager, but this one ONLY shows the various tabs, extensions and processes that are active inside of Chrome at the moment. So if one particular tab is not working right (like when a web page freezes up) and you can’t close it, you can close it from this window. Or if you want to temporarily disable an extension, you can do that from here as well. Just highlight the tab or extension, and click “End Process” – just like you would in Windows Task Manager. And for those of you that really like to get geeky, you can choose any of those items in the list with a RIGHT click, and select other categories of more in-depth information about that particular tab or extension:   Chances are most users are not going to have a need to dig that deep into the recesses of Chrome to find out what the CSS cache is for a particular running extension. But should you ever have a need for that, it’s there, ready and waiting for you! The post A little-known feature of Google Chrome first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

At one point in time, I was an avid newspaper reader. I enjoyed being informed about what was going on locally and around the world, and the newspaper had it all right there in one place, every day. This was back when I was working in an office. I would get to the office about 30 minutes before work started so I would have time to read the paper and feel like I was up to date on current events.   Of course, that was before the age of the internet and the 24 hour news cycle. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years. And that’s the overall trend for print journalism, which is why newspaper are gradually declining and going out of business. When all the news is available and up to the minute right on your computer or phone, why would you buy a piece of paper that was printed yesterday? I do have some friends who continue to hold out hope that printed newspapers are going to make a comeback, but I really don’t see that happening. Still, the newspaper was the public’s best source for news for the past roughly 400 years. That means that the last few centuries of our world is actually documented in those newspapers – from major world events all the way down to tiny local stories. Wouldn’t it be great if most of that information could be seen in one centralized location? Yep – and the Google News Archive has done just that. You can see it here: https://news.google.com/newspapers If you’re a history buff, this is a gold mine. There are newspapers here from all over the world. Major cities to small towns and everything in between. For example, if you live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania you can read over 28,000 issues of the Pittsburgh Press – from July 1819 to July of 1992. Not to mention the Pittsburgh Commercial, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Sun-Telegraph. That’s a lot of news about Pittsburgh!   Here’s the Cambridge Times (Cambridge, Ohio) edition from June 5, 1908:   If you lived in Montreal in October of 1909, you would have had to cough up 5 cents to read The Canadian Times. Now you can read it for free!   The archives are laid out in such a way that they are easy to navigate. The basic structure is alphabetical by the name of the newspaper. But you can also search within the archive in order to get more specific information. Once you click on the name of the newspaper, you’re taken to a page that is laid out so you can scroll through to the decade/year/month you want to see. Here’s part of the page that’s displayed when I click on the Akron Hometowner (Akron, Ohio):   From there, you can use a drop-down menu to choose a more specific time period (such as the month), the size you want to have the thumbnail images appear on this page, or even a specific date. It’s funny how we kind of take for granted that Google takes on projects like this that are overwhelmingly huge. Can you imagine the meeting in Google’s headquarters that day? “Hey guys, why don’t we just get all the old issues of all the newspapers and make them viewable and searchable on the website?”. I mean, where do you even start with a project like that? Then again, this is the company that has pioneered the idea of cars with no human driver, and has given us a street-view map of just about the whole world. Archiving old newspapers is a walk in the park. Pretty amazing resource. The post Google’s incredible newspaper archive first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

As the free period for upgrading from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 comes closer to ending (July 29), Microsoft is getting more desperate. They want to push Windows 10 into as many computers as possible, whether the owner of the computer wants it or not. I’m still getting calls and emails all the time from people that are surprised to wake up one morning and find that their computer has been “upgraded” against their wishes.   As I have written here previously (here), Windows 10 has a built-in function that allows you to revert back to your previous version of Windows, if you do the rollback within 30 days. That rollback function usually works, but not always. Consider these scenarios: What if the built-in reversion process does not want to work or comes up with an error? What if you don’t know how to proceed with reverting back to Windows 7 or 8 after the computer has upgraded to 10? What if the Windows 10 upgrade runs into problems and now the computer won’t even boot into Windows? I’ve seen this several times. And these headaches may all be happening to you, in spite of the fact that you didn’t even want Windows 10 in the first place! I just came across a way that could resolve all of those issues. Neosmart Technologies has come up with a little piece of software called Windows 10 Rollback Utility (pretty clever name, right?). You can get it at https://neosmart.net/Win10Rollback/. Disclaimer: I only recently discovered this program, and I’ve only tried it on one computer so far. On that computer it worked fine. Normally I try to use a program extensively before I blog about it or recommend it, but in this situation there are so many people getting scammed into the Windows 10 upgrade I felt that I should go ahead and tell you about it now. There are no indicators so far that it won’t work properly, just keep in mind that I have not tested it exhaustively.   When you visit that website, you can watch the brief demo video that gives you an overview of what is involved. This is what it shows: Basically there are a couple of different ways you can use this program: You can install it on your computer that is currently running Windows 10, and use it to take the computer back to Windows 7 or Windows 8. But you can ONLY do that within 30 days after the upgrade to Windows 10 took place. If it has been longer than that, this “easy rollback” option is gone. There are still options to get back to 7 or 8, but they are just more involved. If your computer somehow got corrupted during the Windows 10 installation and now it won’t boot up to either version of Windows, you can create a bootable disc using the Windows 10 Rollback Utility. Your computer can boot up to that, and take it back to the previous version of Windows (if you’re not familiar with how to create a bootable disc and boot your computer with it, I can help you with that). One thing to remember: any work that you have done (documents created, pictures, etc.) from the time of the upgrade until now will be wiped out when you revert back to the previous version of Windows. So make sure you back up everything important BEFORE you do the rollback. The post How to easily roll back from Windows 10 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

You know I am always preaching about doing backups. And even people that don’t have a backup process in place know that they SHOULD, but until that unexpected problem comes up and they lose their important documents or irreplaceable pictures, they just say that they’ll do that “someday”. Today I’m not going to tell you about all the files you SHOULD be backing up – instead I’ll tell you about a particular type of file that you should NOT back up.   Question: What’s worse than having your computer crash when you have no backup? Answer: A computer crash when you THINK you have a backup, but you don’t. The scenario: I’ve seen this happen a few times and it’s not good. Client calls me and says the computer won’t boot up, or it’s giving an error message like “Operating system not found” or “Boot device not found” or something similar. That almost always means a hard drive crash. Client: “But the good news is, I was just working on my novel yesterday – you know, the one I’ve been working on for the last couple of years – and when I was done working, I backed it up to my thumb drive. So glad I did that! Sure wouldn’t want to lose two years of work!” So I go over and check the computer, and yep, it’s a hard drive crash. We replace the hard drive and get Windows and Office reinstalled, then it’s time to restore the recently-backed-up novel from the flash drive back to the computer. So I plug in the flash drive and I see this:   That’s when my heart sinks. Because I’m going to have to tell the client that this backup is not a backup. Do you see the telltale clue in that image? It’s the little arrow in the bottom left corner of the icon. That little arrow means what we’re looking at is not the actual Word file. Rather, it’s a shortcut to the main file. It just points to the main file. It’s really nothing more than an icon. It’s not the Word document. Really, it’s a pretty easy mistake to make. You have the actual important document saved in the Documents folder, where it should be. But you want quick, one-click access to it, so you make a shortcut to it on the desktop. The only file you ever click on to open it is that desktop shortcut. So it kind of follows logically that if you want to make sure you have that file backed up, you backup the file that’s on the desktop – the one you see all the time, and click on all the time. WRONG. You have to back up the actual file – the actual document. How do you make sure you back up the right thing? There are a few ways: If you are backing up just a single file to a flash drive, make sure the icon does not have that little arrow in the lower left corner. Have an online backup process in place – so even if you forget to back up an important file, it’s going to be backed up anyway. This is 100% automated. Don’t just back up a single file – back up the entire Documents folder (or whatever folders contain your important stuff). The post A file on your desktop that you should NOT back up first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I’ve been really trying to filter out all the stuff that shows up on my Facebook news feed. Facebook does have some positive benefits, but wow – there is so much stuff on there that I don’t care about. Not that it’s necessarily bad stuff (although some of it is really terrible) – it’s just content that I decide I don’t want to waste my time or thought processes on. For me, one of those things is the constant reminders of my “memories” – the stuff that was on Facebook a year ago or 5 years ago, or longer. Fortunately, there’s a way to stop it from displaying for a while.   Sometimes it shows up and looks like this too:   I know for some people it’s great to take a trip down memory lane right there on Facebook. It’s just not for me. If you feel the same way, here’s how to keep that from showing up in your news feed: – Go to https://www.facebook.com/onthisday and click on “Preferences” in the top right corner – Click to edit the Dates:   – Enter a start date from a looooong time ago, and make the end date whatever today’s date is, then click Save:   This tells Facebook that you don’t want to see any “nostalgia” or “memories” that happened to take place between those two dates. It would be must better if Facebook just offered a switch to disable the nostalgia stuff from appearing, regardless of what the date was. By entering the date range as we did in the example above, it just means that a year from day you might start seeing those silly things again. Maybe by that time there will be a way to just turn it off completely. The post How to disable the Facebook nostalgia posts first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

One of the most dangerous things you can do with your computer is to click on a link when you don’t know where that link will take you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook link from someone you barely know, or a loving email from your dear sweet mother – don’t click on a link without knowing where it goes!   This is wonderfully illustrated this past week in an email I got from my friend and long-time client Marge. She got an email that was supposedly from Paypal Customer Service, asking her to verify her account using a link that just said “CLICK HERE”. She wisely did not click on it and just forwarded it to me to verify that it was a scam. Here’s the email:   With a lot of scams, the email sender will at least spoof the “From” address so that it looks like it came from Paypal. In this case, the scammer was just too lazy I guess. Obviously that is not an email address for Paypal Support. But more importantly, the message in the email asked her to click on a link to “verify” her account (this was another red flag, since Marge does not have a Paypal account). And even if she did have a Paypal account, Paypal would never ask you to do this. They know that any security-conscious user would not click that link. Here’s why. There are two components to any link: the link text and the link address. The link text are the words you can actually see; the text that you are supposed to click on. In this case, the link text is “CLICK HERE”. That text can be anything the writer wants it to be. It doesn’t have to be anything related to where the link address goes. The link address is the actual website where you’ll be sent when you click on the link text. In a lot of cases you can’t see the link address; you can only see the link text. That’s what makes this a little tricky. In fact, the link text could even be a website address, and you could click on it thinking that was also the link address, but the link address could be completely different. For example, the link below says it’s supposed to be for the Ford automobile website, right? But if you actually click on it (it’s safe if you want to try it), it will instead take you to the Chevrolet website. That’s because the text says Ford, but the address is for Chevy. http://www.Ford.com In the case of the email shown above, all we see is the link text. How do we find out what the actual address is? Well, the WORST way to find out is to just click the link and see where it takes you – don’t do that, no matter how tempting it might be! What you should do instead is RIGHT click on the link text, and choose “Copy Hyperlink” or “Copy link address” or something similar:   Then, open up a plain text editing program on your computer. In Windows, Notepad is perfect for this. When you have that open you can click Edit – Paste, or just right-click in the white area and choose Paste from the menu that pops up. In this case, here is what was shown as the link address:   Well, isn’t that interesting! Sure doesn’t look like a Paypal website address, does it? Bitly is actually what’s called a link-shortening service. If you want to send a link to someone but it’s one of those really long ones, you can paste it in at the Bitly website (www.Bit.ly) and they’ll create a much shorter link for you, which will actually redirect to your longer link address. It’s a legitimate and useful service, but unfortunately it gets used by scammers in order to hide the REAL website address where they want to send you. So we have the Bit.ly address – how do we know where that’s going to lead? There’s a little trick to that. When you copy and paste a Bitly address into your web browser (such as Firefox or Chrome), add a “+” (a plus sign) after it and hit Enter. Instead of taking you directly to the end website address, Bitly will instead give you a preview of where it leads, and THEN you can decide if you want to go there or not. It’s a handy security feature built into Bitly, which you should definitely take advantage of. So we put this into the web browser: and here’s the preview that Bitly provides for us: It doesn’t take much of a security expert to determine that “huytv.ml.silentroom.cf” is not a website address for Paypal Customer Support. I was curious about the “.CF” that came at the end of that address though. It was not one that I was familiar with. The more common ones are easy to identify – .CA means it’s based in Canada, .gov means it’s either the federal or state government here in the US, etc. When I checked on what the “.CF” originated, here’s what I found:   Unfortunately, it’s not a big surprise to see that it came from Africa – that’s

I still don’t recommend Windows 10. I’ll be staying with Windows 7 for as long as possible (at least until January of 2020, when Microsoft will no longer offer security updates for it). But I know there are some people that are concerned that someday they might HAVE to upgrade, and the deadline for getting the FREE upgrade to Windows 10 is July 29 – just a couple of months away. It would be silly to pay for Windows 10 (which will probably be $119) if you could have gotten it for free, right? Here’s the timeline: Windows 10 was first introduced at the end of July, 2015. For anyone that has Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1, the upgrade to Windows 10 is free if you do it by July 29, 2016. After July 29, if you want to upgrade to Windows 10, it will cost you $119. But there’s a way around that, if you’re concerned about it. Disclaimer: As a general rule, I don’t recommend that the “novice” computer user should do either one of these things. It’s true that if you know all the steps involved, and you’re familiar with how the system image software works, you could probably do either of these successfully. But we’re talking about your computer’s operating system here. If something goes wrong, or you’re presented with an error message or an option that you aren’t familiar with, you’re might be kind of stuck in a difficult place. I’m only presenting this today for the users that are considering doing the upgrade now specifically to avoid having to spend $119 later. Actually there are two ways to keep using Windows 7, but get Windows 10 free even after the deadline. There are pros and cons to both. Method #1: Upgrade and roll back Of the two methods, this is the easier one – but it’s not 100% guaranteed. Windows 10 has a built-in process that allows you to go back to your previous version of Windows, if you decide you don’t like Windows 10 or it doesn’t work properly (both are likely scenarios). But you have to do the rollback within 30 days of the upgrade. And here’s the catch: that rollback option has been known not to work on some computers. And it can make a difference if you do it 1 day after the upgrade, or 29 days after; whatever work you’ve done during the Windows 10 period will likely be lost when you go back to Windows 7 or 8. Here are the basic steps for this process: Use Macrium Reflect to create a system image backup of your entire hard drive. Macrium Reflect can be downloaded free for personal use here. That system image should be stored on an external/portable drive. Also, be sure to create the Rescue Media disc when the program prompts you to do so. When it’s finished, disconnect the portable drive from the computer. Go through the Windows 10 upgrade process. If you have the Windows 10 nag icon in the lower right corner, you can click that to do it. Otherwise, you can go to Microsoft.com and you’ll be bombarded with messages to get that upgrade. (Note: if the Windows 10 upgrade has already been disabled on your computer through a program such as GWX Control Panel, or Never10, you will need to open that program an re-enable the upgrade ability.) After the upgrade is fully done, restart the computer and make sure it boots up to the newly-installed Windows 10. Maybe you’ll want to click the “Start” button and browse for a while just to cement the fact that you don’t really like Windows 10. Now do the rollback to your previous version of Windows. I’ve done a full blog post about this, which you can see here. If the rollback doesn’t work for some reason, you still have your system image that we created in step 1, so you should be able to re-install Windows 7 or 8 from that. Method #2: Upgrade and restore a system image This one is the more reliable of the two methods – but not quite as simple. It’s only more reliable due to the fact that the “rollback process” built into Windows 10 just doesn’t always work properly. As you can see, the software we use for this is the same as we used in Method #1 – Macrium Reflect. It’s very reliable and I love it. Personally, I bought the paid version just to support the developers (and in case I ever need their tech support, which is not included in the free version). Here are the basic steps for this process: Use Macrium Reflect to create a system image backup of your entire hard drive. Macrium Reflect can be downloaded free for personal use here. That system image should be stored on an external/portable drive. Also, be sure to create the Rescue Media disc when the program prompts you to do so. Go through the Windows 10 upgrade process. If you have the Windows 10 nag icon in the lower right corner, you can click that to do it. Otherwise, you can go to Microsoft.com and you’ll be bombarded with messages to get that upgrade. (Note: if the

Everyone uses Google all the time to find something online. It’s still by far the best and most comprehensive search engine available, which is why it’s also the most popular (Bing doesn’t even come close, in spite of Microsoft’s marketing machine telling you it’s so great). But did you know that Google does a lot more than just find websites and look up information?   Google does a TON of things that are interesting, educational and maybe even a little bizarre. Here are three things that you can do with Google that I’ll bet you didn’t know about. You can view high-resolution images of important art (click here) I’m certainly not well-educated in the field of art, but I do enjoy viewing it. The Salvador Dali Museum is here in my area and I’ve visited it a few times. I’ve also always enjoyed Norman Rockwell’s work, although I’ve been told that he would be more accurately referred to as an “illustrator” rather than an artist. He was pretty talented regardless of title. At the link above, you can just browse what is there, or you can search based on artist, piece, date, etc. Then when you’re viewing, you can zoom way in to see it up close. You can build a Lego masterpiece (click here) Personally, I’ve never really understood the fascination with Legos. They’re just manufactured bits of plastic that connect. I guess the real entertainment value from Legos is based on what your imagination can dream up for you to create with them. And now you don’t even need the actual Legos in order to build something – you can do it right on your screen. When you first visit the site, click on “Start building”. You’ll get an option to sign in with your Google account but you only need to do that if you want to publish what you build. Otherwise it’s pretty intuitive.   You can play Atari Breakout (click here) Breakout is one of the early classic video games. I used to play it for long stretches of time. I think one of the big appeals is that it is really simple to understand – it doesn’t take a big explanation of the rules in order to just start playing and enjoying it. You can control the paddle with the left-right keys on the keyboard, or with your mouse (mouse is easier).   The post 3 cool things you can do with Google first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Every drive on your Windows computer has a letter of the alphabet assigned to it. The hard drive is probably drive C, and the CD/DVD drive (if you have one) is probably drive D. If you plug in a flash drive, it would most likely be drive E, since a new drive will take the next available drive letter. But if you set up a regular backup to a portable USB drive, you need to change the drive letter of that drive first. Here’s why.   When you set up a backup that goes to a portable or external hard drive, you have to tell the backup software a few things. What files and folders to back up How often to back up What time of day to back up Where to send the files and folders for the backup That last item – where to send the backed-up files and folders – is the key element here. So you have your external drive plugged in, and let’s say it takes the drive letter “E” since that is the next letter available, alphabetically. This means that each day, your backup program will take those selected files and folders and put them in their proper place on drive E, your backup drive. And that’s all fine, until something different happens. When you’re using the computer, you should not have the external drive connected to it. But let’s say you are using the computer, and for whatever reason, you plug in a flash drive to see what’s on it. Then you leave that flash drive sitting in the USB port. That means the flash drive is now drive “E”. Later on, you plug in your external drive so that the computer can do its backup. Maybe the backup is set to happen at 1 am (a popular time for overnight backups to start). BUT – what you didn’t notice is that the external hard drive is now drive “F” – the next available letter in the alphabet. So when your backup program fires up at 1 am, it’s going to look for drive “E” – just like it’s supposed to – but drive “E” is the flash drive. There are several problems that could arise from this: the flash drive probably doesn’t have enough available space to do the backup the flash drive might not have the folder the backup program would be looking for to store the backup if you forget the flash drive is there, you might think everything is fine and not realize for several days or even weeks that you haven’t been doing a backup All of those problems can be avoided if you just do one thing when you’re setting up the backup. This is something I do every time I set up a backup for a client. You should change the drive letter for the external/portable drive, and you should assign it a letter that’s way up in the alphabet, like “P” or “M”. That way, it will always stay that letter when you plug it into your computer. The only way you could “bump” that external drive off of one of those letters would be to plug in so many other flash drives or other things that all the other letters are used up. That won’t happen, so you’re safe with a letter that is near the end of the alphabet. Here’s how you change the drive letter: Plug in your portable drive Click the Start button, and RIGHT click on either “Computer” (Windows 7 or 8) or “This PC” (Windows 10) In the little menu that comes up, click on “Manage” 4. In the new window that opens, click on “Disk Management” 5. Now you’ll see a list of all your drives, including the external drive   6. Do a RIGHT click on the external drive and choose “Change Drive Letter and Paths”   7. Now click the Change button:   8. Click the drop-down menu and choose the letter you want to use, and click OK:   You might get an alert that pops up saying that some programs may not work properly if you change the drive letter for this drive. That’s fine, because the only program that will use this external drive is your backup program (I use Macrium Reflect), and you’re going to tell it the new drive letter anyway. Remember, you need to do this BEFORE you set up the backup. Otherwise, you’ll have to go back into the backup program and tell it the new drive letter too. And as always, if you want to set up a backup and this all sounds like more than you want to deal with, I can do all of this for you remotely. So you don’t have to bother with it, you don’t have to bring your computer anywhere, and you don’t have to have someone come in to your home or business. The post How to change the letter assigned to a drive – and why first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I love Netflix. And so do millions of other people. There are so many choices of what to watch, it’s almost overwhelming. But the “standard” Netflix content categories that you normally see on the screen are often too broad to really make a specific selection. However, when you know this little trick and the proper category codes, you can choose EXACTLY the type of movie you want to watch.   You know if you just go to Netflix.com to choose something to watch, you get the standard list of categories such as Action, Drama, Comedy, Documentary, etc. Those categories are sometimes just way too broad! What if you want to watch a political documentary? or an Irish movie? or a Korean TV show? You can actually find those things on Netflix, if you know this little trick! You just have to go on your computer, open a web browser such as Chrome or Firefox, and type this in the address bar at the top: http://netflix.com/browse/genre/xxxxx BUT – instead of that series of Xs at the end, type a number. The number you put there will depend on what you want to watch. To use the examples I mentioned above, let’s say you want to watch a political documentary. That number is 7018. So you would enter this address in your web browser: http://netflix.com/browse/genre/7018 When you do that, Netflix offers up all kinds of choices (this image only shows a few of the options):   Then you just go to Netflix on your TV, search for the name of the movie you want, and watch it. For an Irish movie, the code is 58750, so you would enter http://netflix.com/browse/genre/58750. That gives us loads of Irish movies:   And for Korean TV shows, the address would be http://netflix.com/browse/genre/67879 and you would get even more choices:   So here it is – a list of all the codes for the “other” Netflix categories: Action & Adventure: 1365 Action Comedies: 43040 Action Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 1568 Action Thrillers: 43048 Adult Animation: 11881 Adventures: 7442 African Movies: 3761 Alien Sci-Fi: 3327 Animal Tales: 5507 Anime: 7424 Anime Action: 2653 Anime Comedies: 9302 Anime Dramas: 452 Anime Fantasy: 11146 Anime Features: 3063 Anime Horror: 10695 Anime Sci-Fi: 2729 Anime Series: 6721 Art House Movies: 29764 Asian Action Movies: 77232 Australian Movies: 5230 B-Horror Movies: 8195 Baseball Movies: 12339 Basketball Movies: 12762 Belgian Movies: 262 Biographical Documentaries: 3652 Biographical Dramas: 3179 Boxing Movies: 12443 British Movies: 10757 British TV Shows: 52117 Campy Movies: 1252 Children & Family Movies: 783 Chinese Movies: 3960 Classic Action & Adventure: 46576 Classic Comedies: 31694 Classic Dramas: 29809 Classic Foreign Movies: 32473 Classic Movies: 31574 Classic Musicals: 32392 Classic Romantic Movies: 31273 Classic Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 47147 Classic Thrillers: 46588 Classic TV Shows: 46553 Classic War Movies: 48744 Classic Westerns: 47465 Comedies: 6548 Comic Book and Superhero Movies: 10118 Country & Western/Folk: 1105 Courtroom Dramas: 2748 Creature Features: 6895 Crime Action & Adventure: 9584 Crime Documentaries: 9875 Crime Dramas: 6889 Crime Thrillers: 10499 Crime TV Shows: 26146 Cult Comedies: 9434 Cult Horror Movies: 10944 Cult Movies: 7627 Cult Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 4734 Cult TV Shows: 74652 Dark Comedies: 869 Deep Sea Horror Movies: 45028 Disney: 67673 Disney Musicals: 59433 Documentaries: 6839 Dramas: 5763 Dramas based on Books: 4961 Dramas based on real life: 3653 Dutch Movies: 10606 Eastern European Movies: 5254 Education for Kids: 10659 Epics: 52858 Experimental Movies: 11079 Faith & Spirituality: 26835 Faith & Spirituality Movies: 52804 Family Features: 51056 Fantasy Movies: 9744 Film Noir: 7687 Food & Travel TV: 72436 Football Movies: 12803 Foreign Action & Adventure: 11828 Foreign Comedies: 4426 Foreign Documentaries: 5161 Foreign Dramas: 2150 Foreign Gay & Lesbian Movies: 8243 Foreign Horror Movies: 8654 Foreign Movies: 7462 Foreign Sci-Fi & Fantasy: 6485 Foreign Thrillers: 10306 French Movies: 58807 Gangster Movies: 31851 Gay & Lesbian Dramas: 500 German Movies: 58886 Greek Movies: 61115 Historical Documentaries: 5349 Horror Comedy: 89585 Horror Movies: 8711 Independent Action & Adventure: 11804 Independent Comedies: 4195 Independent Dramas: 384 Independent Movies: 7077 Independent Thrillers: 3269 Indian Movies: 10463 Irish Movies: 58750 Italian Movies: 8221 Japanese Movies: 10398 Jazz & Easy Listening: 10271 Kids Faith & Spirituality: 751423 Kids Music: 52843 Kids’ TV: 27346 Korean Movies: 5685 Korean TV Shows: 67879 Late Night Comedies: 1402 Latin American Movies: 1613 Latin Music: 10741 Martial Arts Movies: 8985 Martial Arts, Boxing & Wrestling: 6695 Middle Eastern Movies: 5875 Military Action & Adventure: 2125 Military Documentaries: 4006 Military Dramas: 11 Military TV Shows: 25804 Miniseries: 4814 Mockumentaries: 26 Monster Movies: 947 Movies based on children’s books: 10056 M

Popular programs come and go. What was highly used a few years ago may no longer be used much at all, and in fact could even be inviting hackers into your computer. Why keep an unsecure program that you don’t even use anymore? The program I’m referring to specifically today is QuickTime. QuickTime is a media player, which means it can play audio or video files. It’s made by Apple, but it is commonly seen on both Mac and Windows computers. It used to be very popular and was often used to play movie files that ended with the “.mov” extension. These days it’s not really used much. Apple has not come out with a new version of the software in more than 10 years, and in terms of computer software that means it’s very outdated. They also just announced recently that they won’t be issuing any new security updates for QuickTime programs running on Windows computers. They are going to continue to support it on Apple computers. That means whenever a new security flaw is found in QuickTime, it won’t get fixed if you’re running Windows. So hackers or scammers would be free to exploit that security problem on your Windows computer, because they know the problem is not going to be fixed by Apple. So you should just get rid of it. To remove QuickTime, just go to Control Panel – Programs and Features and find it in the list. Do a right-click on the name and choose “uninstall”. Doesn’t get much easier than that! Of course, the next question might be “If I have some .MOV video files saved on my computer, and I no longer have QuickTime to play those video files, how can I play them?” Good question! You have a couple of options, at least: Windows Media Player can play .MOV files VLC Media Player can play .MOV files Windows Media Player is already on your Windows computer, and VLC Media Player is a free download at http://www.videolan.org/vlc/. The post Time to get rid of QuickTime first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

When Windows 8 first came out and people sat down at their computer to use it, the first common reaction was just plain confusion. Everything had changed. The Start button didn’t do what it did in Windows 7, and people didn’t know how to get to the places they used to be very familiar with. If they had known this little secret key combination, they probably would have felt less stress and they may have actually gotten some work done.   Windows 10 is similar. Microsoft thinks we should be so grateful that they “gave” us back the Start menu, but the Windows 10 Start button and Start menu aren’t nearly as functional and practical as the one that came with Windows 7. It’s just one of the reasons I don’t recommend “upgrading” to Windows 10. But even Microsoft has its fleeting moments of good judgement. Part of the design of Windows 8 includes a secret key combination that gives you a menu of the common places in your computer that you might want to find. That key combination works in Windows 10 also, and I use it quite often when I’m working with either of those versions of Windows on a client’s computer. The key combination is: Windows key + X Just hold down the Windows key (lower left area of the keyboard) and tap the letter “x”. This only works with Windows 8 and 10, so if you have Windows 7 you can’t use it (but if you have Windows 7, you don’t need this). When you hit Windows + X, you’ll see a neat little “common places” menu pop up that looks like this:   This handy little menu is commonly called the Power User Menu, but it is also sometimes known as: Win + X menu Windows Tools menu WinX menu Power User Hotkeys As you can see, there are some handy locations on there. Some of them you might not be all that familiar with. Here’s what I recommend, as an “educational exercise” and it won’t take long: Open the Power User menu, and click on the first place in the list. That way you’ll be able to see exactly that that is, so that you can access it in the future when you need to. Then open it again, and check the second one in the list and so on. Here are a few examples: Want to uninstall a program on your computer that you no longer need? Programs and Features Want to set your laptop so that it goes into Sleep mode after 60 minutes of inactivity? Power Options Want to see how much memory your computer has, or what version of Windows you’re using? System Want to see all of your various drives, folders, etc.? File Explorer Saved a Word document but you don’t remember where? Search Are you lost and just want to get back to your icon screen? Desktop It actually is a pretty handy thing to know about. Even better is a tool called ClassicShell (get it free here). That’s a free program that actually gives you back the old Windows 7 Start Menu, on your Windows 8 or Windows 10 computer. When Windows 10 first came out, it didn’t work well with ClassicShell. That may have been resolved now. The post The key to hit when you’re lost in Windows 8 or Windows 10 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Microsoft is still trying to “upgrade” all Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 computers to their newest concoction, Windows 10. We’ve been battling that with free software (GWX Control Panel) and it’s a constant fight. Now there’s a new program (also free) to put an end to the threat of upgrade.   A little background first. When Microsoft started getting really aggressive about pushing Windows 10 onto computers even when people didn’t want it, they got some strong pushback. And rightly so. Some people, including myself, like Windows 7 (or even Windows 8.1) and want to keep using it. We choose NOT to go to Windows 10. So Microsoft announced that they were ever so graciously offering the option to disable operating system upgrades. This can be done on a computer-by-computer basis. All you have to do is follow their steps. Easy, right? No, not easy. The process required configuring the Windows Group Policy Editor. If you don’t know what that is, you’re in good company because most people don’t. And in some cases it also involves editing the Windows Registry – something that the average user should never attempt, as a mistake could completely mess up your computer. So Microsoft technically did offer a way to not get Windows 10, but then they made it so technical and difficult that most people couldn’t do it. It’s even been called “user-hostile”. A few months ago, an independent programmer came out with the free program GWX Control Panel, which has been better than nothing. It monitors for whenever Windows 10 tries to sneak in and alerts the user so you can swat it away again like a mosquito. But Windows 10 is a pesky and persistent mosquito so it keeps trying to get back in, and GWX CP alerts pop up, and things need to be reset. It’s a constant battle. So now we have Never10. It’s a free program, created by Steve Gibson of Gibson Research. Steve does a weekly podcast with Leo Laporte called Security Now, and he’s been in the computer security industry for decades. He’s definitely someone to trust, and he knows what he’s doing. And he also does not want Windows 10 on his computer. You can get Never10 here: https://www.grc.com/never10.htm (just click the green “Download now” button on that page). Never10 does not install anything on your computer. You just download it, and run it. You know that difficult process from Microsoft that I mentioned earlier? That’s exactly what Never10 does. It takes care of those steps for you, and it disables the Windows 10 operating system upgrade for your computer. When you first run it, you will probably see a window like this:   If you see that window, just click the button at the bottom that says “Disable Win10 upgrade”. When you do that, it will do what it needs to do in about a 1/2 second, and you’ll see this message:   Click “Exit” and you’re done. Of course, if Windows 10 upgrades are already disabled on your computer, you might see that second message right off the bat. Once you see the green message, you can delete Never10 or you can leave it wherever it downloaded to (it takes up almost no space). You can then also uninstall GWX Control Panel. And if your’e really geeky and want to see all the technical stuff about Never10, you can see that here. If you’re uncomfortable with running Never10 on your computer, I can take care of it for you through my Remote Support service. Details on that are here: http://ComputerTutorFlorida.com/remote The post A simpler way to block the Windows 10 “upgrade” first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Last week we talked about how to access the secret expanded Send To menu, and I mentioned that it was possible to also add folders and locations to the Send To menu. You can also delete some of the ones that are there by default if you don’t need them. Some people have asked about how to do this, so that’s what we’ll do today.   As a quick review, here are the main things to know about the Send To menu: You get to the Send To menu by right-clicking on a file or folder, then moving your mouse down to where it says “Send to” – then you’ll see the standard “Send To” menu pop out to the side. The most common use (for me anyway) is to make a desktop shortcut. So instead of storing a folder full of pictures on your desktop (which will slow down the computer), you can store that folder in… oh, I don’t know… maybe the PICTURES FOLDER, and then just have a shortcut to it on the desktop. Same one-click access to that folder, but without cluttering up the desktop and slowing down the computer. You can “Send To” a location, or a program. If you choose to send a file to “Documents”, then a copy of that file will be saved in the Documents folder. If you choose to send a file to “mail recipient”, then a new email compose window will open with that file already attached (to do this, you need to be using an email program such as Outlook or Windows Live Mail – it won’t work with web-based email, like if you go to Yahoo.com to get your email). You can customize what shows up on the Send To menu! So you can delete the junk you don’t need, and add locations and programs that you would use. Here’s how you customize the Send To menu. First, you need to actually get to the folder that IS the Send To menu. If you’re geeky, you could do it the old-fashioned way and drill down in Windows until you get to it: But really the easier way is to hold the Windows key and tap the letter R. In the window that comes up, type: shell:sendto That takes you directly to the folder where all of your “send to” options are. As you can see, it looks like any other folder on your computer:   At this point, you can add or remove items from this folder based on what you want in your “Send To” menu. If something is there currently that you would never use (I’m guessing you probably don’t send too many things to a “fax recipient”), just right-click and delete it. To add a new folder or a new location here, you just create a shortcut for that folder or location inside the Send To folder. For example, let’s say you want to add the Pictures folder as a destination in your Send To menu. With the Send To folder open, do a right-click in the main open area and choose New – Shortcut. Then click on Browse and choose your Pictures folder. Now, when you right click and choose Send To on a picture, you can opt to send it to the Pictures folder. Easy! It just takes a minute to get the Send To menu just the way you want it, but it can save you a lot of time in the future because it makes the process a lot more efficient. The post How to customize your Send To menu first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

You’re probably already familiar with the “Send to” menu in Windows. What most people don’t know is that there’s a hidden, expanded “Send to” menu that gives you a lot more options.   The regular Send To menu is certainly no secret. In fact, I use it all the time – most commonly, to put shortcuts to often-used programs right on the desktop for easy access. Just about any file or folder can be “Sent” somewhere. When you right-click on a file or folder, you get a short menu that pops up, and one of those options is “Send to”. When you put your mouse over the words “Send to”, you’ll see another menu fly out – and you can choose where you want to send that file. It looks like this:   So you can see I have the option to send that Word document to Adobe Audition, or a compressed folder, or Dropbox, or Evernote, or any other of the locations or programs in that list. But what you’re seeing there is just the REGULAR “Send to” menu. We’re looking for the Secret Super Duper EXPANDED “Sent to” menu. To get to that, you just add one small step to the process. Before you right click on the file or folder that you want to send somewhere, hold down the SHIFT key. Then right click on the file or folder (you can release the Shift key after you do the right click). When the menu appears, move your mouse down to the Send To line, and you’ll now see this:   As you can see, lots more options! Instead of 12 locations or programs that we had in the first one, the “Secret Send To Menu” has 28 – more than double. Most of the additional options are the commonly used folders on your Windows computer Of course, what shows up as options in the “Send to” menu (either one) will vary somewhat between different computers. In my case, I have added a few of the options manually on the shorter version. You can add to that menu or delete items from it so that it’s customized the way you want it. The post Windows has a secret “Send to” menu first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

This is so simple and so useful, I can’t believe it’s not more widely known. It would be really handy for when a client is trying to tell me what an error message says, or what the content is in some other Windows message.   The way this comes up most of the time is this: a client gets some kind of error message that pops up on their computer, and they don’t know what it means or what to do with it. So they call me. Sometimes by the time they call, the message has disappeared on its own, or they have clicked on something and caused it to close, so they can no longer tell me what the message actually said. Or, if the message is still on the screen, they don’t read me the exact wording – they just sort of “summarize” what it says. This doesn’t work, since their summary doesn’t necessarily include all of the critical content that could tell me what is going on. What I need is a quick relay of ALL the actual text and what buttons are available to click. What most people don’t realize is that you can do that with a simple copy and paste. To show how it works, I’ll use a dialogue box that I created:   When you see something like that come up on your Windows computer screen, here’s what you do: Click anywhere inside the box – EXCEPT on any of the buttons. One left click anywhere else, inside the box. Hold down the CTRL button and tap the letter C. So far, it will seem like nothing has happened because you didn’t see anything change. Open up Notepad (or any word processor program) and click CTRL + V. There it is – all the text from the dialogue box:   And rather than open a word processor program, you could just as easily open your email, compose a new email message and paste the content of the box right there. The nice thing is that the copy/pasted content includes everything – the title at the top, the content of the message itself, and the names of all the buttons that are available. This way it leaves no margin for error – your tech can easily and accurately see what the dialogue box is telling you. Of course, if someone knows how to do it, it’s possible to just take a screenshot of the dialogue box and save that image, then email that. But that’s not nearly as easy as a simple copy and paste! The post How to copy and paste the contents of a Windows dialogue box first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Obviously you want to make sure your computer lasts as many years as possible. And now, this is especially true if you are using Windows 7 or Windows 8 because if you buy a computer right off the shelf now it will most likely be running Windows 10. The laptops I sell are almost all Windows 7 since that is still the preferred operating system (in my humble opinion) and it will be supported through January of 2020. But it’s all the better if you can keep your current laptop running well for as long as possible.   Here are 6 things you can do to help your laptop to have a long life: 1. Never use it on a soft surface. You might see ads for laptops showing someone in bed but that’s just marketing nonsense. A laptop by nature runs hotter than a desktop computer because all of the components are crammed into a small space. There are exhaust vents on the bottom or sides that need to be kept open for the hot air to escape. If it doesn’t, your laptop will overheat – this can damage it, and it might even shut down if it gets too hot.   2. Always use a cooling pad. This kind of goes along with #1 – it keeps your laptop nice and cool. A cooling pad is basically just a small “platform” that your laptop sits on while you use it. The cooling pad has one big fan or 2-3 smaller fans built in, so that it automatically sucks the hot air away from the laptop. A cooling pad is less than $20 and you can get them anywhere computer supplies are sold (here’s a nice one for $15 on Amazon).       3. Don’t lift up just one side of the laptop. This is something I see all the time. When a laptop is brand new, the connection that the power cord has when plugged in to the back of the laptop is nice and solid. But if you tilt up the laptop from the front (to retrieve a piece of paper, or to look under it, etc.) the power plug is stressed. Doing it once might not matter, but when you do that more than a few times, eventually it will mean that the power cord plug won’t make contact with the power jack inside the laptop. That’s when you have to wiggle it or hold it a certain way in order for it to make contact and provide power. You can eliminate most of that problem ahead of time though – if you want to get under the laptop, just lift up the whole thing at the same time.   4. Thunder or lightning? Unplug! In our house, whenever we hear thunder or see lightning, we unplug all of the computers as well as the big screen TV. You should unplug anything you would not want to have to replace. Voltage surges can happen anytime, but they are usually the worst during an electrical storm. And don’t tell me, “It’s okay, I have a surge protector.” If lightning strikes nearby, your little surge protector is no match for it. The nice thing about a laptop is, assuming your battery is good, you can still keep using it even during the storm. I also leave my Verizon FIOS modem plugged in, so I can still go online with my laptop. If the modem gets fried, Verizon will just send me a new one.   5. Remove the battery for extended periods of non-use. If you’re planning to not use the laptop for 30 days or longer, it’s best to just take the battery out during that time. Depending on how strong the battery is, it might be low (or dead) when you put it back in, but just let it charge up and start using it again.   6. Keep liquids away! It’s always a shame when someone brings me their computer after it’s had something spilled on it. Coffee, beer, milk, Coke, Kool Aid – it’s all bad and has the potential to permanently destroy your expensive laptop. If you’re going to spill anything on it, spill water – it’s the least destructive and at least it will dry completely. But if it short-circuits something on the motherboard, even spilled water can mean you’re about to replace your laptop. And it’s so easily preventable! If you must have a drink nearby while you’re working on your laptop, make it something like a bottled water that has a lid. Replacing the lid each time you take a drink is a whole lot better than replacing your laptop!   The post How to make sure your laptop has a long life first appeared on The Computer Tutor.