The Computer Tutor

My default web browser is Google Chrome. I also use Firefox for some things and it’s fine, but I really like Chrome. Recently I came across a couple of interesting things in Chrome.   Feature #1: Customize website zoom level Have you noticed that as you get older, some of the text on certain websites gets smaller and harder to read? It’s an interesting phenomenon. I’m sure it has nothing to do with my eyesight changing as I age. Must just be a defect in the computer, right? Of course. I’ve found this to be an issue only with some websites, not all. So certain websites I view at 100%, some 125%, some 150%. The nice thing with Chrome is that you don’t have to adjust the zoom each time you visit a particular website – you can set the preferred zoom level, and Chrome remembers it. Here’s how you do it: Go to a website for which you need to adjust the size of the text (make sure this is the only tab open in Chrome). Hold down the CTRL button on your keyboard, and roll the wheel on your mouse to adjust the size of the text. Rolling the mouse wheel away from you makes the text larger, and rolling it toward you makes the text smaller. When the text is at a comfortable size for reading, close Chrome. Open Chrome and go back to that same website, and you’ll see that it stays at the zoom level you chose. Note: as an alternative to scrolling with the mouse wheel, you can click the Customize button (the 3 horizontal lines in the top right of the Chrome window), go down to the “Zoom” area and hit the “+” or “-” buttons to adjust screen content size. You can do this for every website you visit. And if you want to see all of the websites that Chrome is storing for you at customized zoom levels, you can click the Customize button, then click Settings, Show Advanced Settings. Under Privacy, click Content Settings, then scroll all the way to the end and click on “Manage” under the Zoom Levels section. Nice list of all your customized sites:     Feature #2: Customize website notifications I had a client ask me about this recently. He kept having a recurring, annoying problem: Scott – I do like to use Facebook sometimes. But when I’m doing some actual work or research on my computer, I close Facebook and email and other distracting websites so that I can focus on my work. But then while I’m working, all of a sudden I see a little window pop-up on my screen, and it’s a Facebook notification that someone has liked my post, or someone commented, or something else has just happened on Facebook. I don’t know how this is happening when I don’t even have Facebook open! How do I get rid of that?” Yes, sometimes it does seem like Facebook follows us everywhere even when we want to get away from it. I noticed this same thing happening a while back. Fortunately, there is a way to turn off those Facebook notifications. Click the Customize button and click on Settings, and Show Advanced Settings. Find the Privacy section, and click on Content Settings. Scroll about halfway down that list to the section called Notifications, and click on Manage Exceptions Find Facebook in that list, and out to the right you can click on “Allow” and it will give you a drop-down menu where you can choose “Block” Click the “Done” button in the lower right corner.   And now you can work without Facebook popping up every 30 seconds to distract you! And of course, you can probably customize Firefox to resolve these issues as well but I have not really researched that specifically since I usually use Chrome. The post A couple of handy features in Google Chrome first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

There’s an email scam that’s not new, but a lot of people have not heard about it and it has some elements that make it seem very legitimate. I was a target in this scam recently so I’m laying out the details here so you can avoid being taken.   This is the email that was sent to me:   The interesting thing here is that this email actually WAS sent from the email account of my friend (for the purpose of this blog post, I’ll call him Steve). Steve either inadvertently revealed his email password at some point, or (more likely) the password he used when he created his account was a simple one and easy to remember. This means it was also easy for the scammer to guess. In this situation, I know Steve primarily from church. He also owns a local business. We definitely don’t have the type of personal relationship where he would ask me to loan him money. Because of that, and the fact that I have heard of this scam before, I knew it was not a legitimate email. The first thing I did was to call Steve’s office and make sure he was aware of what was happening. But beyond that, I wanted to “play along” with the scammer and see how it played out. I replied to the email: Not too long after that I get the whole scam story:   Poor Steve. His mother is dying and he is without the needed funds to pay the doctors to save her life. There are a few things about this email that are important to note: He is specific about the name of the disease – this makes it sound more legitimate He is appealing to my sympathy – if I don’t help, his mother may actually die The loan request is not because he’s broke, but because he’s in a temporary difficulty There is a sense of urgency – I must make a quick decision The request for privacy – this makes sense because of the nature of a request to borrow money, but in reality he doesn’t want me to check around with any of our mutual friends and find out that the whole story is a fake He has not yet stated a dollar amount. This is because A. He wants me to agree to the loan first, and B. He’s judging by my communication how much money he should ask for So I respond:   I really wanted to see if he would give me a dollar amount at this point. When I ask him directly about this, it would be difficult for him to avoid the question because obviously the hospital or doctor would have already told him how much is needed for the medical procedure. Also, I played dumb about the actual money transfer process – in almost every case it’s through Western Union since that’s worldwide and cash can be retrieved anonymously (which is why scammers love Western Union). He replied:   As predicted, he requests that I send the money via Western Union. If you send someone money via WU, then realize later that it was a scam, there is no way you are getting that money back. It’s like walking through a crowd in Times Square and handing people $100 bills – you could never hope to get anything back, or even know who actually ended up with the money. It’s just gone. He’s asking me for 2000 pounds – roughly about $2800 in US dollars. Usually when I’m stringing a scammer along, this is where the story ends. Obviously I’m not going to send the money and he doesn’t want to waste any more time on me since he is playing with a bunch of other targets at the same time. But I wanted to see how he would react if I told him WU was not an option. I told him I didn’t know how to use Western Union and asked if there were any other way to get the money to him. He replied:   Ah, here we go. He’s hinting that there may actually be a way possible other than Western Union. In reality, what he is suggesting is really silly though. He’s supposed to be in a foreign country, without any resources, and yet he’s saying that in this strange city he will be able to locate someone who has an offshore account and can receive the money from me, then transfer the money to Steve after deducting a commission. Pretty unlikely scenario, but at this point he probably figures he has nothing to lose since Western Union is out of the question. So I told him yes, please set it up. Shortly after that, he emailed me with the new arrangement:   I have to admit, I was a bit surprised to see this. He has apparently given me an actual bank account number with Bank of America. This doesn’t quite make sense, since obviously a bank account can be traced back to a person. I reported the incident to Bank of America but I never heard back from them in any way (not a big surprise). What I suspect is that the actual account holder is also being scammed. The scammer could have gotten her account number from a check or by some other means, and he is playing a scam on her such that she will be expecting $5000 to be deposited in her bank account for som

A lot of people want to be reasonably knowledgeable about one or more aspects of their computer. Not like a computer programmer or someone that works on computers all day, but familiar enough to use popular software and be able to handle things that come up from time to time. But how do you learn? There are several ways to learn, and today I’ll compare the pros and cons of 5 methods of learning.   Learning Method #1: Books If you walk into any Barnes & Noble, you’ll see a big section of books on just about every computer-related topic you can think of. For every popular computer program, there are several books available to teach you how to use it. Usually these books range from $20 to $50. Some might even include a DVD with some additional content.   Pros: Books are readily available. You can find one or several online and have it in your hand very quickly. Often, there is a book available specifically for what you want to learn. And once you own it, you always have it for easy reference. Cons: Not all books are very well written so the instruction given might be confusing. Personally, I’ve never been a big fan of the “For Dummies” series of books. The ones I’ve read seem to be trying too hard to be humorous. Not to mention the whole “you need this book because you’re a dummy” idea is kind of condescending. Also, a book is “one size fits all” – the instruction is not personalized for you.   Learning Method #2: Website tutorials For most subjects, there are several websites that have some basic instruction. In fact, this is the kind of thing I post on my website most Mondays – step by step instructions on how to perform a particular task on your computer.   Pros: There are lots of websites available that can offer instruction on a particular topic, and the vast majority of them are free. Cons: Since anyone with a computer and an internet connection can create a blog or a website, there’s really no telling how accurate the information is. The person that created the site might be the foremost authority on the subject, or it could be written by a teenager living in a basement in Cleveland. In some cases you can research the author’s credentials, which is a good idea. Also, a website can be taking down at any time so this might not be a permanent or even long-term source of information.   Learning Method #3: Instructional videos Did you know that YouTube is the 2nd most popular search engine (after Google of course)? You can go to YouTube and do a search there on just about anything, even very specific things, and it’s likely you find that someone has made a video about it. Want to replace the power supply on your Dell desktop computer? Watch someone else doing it, and just do what they do.   Pros: Probably the biggest advantage with online videos is the fact that they are visual. You can actually watch “over the shoulder” so to speak while someone does what you want to learn to do. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in many cases a video is even better. Cons: If anything is incorrect or unclear about the video, you might be kind of stuck. On YouTube, there’s no button for “Contact the video creator” and many people don’t include their contact information with the video. So if you have a question there’s no one to ask. Also, like a website, a video can be removed from YouTube at any time so you might go back to watch it a second time and find that it’s gone.   Learning Method #4: Classroom Obviously, the classroom setting has been a popular method of teaching for a long time. This is often considered the “standard” teaching model – a classroom of students who are there to learn about a particular subject, and a teacher who is an authority on that subject.   Pros: The biggest advantage of this process is the more personal approach. You are actually being taught by a human. In most cases, you can also ask the instructor questions and get personalized answers. Cons: Class size can be an issue. If you are one of 200 students, the teacher may not have enough time available to give personalized help to you or any of the other students. Also, the teacher may or may not be an expert on the subject (though you can research this before enrolling usually). Finally (and this is a big one), not everyone in the class will be at the same level. So even though you grasp the material and want to move on, there may be several others that are constantly asking very fundamental questions and keeping the rest of the class from moving forward. Or the reverse – you could be struggling but the instructor is moving ahead with new material and you could feel left behind.   Learning Method #5: One on one tutoring With this method, there are only two people involved: you and the instructor. You have a specific thin

Enough Windows 10 nonsense – let’s have some fun with some great websites!   Every few months I do a blog and podcast about some interesting websites I’ve come across. There’s no exact criteria for what makes the list. I just look for ones I find interesting, entertaining, or educational.   FotoJet www.FotoJet.com If you want a place that will make you look like a super creative person on social media, this is it. If you have a YouTube channel, or an Instagram account, or a Twitter account, or virtually any other type of social media account, you want it to look nice with professional photos. But it’s difficult to do that unless you have good photo editing software, and the skills to use it correctly. FotoJet makes it easy to make really nice images with overlaid text, and they know exactly what size the photo needs to be for each type of social media account. For example, a header image on a YouTube channel should be 2560 pixels wide and 1440 pixels high. FotoJet already knows those types of details so you don’t have to learn through trial and error. To see what is available for you to create, click on the “Samples” link at the top of the website. Twitter headers YouTube covers Facebook covers Facebook posts Google Plus covers Pinterest graphics Instagram posts Photo magazine covers Photo comics   Run Pee www.RunPee.com Everyone watches movies, and everyone has to pee eventually. But what about when you’re with a group of friends watching a great movie, and you have to use the bathroom? If the movie is really good, you don’t want to leave for a few minutes and miss something that’s critical to the story line. But you know you can’t wait another hour or more until it’s over. That’s where the RunPee app comes in handy. You can access this on a computer, but it’s probably more effective using the app on your phone. When you run the app, it displays a list of movies. New movies are added every week on the day the open in theaters. Through the magic of crowdsourcing, each listing will tell you when there is a 3-5 minute stretch where you can leave and come back without missing anything important. Most films have a few of these, and they are summarized in a sentence or two. If you start the app and start the timer when the movie starts, you can even get a vibrate alert on your phone when one of the “pee times” comes up!     All My Faves www.AllMyFaves.com This is one of those sites that is REALLY useful. They’ve taken just about every type of website (such as videos, maps, news, weather, car rental, photos, movies, genealogy, lots more) and put them in a list down the left side. Then, for each category, they have the most popular websites in that category displayed via the logo. Each logo is a link that takes you to that site. They’re laid out like this: And they fit all of it on one page! Here’s a smaller, abbreviated version but you should just go to the website to see all that’s there.   Status History www.StatusHistory.com This one is Facebook-related, since almost everyone on the planet now has a Facebook account. Except my dad – he refuses to participate. The Status History site allows you to see all of your previous Facebook status updates – right back to when you first got on Facebook. It took about 6 minutes for it to find all of mine (2196 total). Pretty interesting to see what I was posting back as far as 2008. You can also see some other interesting numbers: How many “likes” you’ve received Who has made the most comments on your posts How many times you’ve commented on friends’ posts Who has given you the most likes It’s interesting to see this information, but when I see these historical totals, I also can’t help but think about how much time is wasted on Facebook. Maybe my dad has the right idea.   InnerBody www.InnerBody.com I love this one because it is so educational, and so easy to use. And it is useful for just about everyone, since we all have a body. And most of us have very little knowledge about how organs and body systems work, or even where they are. This website changes all that, and in a very visual way. When you first see the website, there’s a human body displayed, and you can mouse over (without clicking) the list on the left to highlight a particular system:   Then when you actually click on the system you want to explore, you’ll find much more detailed information on that area. And the image also becomes interactive – you can even see a 3D image, which you can rotate and zoom in on with your mouse. There is a LOT of information here so you could spend a lot of time on this site. And the graphics, while anatomically correct, are done tastefully. Very useful and informative.   The Kitty Convict Project http://www.explodingkittens.com/kittyconvi

With an announcement this past week, Microsoft made sure that millions of unsuspecting Windows 7 and Windows 8 users will be surprised to find their computer “upgraded” to Windows 10. You can stop it, though.   What Microsoft announced is that they are now going to re-categorize the Windows 10 “upgrade” as a Recommended update. (sorry, but I always have to put that term in quotation marks in reference to Windows 10 because “upgrade” usually implies that what you’re getting is an improvement). Here’s what this means. Microsoft sends out Windows Updates monthly. It’s on the second Tuesday of each month and has become known as Patch Tuesday. This month, it’s February 9. When those updates are sent out, they are classified as either “Important” or “Optional”. An Important update would be something like a security hole that’s discovered in Windows that needs to be patched so that hackers cannot exploit it and cause problems. An Optional update would perhaps be a driver update for your mouse – might be good to have, but not critical.   But in addition, Microsoft designates some Windows Updates as “recommended”. These are the ones that THEY think you should get. And in your computer, in the Windows Update settings, there’s an option related to how your computer handles the “Recommended” updates. You have the option to either get the recommended updates the same way you get your Important updates (which for most people is automatically installed at 3 am the day after they come in), or you can choose NOT to get them automatically. Here’s what the option looks like. It’s just a simple check box:   Here’s the key point in this discussion: When you get your computer, that box is already checked by default. Therefore, unless you have unchecked that box, you are going to get whatever updates Microsoft categorizes as “Recommended”. And they just classified the Windows 10 “upgrade”as “Recommended” with this recent announcement. So, lots of people – probably millions – will be getting Windows 10 this week, even though they really don’t want it. Here are three things you can do to prevent Windows 10 from getting into your computer: In Control Panel, open Windows Update. On the left side, click on Change Settings. UNcheck the box that says “Give me recommended updates the same way I receive important updates” and click OK. (If you’re on my Managed Service Plan, ignore this step.) Get GWX Control Panel installed (it’s free) and make sure “Monitor Mode” is enabled. I did a full post about GWX Control Panel, which you can read here. I would also recommend getting on my Managed Service Plan (description and pricing here). This is the best security protection you can have for your computer, and it handles the Windows Updates for you, so you won’t get any unexpected ones. But even with that, I would still want GWX Control Panel installed. The more I hear about Windows 10, the more it really sounds like a computer virus. What are the characteristics of a virus? Sneaks on to your computer against your will Code written poorly, so it often doesn’t run properly Spies on the user Created to exploit the user for financial gain Frustrates its victims Difficult to remove once it gets in Those things all describe any common computer virus, but they also describe Windows 10. Not something I would want on my computer.  The post Microsoft’s newest tactic for force-feeding Windows 10 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I love little pieces of software that focus on a single problem and solve it efficiently. A while back I found something that does this, and now I use it every day. In fact, if it’s turned off for some reason, I notice the difference almost immediately. And it’s free.   Here’s the problem: Windows has this thing called “focus”. This basically just means that one window is always “in front of” any other open windows. Whatever window you’re currently working on, that’s the window that is in front of the others – it has the focus. Even if two windows are side by side, only one of them can have the focus at a time. If you’re working in one window and then move your mouse over to a website and try to scroll down the website page, nothing will happen because that window doesn’t have focus. In order to do anything in the web browser window, you have to first click somewhere in that window to tell the computer “Hey, give this window the focus now” – and then you can scroll down the page. It’s just one of those weird things that has been in effect in Windows computers for many years. Most people have gotten so used to it that it might not even seem like an inconvenience. But wait til you get used to NOT having that inconvenience! Wizmouse is a free program (get it here) and it’s very small so it uses almost no resources. When it’s running, it eliminates the “focus” feature in Windows. You don’t have to keep clicking on whatever window you want to work with in order to do anything – all you have to do is move the cursor to that window and start working. Wherever your mouse is, that window has the focus! When you download and install Wizmouse, you’ll have a window that has some options available to you. For me, I just check the boxes to make sure Wizmouse is enabled, and I have it start with Windows so that it’s running all the time. And I have it run as Administrator.   Sometimes when I’m recording my podcast, before I hit “Record” I’ll go through and shut down whatever programs are running in order to give the audio recording the full use of the processor and memory. Later on, when I start using the computer for other things, it’s a very short time before I realize Wizmouse is disabled and I need to start it up again because I am so used to the way it makes windows work. I’ll bet you get spoiled by it pretty quickly too. Also – Wizmouse is free, but you’ll notice on the website and on the settings screen in the program, there’s a button to click if you want to donate to the programmer who created it. Always a nice thing to do. The post A little program that I now can’t live without first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

You just got back from the trip of a lifetime. For some people that would be a cruise to Alaska, for others it might be a guided tour through the Holy Land of Israel, and for some it could be visiting some of the old castles of Ireland. Personally, I would enjoy any of them. But now that you’re back home, you have a computer folder full of pictures, and each one has a name like “DCF2016070901.jpg” which of course tells you nothing about the pictures itself. Those pictures – all 1000 of them – need to be renamed.   Of course, one option is to open up the folder that has all your pictures, and start at the beginning. On the first picture, do a right click, then choose “Rename”, type “Disney1” and hit Enter. Then do the same thing with the next picture and call it “Disney2” and hit Enter. Yeah! Only 998 to go! As you might guess, that’s not really the most efficient way to go about this since it would take a very long time and most people would just get tired of it and quit before they got all thousand pictures renamed. Here’s the much easier way. This process assumes you have all of your Disney pictures in one folder. With that folder open, so you see the entire group of pictures, hold down the CTRL key and tap the letter “a” (for “all”). Now all of the pictures are selected (highlighted). On the first picture in the list, do a right-click and choose “Rename” and type the word “Disney” (no number, just the name Disney). Hit Enter. In just a few seconds, every picture you see in that folder is renamed. So now the list is Disney1, Disney2, Disney3 all the way up to Disney1000. So much easier to have the computer to that work! Now, I can hear some of you saying, “But Scott, our vacation was divided up and we weren’t at Disney the whole time. We went to Disney for 4 days, and Sea World for 3 days, then we went to Busch Gardens for a day.” That’s fine. This just means you have to divide them into their own folders first. Just make 3 folders: Disney Sea World Busch Gardens Then just drag each of the pictures into the appropriate folder based on what you see in the thumbnail image. Once the large group of folders is divided into those 3 folders, then go into each of those folders and do the same renaming process as before. You can really narrow it down as much as you want, although the more specific you want the file names to be, the more time it will take to get it that way. Even so, the process I outlined here (called “batch renaming”) is a whole lot faster than just renaming each image individually. The post How to rename 1000 images in 32 seconds or less first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Microsoft Word does so much more than any of us can imagine. I could probably create a whole blog just on MS Word tips and tricks. Today, I’ll show you some of the cool things you can do in Word by using the CTRL key in combination with some other keys.   The Control key (usually abbreviated on the keyboard as “Ctrl”) does a lot of things that most people aren’t aware of. If you use these shortcuts, it can definitely save you some time. If you’re using a Mac keyboard, I believe the key you would use for these functions is the Apple key (also known as the Command key or cmd key). Note: for this list, I did not include the commonly-known Ctrl key functions such as Ctrl+C for copying or Ctrl+P for printing. Action: [Ctrl] + [k] Effect: make selected text a clickable link If you’re writing in word and you have the phrase “my website” in there, you might want to just make that phrase clickable – without having to type out the entire URL. So you can highlight the phrase, then Ctrl + K and in the new window enter your website address in the “Address” field. Action: [Ctrl] + [m] Effect: indent the entire paragraph Put your cursor anywhere in a paragraph and Ctrl + M, and that paragraph alone is indented. In the example below, I did this with the second paragraph: Action: [Ctrl] + [click] Effect: select (highlight) a whole sentence When you need to highlight an entire sentence, this is so much easier than dragging the cursor across every letter. Just hold down Ctrl and click anywhere in a sentence, and the whole sentence is highlighted. Action: [Ctrl] + [backspace] Effect: delete the preceding word Just put the cursor at the end of the word you don’t want (if you just typed that word, you’re already in the right spot). Hold down Ctrl and hit the Backspace key. That word is gone. (Technically, the computer is just deleting from wherever the cursor is back to the first “space” entry. So if your cursor is in the middle of a word at the start, the letters to the right side of the cursor will remain afterward.) Action: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [>] Effect: increase font size of selected text This is another time saver in a specific situation. You have a single sentence and you want to change the font size. First you have to highlight that sentence (Ctrl + click, remember?). The old way would be to go up to the toolbar, click the font size drop-down list, and choose a number. If that doesn’t look right, go through the same thing again. This Ctrl shortcut is much easier – just hold down Ctrl and Shift, and tap the “>” key until it looks big enough. Action: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [<] Effect: decrease font size of selected text Same as above, but if the text gets too big and you need to reduce it you just use the “<” key. Action: [Ctrl] + [=] Effect: makes selected text subscript Useful in certain situations, such as some mathematical equations. In the example below, the second sentence is subscript. Action: [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [=] Effect: makes selected text superscript Same as above, but the selected text is superscript. Second sentence below is superscript. Action: [Ctrl] + [a] Effect: select the entire contents of a document This is one I use all the time. If you need to take some action on the entire contents of a document – such as copying to paste it, or changing the font size, or the font itself, etc. this is the best way to do it. Don’t drag your cursor over multiple pages. Just hit Ctrl + A, and the whole document is highlighted. Action: [Ctrl] + [z] Effect: undo last action Everyone makes mistakes. The key is recognizing a mistake quickly enough. Ctrl + Z fixes whatever you just did – it only affects your most recent action. So if you accidentally highlight and delete an entire paragraph, you can immediately Ctrl + Z and get it back. But if you delete the entire paragraph and then do just one other thing (like typing a single letter), this “undo” shortcut won’t help. The post The magical CTRL key in Microsoft Word first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I’m not sure what to think about Microsoft lately. They’re sending good and bad messages. Recently, they issued some really good news about Internet Explorer, but they also made some statements about Windows 7 that seem to be designed to deceive.   The good news: Internet Explorer, the web browser that we love to hate, will only be supported if you have the most recent version (which is Internet Explorer 11). Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 will no longer be supported – so if your computer still has an old version, you need to update it. You need to do this even if you don’t usually use Internet Explorer. Why is this good news? Because the older versions are full of security problems and are a constant source of headaches for people that make a living creating websites. Not to mention the risk to the people who actually still use those outdated versions of IE. To check what version you have, open Internet Explorer and click on the gear-shaped icon in the top right, then click on “About Internet Explorer”. If you see this, you’re good to go:   Note: this change of support goes into effect Tuesday, January 12, 2015 – that’s Patch Tuesday, the day Microsoft sends out all Windows Updates for the month. So you should check this and make any necessary changes right away. Unfortunately, there are lots of people – millions probably – that still use outdated versions of IE and won’t bother to get the update. That’s what keeps computer repair shops in business.   The deceit: Microsoft is so laser-focused on getting every computer worldwide on Windows 10, they are now starting to look really desperate. And usually desperation means you start to do stupid things, like making statements that are pretty misleading. In a recent episode of Windows Weekly (podcast), there were some comments made by Chris Capossela, the Marketing Chief of Microsoft. He said that Windows users that continue to use Windows 7, do so “at your own risk, at your own peril“. He went on to say, “We do worry when people are running an operating system that’s 10 years old that the next printer they buy isn’t going to work very well, or they buy a new game, they buy Fallout 4, a very popular game, and it doesn’t work on a bunch of older machines.” That is just irresponsible, fearmongering nonsense. The printer issue: If you were a printer manufacturer, would you build printers that are incompatible with over half of the computers currently in use? Currently, 55% of computers worldwide are running Windows 7. Virtually any printer you buy today (or next year, or the year after) will be compatible with Windows 7. Nothing to worry about. Here’s the irony in this statement – many people have “upgraded” to Windows 10, only to find out that they can no longer use their printer. That’s because the printer was designed to be compatible with Windows 7. When their printer was built, Windows 10 didn’t exist so there are no Windows 10 drivers for that printer. So if you like your printer and you want to keep using it, better think twice before moving to Windows 10. The game issue: This statement is just as ridiculous. First, just do a Google search for “Fallout 4 minimum requirements” and you’ll see that the game is compatible with Windows 7, 8 or 10. If a game doesn’t work on a particular computer, it’s not usually because of the version of Windows (and obviously that wouldn’t be an issue with Windows 7 and Fallout 4). The problem is most often hardware-related – meaning there’s not enough video memory, or the processor isn’t fast enough, that kind of thing. Clearly, this guy – a software company executive – knows this already. This really amounts to nothing more than deliberate misinformation. Oh, and the line about “an operating system that’s 10 years old“? Windows 7 was released to the public in July of 2009. So it’s not yet even 7 years old. Sounds like Mr. Capossela might be better suited for a career in used car sales or politics. Windows 7 is stable, secure, and will be fully supported through January 14, 2020. I’m not upgrading yet, and I don’t think you should either. The post Microsoft simultaneously issues some good news and some deceit first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Part of the fun of Facebook is seeing something new, or learning to do something you never knew was possible. Unfortunately, most of what is posted on Facebook is just fake junk that gets repeatedly posted because people don’t research or verify; they just click the “Share” button. But what I’m telling you about today is definitely real, and I’ll bet you didn’t know you could do this. Plus, you can verify it works by trying it yourself.   If you use Facebook, you obviously know what a status update looks like. It’s very plain. You can’t make any changes to what the letters look like – all of the billions of posts on Facebook look exactly the same. Until now. If you want to make YOUR Facebook update stand out from the crowd, now you can – through a free website called FB Font Changer. You can check it at FBFontChanger.com. At that website, you just enter your Facebook status content in the field at the top of the page, then hit the “Convert” button. Let’s say for example you want to post on Facebook “Taking my dogs to play at the park”. When you enter that and convert it, you now have these options to choose from, depending on how you want it to display:   As you can see, you get lots of choices. When you see one that you like, you just click the “Copy” button out to the right of that particular line. Then go to Facebook and in the status update box, do a right click and choose “Paste”. There it is! Obviously this is not something earth-shattering, but not every computer trick has the ability to change the world. Do a few posts with some of these fonts though, and I’ll bet you have some friends that will ask, “Hey, how did you do that?”. The post How to change your font in a Facebook post first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Some things seem so obvious. But, just about every week (if not every day) some new “research study” comes out with an end result that any reasonable person with half a brain could have come up with. And we the taxpayers are often paying for these ridiculous things! Some important “findings” include “students who do their homework get higher grades” (study), “pigs do love mud” (study), “weight gain is caused by overeating” (study), and “reading is good for your brain” (study). Well, here’s something that I think is obvious: Windows Explorer should display folder size by default. But it doesn’t.   Here’s what I’m talking about. On your Windows computer, click the Start button (the MS orb in the lower left) and choose the Documents folder. For this example, I’m assuming you have some sub-folders inside the Documents folder. Mine looks like the image below (yours may display slightly different if you choose to display Large Icons, Small Icons, etc. I choose to display in the “Details” format).     How am I supposed to know how much data is in each of those folders? Microsoft goes to all the trouble to have that column there titled “Size” and then for any of the folders, it is just left blank – no information! This just does not make any sense. But that’s how it has always been, and Microsoft probably doesn’t have any plans to display that info, regardless of how OBVIOUS it is that it should be shown there. As is often the case, someone recognized this need and created a solution. The fix is a little program called Folder Size Explorer. It’s free, and you can get it at folder-size-explorer.com.   Folder Size Explorer runs on any recent version of Windows (although I only have it installed on my Windows 7 machine). Just go to the website and click the “Download” tab and you’ll see the link to download the file in .zip format. You can extract the files from the zipped folder and run Setup, and you’ll see that the installation is pretty routine. Once it’s installed, you should see an icon for it on your desktop, and it’s also in your “All Programs” list in the Start menu. Just click to run it, and see what the difference is when you’re looking at your Documents folder (or any folder). Here’s what information is displayed:   As you can see, for each folder, it shows the total size of the data in that folder. In addition to that, it tells you how many individual files are in that folder, as well as how many subfolders are there. It’s beautifully simple. I really don’t know why Microsoft can’t figure out how to do this in Windows by default. And that’s it! No fancy bells or whistles, it just does what it’s supposed to do. You probably also noticed on the Download page there’s a link to Donate. The software is free, but I always like to give some money to the developer when I find a program like this that does a great job and doesn’t try to sneak a bunch of other junk into your computer. The post How to show folder sizes in Windows first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I like Facebook. It has a lot of good and useful features. But it also has a lot of stuff I don’t want or need. There are a couple of tools I use to filter out all the garbage in Facebook so I don’t waste time on stuff I’m not interested in.   Anyone that’s on Facebook knows what I’m talking about. These days, you can’t hardly look at the news feed without having to wade through the latest thing that Donald Trump said. Or one of your friends post the results of a quiz that tells them which Disney “Frozen” character they are. Or there’s a “news” story about the Kardashians. All of this is of zero importance to me, but my Facebook news feed is cluttered with it all the time. Here are the two ways I clean that up (both are free). The first one you might know about. Tool #1 for Facebook news feed cleanup: Unfollow I use this liberally. Every time you see someone post something in Facebook, there’s a link in the top right corner of their post. When you click it, you have a few options. It looks like this:   When you click “Unfollow” it just means that whatever that person posts in the future, you won’t see it. Two important factors here: You will still be Facebook friends with that person. That person will not know that you unfollowed them. So it really is the perfect solution, if you have someone you’re friends with but they are constantly posting their high score in Mafia Wars, or their status is always about how great their new Amway business is, you can finally declare yourself free of all of that. Personally, I am very liberal with the Unfollow option. I might give someone a second chance (based on how annoying they are, and how close our relationship is in real life). But it really doesn’t take a whole lot for me to just Unfollow and filter someone right out of my news feed. Facebook is enough of a time waster already – there’s no point in having to see stuff I don’t want to see. And I know the question that some people are already thinking – if a person is that annoying on Facebook, why not just unfriend them? Fair enough. For some people, unfriending is an option. In my case, I use Facebook as a marketing tool for my computer services and laptop sales. So even though I might not want to see what someone is posting, I do want them to see what I’m posting. So I keep them as a Facebook friend but unfollow. Tool #2 for Facebook news feed cleanup: FilterFeed This one is a browser extension. I just discovered it recently and I like how it works. Unfortunately, it is only available for the Chrome browser so if you use Firefox you’re out of luck (although there are other options for those browsers). To get this, open Chrome and go here. You can install the extension into Chrome right from that page and it just takes a few seconds. Once it is installed, go to Facebook. You’ll see up at the top there will be a an icon that looks like a funnel:   Now that you know it’s running, you have to decide – what do you NOT want to see in your Facebook news feed? A good example at the moment might be Star Wars. Obviously the new movie is about to be released, and of course there are LOTS of conversations about it on Facebook. But you know you won’t be able to see it on opening night, so you definitely don’t want to accidentally read a Facebook post that reveals anything. So you do a single left click on the Facebook FilterFeed funnel icon, and you type Star Wars and hit Enter.   You can enter lots of words (I don’t know if there is a limit). Just type the word and hit Enter, and you won’t see any posts that contain that word. Maybe you get tired of all the political arguments. It’s so bad now especially, with the presidential election and all the campaigning and the televised debates. I get really sick of it. For something like that, you could enter all of the relevant names:   One thing you want to be careful about is to not enter a keyword that is too generic. In this case, it was probably a mistake to have just “Hillary” by itself. In politics, it’s obvious who that means but I also have some friends named Hillary and their posts would be blocked also. And of course, the little “X” you see next to each name means you can remove that word from the filter whenever you want. But that list does look like a nice selection of things to not see any more. The possible uses for this filter are endless. So whenever you find yourself scrolling past a bunch of junk in Facebook, don’t just stay frustrated – get rid of it for good! The post Filter out the garbage in Facebook’s news feed first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I love new technology and I just heard about this recently. It’s not available to the general public yet, but it’s a good possibility that you’ll see this (or something similar) in the future.   This is a project called Heat Harvest. The Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design gave 12 people a couple of weeks to come up with some ideas on how to save energy and promote a healthier lifestyle. Two of the participants, Sergey Komardenkov and Vihanga Gore (both of whom are much smarter than I am) came up with this idea. You know when you have a cup of coffee sitting on the table, and you’re chatting or watching the news or checking Facebook or something – what happens to the coffee? Over time, it loses its warmth and will eventually get to room temperature. Hopefully you will have finished drinking it before it gets cold. The point is this: in terms of physics, heat = energy. So the heat that is lost from your coffee into the air in the room is really just energy that is lost and wasted. So these two people thought, “How can we put this energy into use, instead of wasting it?”. So they came up with a process that converts the heat from an object (whether it’s your cup of coffee or any other hot dish sitting on the table) into electricity. That electricity is released at a certain point on the same table using a concept called thermal electricity. It’s been around for hundreds of years, but some recent developments have made it possible to be more efficient to actually harvest wasted heat and use it to power up or charge the objects that we use every day. One of the sponsors for this project is Ikea – you’ve probably heard of them. We have an Ikea store here in the Tampa Bay area, and they do have some pretty cool furniture and household items. There have been times when I wish it came preassembled, but I guess that’s part of the fun. So I guess the most likely place to first see the Heat Harvest in action could be in an Ikea dining room table. Pretty smart! Here’s a video that explains more about it: https://youtu.be/JZ3B68rxkf4The post Charge your phone with a cup of coffee (someday) first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

There are some things in life that are really obnoxious and annoying. Car dealer commercials. A dog that’s left outside and barks for hours on end early in the morning or late at night. Politicians who will promise anything to get elected. Computerized telemarketing calls on your cell phone. People who make an appointment then don’t show up and don’t call. People who feel entitled. And last but not least – the Get Windows 10 nag icon in the bottom right corner of Windows 7 and Windows 8 computers.   When Windows 10 was first made publicly available at the end of July, I made it very clear more than a month ahead of time that my recommendation was to NOT upgrade yet. I know some people who went ahead and got Windows 10. Some are okay with it, and I’ve talked to many people who have regretted the decision to “upgrade”. Some of my clients even purchased brand new computers with Windows 10 already installed, and ended up sending them back to the manufacturer (in this case, Dell) for a refund. And now, each week I get the question – “Is it safe to upgrade to Windows 10 yet?” And my recommendation is still the same: not yet. When will I recommend you upgrade to Windows 10? I don’t know. One thing I do know is this. Microsoft has been extremely and obnoxiously aggressive in pushing Windows 10 down the throats of Windows computer users. In some cases, they included it in a Windows Update and computers were upgraded to Windows 10 even without the permission of the user. Lots of Windows computers have already downloaded (silently, in the background) the Win10 installation files and folders so that all it takes is a click from an unknowing user, and the installation begins. Even if it doesn’t get installed, that download takes up several gigabytes of space on the computer’s hard drive. When this first started happening, I found a way to fix it on my client’s computers. I would just go into the Windows folder on their computer, and rename the GWX (for Get Windows 10) folder to something else. With the folder showing a different name, the upgrade app and icon was not able to run automatically when you turned on the computer, so the icon would not be displayed. Unfortunately, Microsoft caught on to that pretty quickly. Soon Windows got another update and the folder was renamed to the original name, and that icon started popping up again. Well now we have a more permanent solution, and you can do this on your own. A software developer in Portland, Oregon has created a small program that solves this problem, and he has made it available for free. It’s called GWX Control Panel. There are a couple of ways you can get this program: You can go to the website ultimateoutsider.com and click on “Software”, and you’ll see GWX control panel listed as one of the programs available for download. If you want to read about the program itself, what it does, and all of those details, you can do that at the website. The other option is to just use a shortcut I created – ComputerTutorFlorida.com/gwx – as a direct link to download the program. That link takes you to a Dropbox file, so you can just click “Download”, and then run it to install. You can run the installation file and just leave everything as default – it won’t try to sneak anything in with it. When it’s done and you run the program, you’ll first see the Agreement window:   After that you’ll see the main program window. This is what mine looks like now, since I have already installed and run it. For most people, the first time you run it, the answers to the questions will be “Yes”.   While it may look like a lot of items to contend with here, it’s really this simple: the first 2 wide buttons near the bottom of the screen directly correlate with the first 3 questions at the top of the screen. So you just click the first 2 wide buttons: Click “Disable Windows 10 App” and the first 2 questions questions at the top change from Yes to No. Click “Disable Operating System Upgrades in Windows Update” and the third question changes from Yes to No. Optionally, if there are Windows 10 download folders found, you can click “Delete Windows 10 Download Folders” to free up that space on your hard drive. Two other options: If you want the program to run in the background and monitor if any Windows 10 related settings or features somehow gets on your computer, you can click “Enable Monitor Mode”. If something does show up, the little icon in the lower right will flash to alert you of this. If you are interested in more details of how this program works, you can click on “Display the User Guide” to see the full set of instructions and a more detailed explanation. I’ve been using this on client computers for a while now, and I’ve been

Last week I told you about how my backup process saved all of my critical data twice in the last couple of months. One of those backups is called a system image backup and it saves EVERYTHING on your hard drive. As a result, that backup can be pretty big. Today we’ll talk about an easy way for you to reduce the size of that backup, and also save some space on your hard drive.   I have a TON of files and folders on my computer, including a lot of pictures and videos. Those types of files take up a chunk of space, not to mention all of the audio podcast files as well as the typical documents, spreadsheets, etc. That means whenever I do a system image backup (which is overnight, every night) it takes several hours to complete. This works out fine for me since it happens during the night when I’m not using the computer. But what if you want to just do the system image backup during the day? The longer it takes, the longer you are without the use of your computer. Not to mention, the more files and folders that are stored on your computer, the less free space there is on your hard drive. Of course, with hard drives today being quite large, space might not be an issue for everyone. But there are some people that would benefit from freeing up some hard drive space. Here’s how you free up some space, and make your system image backup smaller: In Windows, click the Start button (the Microsoft logo in the bottom left corner), then click on “Computer” (or click on “This PC” if you are using a newer version of Windows). When you see the drive icons with letters, do a RIGHT click on the C drive and choose “Properties”. That brings up this window:   Now click on the little button labeled “Disk Cleanup”. You’ll see a small window that calculates how much space you are using and how much you can save. This might be here for a few seconds or a few minutes:   When it’s done with the calculation, you’ll see a window that shows you how much space you can potentially save on your hard drive, by removing some files and folders that are not needed:   As you can see, in my case it came up with a lot of files that I could get rid of and free up some space – 106 gb in fact. That’s a lot of space! For some perspective, the first Windows computer I bought had a hard drive that could hold 40 gb of data – that means I had to store the Windows operating system, all of my other programs, and all of my own files and folders inside that 40 gb of space. And today, I have “throwaway” files that are more than 100 gb! How things change! You might want to go down the list and see what types of files and folders are included in this total. If you’re not sure about something, or if you definitely DON’T want to delete a particular item, just uncheck the box and it won’t be included in the total and it won’t be deleted. But Scott, how do I know if I can delete something or if I should keep it? You can click on the name of each item in the list, and in the area at the bottom of the window you’ll see an explanation of what that particular item is. That should give you some idea of whether it’s important or not (it’s probably not). Best rule is this: if you’re not sure, keep it. But practically speaking, the reason the items in this list are in this list are because they aren’t really critical for the continued operation of the computer. So you probably won’t be hurting anything if you delete these things. Once you have the preferred boxes checked or unchecked, click OK and the Disk Cleanup process will begin. It might take a while if you have a lot of non-essential things to remove. The progress bar will tell you how it’s getting along:   When it’s done, just close the open windows and you’re all set. You may save a lot of hard drive space doing this, or you may not save much. It’s worth checking out though, especially if you have never checked it (or have not checked it in a while). I don’t check mine very often, which is why there were over 100 gb that could be eliminated. By doing this, the size of my system image backup went way down. Prior to this, my backup process overnight would take almost 7 hours. Now, with the smaller backup, it only takes 5 1/2 hours. That’s a significant difference! The post How to save disk space, and reduce the size of your backup first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Yes, here I am again preaching to you about backing up your computer. But this time, it’s from a personal point of view and it has to do with my own primary desktop computer. I’ve had two different, major problems in the last two months so I wanted to tell you about what happened and how each of them turned out.   Problem #1 was about 2 months ago. Everything seemed to be going along fine, then I started to get the Blue Screen of Death on my computer every so often. Maybe once every 7 to 10 days. I could be right in the middle of something, and all of a sudden my cursor would freeze, then both monitors would go black, then the blue screen would flash up there and the computer would immediately restart. I wasn’t too happy about this obviously. Otherwise, it seemed to be working okay. When I checked the error codes, it looked like the problem might be related to an outdated video card driver. So I updated all the drivers, and yet it still kept happening. I knew I would have to do something about it at some point, but I just hadn’t decided exactly what. Then, that decision was made for me one day when I got the blue screen, and this time it didn’t reboot. I would make sure it’s completely turned off, then when I would go to power it up, it would not boot to Windows at all. It just got stuck in that “Repair Windows” cycle but the Self-Repair was not able to accomplish anything. Now just for a minute, I want you to put yourself in that situation. Your computer won’t boot up. You cannot access any of the data on your computer – no documents, emails, pictures, nothing. How bad would that be if it happened to you? Would losing all of your files and folders be a really bad thing? Solution to Problem #1 : replace the hard drive As I said, this is a desktop computer. In this computer, I have a second physical hard drive. Every night, my main hard drive is completely cloned to that second hard drive. So, when my main hard drive crashed, all I had to do was switch over to that second drive and everything was there. Then I just replaced the first hard drive. Hard drives crash all the time – sometimes gradually, and sometimes with no warning at all. This might sound complicated, but it’s really not. The process of cloning that drive every night is completely automated by software, so I don’t have to do a thing. This might be more of an effort than some people are willing to exert, but for me I like having it this way. And this cloning process is just one of the 4 ways my computer is backed up every single day. As I said, for some that would be overkill. Just personal preference. Problem #2 was just a couple of weeks ago. The second Tuesday of each month is called Patch Tuesday. This is the day Microsoft sends out their monthly Windows Updates, to patch up problems and security issues that have been discovered in Windows. For my computer, those updates were installed on Wednesday November 11. That day, I noticed I was having a lot of trouble with MS Outlook. Every time I would get an email that had any images embedded, Outlook would crash. Then I noticed that Skype would not run – it just would not open at all. I also use Sony Vegas, a video editing program, and that would also not open. There were a few other screwy things going on that I don’t recall specifically right now. I checked the hard drive, and it was not showing any signs of crashing or failure. With a little research, I found out that one or more of the updates that Microsoft had sent out that week had a problem. It was crashing Outlook and other programs. For some of my clients, it was just a matter of removing the bad update. For me, it was worse – my computer went downhill pretty rapidly and before I could repair it, it would not boot up to Windows at all. I couldn’t even use System Restore to take it back to an earlier date. So there I was with a perfectly good hard drive, but a completely screwed up Windows installation and unable to boot up, even in Safe Mode. What would you do in that situation? Solution to Problem #2: restore Windows from a system image backup One of the other mostly automated backups I do each night is what’s called a System Image backup, using a program called Macrium Reflect (free). All I have to do is plug in my external drive at night, and unplug it in the morning. Overnight, Macrium Reflect takes everything on my main hard drive – programs, files, folders, settings, EVERYTHING – and puts it in a single file on my external hard drive. So all I had to do was restore that System Image backup from a couple days earlier, and everything was back like it was on that day (Tuesday, before the Windows Updates came in). This type of backup is one of two backups that I recommend for everyone. It allows you to get back in business within an hour or two after replacing a crashed hard drive. In my case, the hard drive did

If no one ever opened a scam/spam email, the spammers would stop sending them. If you have checked your spam folder lately, you know that the flow of spam doesn’t seem to have slowed down much. One reason I like Gmail is that their excellent spam filters keep that garbage out of my inbox. But what if one slips through? How do you identify an email as a scam?   Let’s take a look at one of these that showed up in my email recently. Gmail correctly sent it directly to the Spam folder, but I pulled it out of there just for the purpose of this blog post. Four things on this email jump out to me right away.   First, it does not state clearly who is sending the email. It just says that it’s being sent from “mailminion.net” on behalf “Payments Dept”. This is just an email sending service, not a person. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a scam, since many legitimate online businesses use an email service. I use one of the most popular ones, Aweber, to send out my Monday morning emails. But they fact that they have chosen the display name “Payments Dept” is suspicious. Second factor is the blind link within the email message. This is exactly the type of link you should never click on, and for that reason alone this email is one that should just get deleted. But in the interest of investigation, I followed that link to see where it would go. Don’t try this at home! The actual link behind that text is this: http://mm-s399.com/campaigns/yc483c9l3taac/track-url/a621ea4bb5e6c/b63d0cc529d45c8aba3dba1cdcef66e03f0a5703 but once it was clicked, it forwarded from that address to this actual website address: http://sarahsconfession.com/c/?clickID=2786033600&aff=StrongLead&c=US&tid=1023b209664a379305b8caeec13444&aff_id=5662# So now we can actually see where we’re going with this junk. On that page is a video sales pitch for some stock trading software that the video claims is currently making its other users $10,000, $20,000 or even up to $60,000 each month. And it’s all automated! You just click one button in the morning, and go out and do whatever you want to do during the day, and by the end of that day you will have thousands of dollars in your bank account. To any resaonable thinking person, this is obviously all garbage and a complete scam. Unfortunately, there are many people that buy it simply because they want so badly for it to be true. But what about the Paypal payment that was already “processed”, that the original email talked about? Just a lie to get me to click on the link and hopefully get sucked into the scam. Just what we’ve already talked about is enough to prove that this is not a legitimate email. But there’s more. The third item – you can’t see it very well in the image, but at the bottom of the email there is what is supposed to look like a US mailing address. That’s designed to add some credibility and make it more believable. After all, a scammer wouldn’t actually give out his address, right? Well, what it says is this: Finance Rewards Society, 2205 Rose Avenue,, LA, 70171 They’re hoping people see that and just assume that it’s in Los Angeles, California. Except there is no 70171 in California. In fact, that zip code does not exist anywhere in the United States. The fourth tipoff is that you can “unsubscribe” and you can even “report abuse”. But the place you’re reporting the abuse is the very place that’s sending you the email. They’re giving you the opportunity to THINK you have reported them, so you don’t actually report the spam/scam to any authority or group that can take action against them. They allow this type of scam email to be sent through their service, so your “report” doesn’t do any good. It’s like reporting a burglary to the burglar’s accomplice. The other factor that is common in a lot of scam emails is bad grammar and misspelled words. It’s usually very clear that whoever wrote it is not a native speaker of English. In the email example above, there are only a few sentences so they didn’t really have any glaring grammatical errors. But I’ve often said this: if a convincing scammer ever teams up with someone that knows proper written English, that’s a team that will be able to scam a lot of people. The bad guys already snag a lot of people even with their broken English; who knows what they would be capable of if it sounded legitimate. The post Analysis of a scam email first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Every day, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of new malicious websites coming into existence on the internet. It’s very common now, when you do a Google search, for many of the search results to be websites that you should definitely not click on. You’d think Google would have that figured out by now, so that those sites don’t show up so well in the rankings. But they are still there, so you have to be very careful.   The question is: How can you know if a site is safe or not, unless you click on it? The answer is: Let Google check it for you Not many people know about it, but Google offers a “safe browsing” check so that you can get their evaluation of whether or not a site is malicious – and you never have to visit the website itself to do that. Here’s an example of how you would check on the safety of visiting a particular website: Let’s say your computer starts crashing sometimes, and it’s starting to happen often enough to become annoying. And, you don’t really know what is causing it to crash. But every time it freezes up, it comes up with this error message that seems to be giving you some kind of report of what happened, but it looks like a bunch of computer code that doesn’t mean anything unless you’re a computer geek that knows that language. So you do a Google search for “Windows crash report” to see if you can find any helpful information. And what do you know – there’s a website that comes up in that Google search that seems to be just what you’re looking for. The website is Windows-Crash-Report.info. Wow, it sounds like exactly what you need, right? It must have all the answers! WRONG. When a scammer is creating a website, he wants you to think it’s a legitimate website. He wants you to think this site has the answers you are searching for. He wants you to think it’s safe to click and view the website. Don’t fall into that trap – because in some cases, as soon as you click, you’re in trouble. Instead, check the site using this website address format: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=SuspiciousWebsite.com But instead of “suspiciouswebsite.com” at the end, you would just put in the website you want to check on. Note that you don’t include “http” or “www” or anything like that, and nothing after the “.com”. Just the domain name by itself. So if we wanted to check on the site I mentioned above, we would type this address into the address bar: http://www.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=windows-crash-report.info When you hit enter, Google comes up immediately with a brief report that tells you what their evaluation is for that site and whether it’s probably safe to go there. In this case, Google has this to say about that website:   As you can see, Google is not coming out and clearly stating “this site is dangerous”, but they do state that the site had some suspicious activity detected over 90 days ago, and for me that’s enough to keep me from clicking through to it. Does this seem like a lot of hassle to go through, just to see if a website is malicious before you visit it? Yeah, maybe. But from my standpoint, I can tell you that I have people bring me computers all the time that have gotten infected just because someone decided to click an unknown link “just this once” out of curiosity, and almost immediately they regretted it. You can avoid that. Be safe! The post Quick way to see if a website is malicious first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Everyone knows what a YouTube video is. But not everyone knows what a GIF video is (even though just about everyone has seen one on Facebook or somewhere on the internet). Did you know that you can easily take a YouTube video, and create a GIF video out of that? Today I’ll show you how.   A GIF video is pretty much just a short video that usually plays on an endless loop. Here’s an example of one. In this, you first see the dog get up and run out of the camera range, for no apparent reason. Then you see what he sensed before any of the humans did (an earthquake):   Sometimes short little videos like this can be pretty handy. Since this one appears to be a video that was taken by an office security camera system, the original video was probably hours long and full of just boring footage that showed nothing of any interest to anyone. But that little animated section of it is interesting. It’s true that animals sense something like this before a human ever would, and that dog clearly jumps up and runs before anything starts happening visually. The good news is – you can make your own GIF videos, and it’s really easy! Here’s how. Let’s say you find this great video on YouTube. For our example, we’ll use this “military homecoming surprise” video. This father was deployed for 9 months and his young daughter was not expecting him to come home already, and he surprised her by showing up at her baseball game. Here’s the full video: That video is almost 2 minutes long. A lot of that is the silent intro, then the narrator sets up the story, then the actual reunion of father and daughter, and then the long wrap-up. But you might only want to make a quick GIF video of just the actual reunion. First, while you’re at YouTube on this video, look up at the address bar at the top of your web browser. It should show a website address that looks like this:   Now, click your mouse so that the cursor is flashing just in front of the “y” in “youtube”. Then, type the 3 letters “gif” (without the quotes). So now the website address looks like this:   Now hit the Enter key on the keyboard, and you’ll be taken to a video editing page and you can decide how long the GIF video will be, and exactly where it will start and end. You can also put a title at the top of the video, and you can even create a caption to last for a certain period of time (I just put the caption “Wow” for a short time in the middle of the GIF). Then you click the big button at the bottom that says “Create GIF”.   Shouldn’t take long for the GIF video to be created. Then you are presented with a menu that gives you the link to the actual GIF file, and a website link where you can send people to view it, and a few other things. The first time you play it, it might play in sort of slow motion, because it is also loading at the same time. After the first play, it should be at normal speed. You can see what my final creation looked like here: https://gifs.com/gif/mLrV27 They also give you the option to share your new video on all the social media sites. The nice thing about this whole process is that there is no software to download or install on your computer, so you probably don’t have to worry about malware or viruses sneaking in. I would guess they are making some money from ads, but I didn’t see any because they were blocked by my ad-blocker software. The post Transform a YouTube video into a GIF first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Every so often I do a post where I feature several websites that are interesting, informative, funny or just somehow intriguing in some way.   Documentary Addict http://documentaryaddict.com/ Whenever I go on Netflix, and I don’t have anything specific in mind to watch, I tend to browse through the documentaries. And Netflix does have a lot of documentaries in their library of things to view. I don’t know the exact number they have, but I would bet that Documentary Addict has a lot more. The current total they show is 5,257 but that is changing pretty regularly as they add new ones. There are documentary films here on just about any subject you can imagine. If you’re not looking for anything in particular, it can be a little overwhelming. But if that’s the case, you can also check out their subsections such as “Just Added”, or “The Week’s MOST RIVETING” or the “Top 100” and you’re sure to find some really good content. Or, you can just pick one of 26 categories to narrow it down to a particular field of interest. And one other advantage of Documentary Addict – it’s completely free.   FaxZero http://faxzero.com/ The technology of faxing was pretty amazing when the first standard office fax machines were introduced back in the late 1980s. But let’s face it – faxing is now an outdated form of transmitting/receiving documents. Fax machines that originally cost hundreds or thousands of dollars can hardly be given away now, because there are just other ways to accomplish this more efficiently and with higher resolution. BUT – there are still some businesses and some individuals that use faxes. If you are dealing with one of them, it’s rather unhandy if you don’t have a way to send a fax from your location. FaxZero allows you to have this ability, and it’s free for most situations. You can create a document in Word, then go to the FaxZero website and upload that document with the fax number you want to send it to. It’s free to send up to 3 pages + the cover page, and you are allowed to send up to 5 free faxes per DAY. This is probably perfect for that one time in 5 years that you need to do this (it certainly wouldn’t make sense to own a fax machine for those rare occasions, not to mention you would need a regular telephone line and many people don’t even have those at home anymore). If you need to send a longer fax, it’s just $1.99 per fax for up to 25 pages – still a bargain.   SuperCook Recipes http://www.supercook.com/#/recipes If you like to cook and you like trying new things, and you don’t always feel very creative, this website could be a great tool for you. All you have to do is tell the website what ingredients you have on hand, and it will come up with a bunch of recipes for dishes that only use those ingredients. For example, I went on the site and told it that I only have American cheese, eggs, a potato, and some sausage – and it came up with 70 different ideas for a meal. These included: Swedish sausage potato cakes Sausage and potato frittata Salt-baked potatoes And a bunch more. Of course, the more ingredients you have, the more options it will come back with. But for nights when it’s suppertime and your brain is too tired to come up with something on its own, this website could help.   Amazon Filler Items http://www.filleritem.com/ If you shop at Amazon, and of course you do because everyone does, you know that if your purchase is over $35 you probably qualify for free shipping (Amazon Prime members ignore this because you usually get free shipping anyway). So what if you want to buy something that’s $33.99? Just a little bit more in your shopping cart and you’d get free shipping, but how do you find an item that costs just $1.01? That’s where the Amazon Filler Items website comes in. You go to the site, and enter the dollar amount that you need in order to get your total purchase up to $35. The site comes back with a list of dozens or even hundreds of “filler” items that fit the bill. It’s almost a certainty that one of them will be one that you would have to buy at some point in the future, so you’re not really just wasting money.   Flight Radar http://www.flightradar24.com This website can be handy if you want to track a particular flight to know where it is or when it’s taking off or landing. What you’re looking at on the screen is a basic map of your location. Flying all over that screen are little images of airplanes. But these aren’t just random plane icons – each one represents an actual flight that is happening right now. When you see one near your location, click on it and it will tell you what flight it is and where it’s headed, along with some other details. Pretty handy.   Stuff in Space http://stuffin.space/ I’m

Everyone visits YouTube at one time or another. Some people visit it and watch videos every day. There are even people that spend HOURS each day watching those videos. But I’ll bet there are a lot of people, even those that use YouTube every day, that don’t know some of these shortcuts that work in YouTube. For most media players, such as Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player, the standard keyboard key for pausing the video and starting it again is the space bar. That doesn’t work with YouTube. YouTube is a website. When you’re viewing a website, and you hit the space bar on your keyboard, it just makes the website you’re looking at scroll down by one page length. For YouTube, the key to Pause/Play a video is:   I don’t know about you, but when I first discovered this, my reaction was, “Why K?” It seems like “P” might make more sense since it could stand for “play” or “pause”. Maybe because K is right there in the center of the keyboard. I mean, if you look at your overall keyboard from left to right, K is just about right in the middle. But whatever the reason is, K is what you tap if you want to pause a YouTube video or start it up playing again. Go watch a YouTube video now and try it out. And that’s not all. If you’re watching a video and you want to go back 10 seconds and replay, hit the letter J (that one does make sense, since it is immediately to the left of K). And if the video has a boring part you want to skip over, tap L to fast forward 10 seconds (again, just to the right of K so it’s the obvious choice). Want to rewind just 5 seconds back? Hit the left arrow key. And as you might guess, the right arrow key fast forwards 5 seconds. And the up and down arrows are useful too – they increase or decrease the audio volume. Most YouTube videos are much easier to watch, and more entertaining, when they take up the full screen. If you’re watching a video and it’s just the regular YouTube window, you can tap the letter F (for Full screen) and have the video fill up your screen. Tap it again to go back to the original view. This:   is not nearly as impressive or as fun to watch as this:   Want to quickly shut off just the audio portion of a YouTube video? Hit M for Mute. You can also turn on Closed Captions for almost any YouTube video just by hitting the letter C. Tapping it again turns captioning off. Here’s a fun one – you can speed up or slow down a video by using the “less than” or “greater than” keys:   Of course, with those keys, you need to hold down the Shift key at the same time since the symbols are at the top of the key. Otherwise you would just be hitting the comma or the period. And finally – quickly navigating through a video. You can do this with the number keys 1 through 9. YouTube divides every video into 10 equal parts, no matter how long the video is overall. So if you want to go immediately to the halfway point on a video, you just hit the number 5. If you want to be at the point where the video is 80% done, you hit 8. This can be really handy if you have a long video and you want to just sort of skim it for certain content but you’re not sure exactly where it is. So here’s a summary of these shortcuts, in case you want to print it: K = Play/Pause J = Back 10 seconds L = Forward 10 seconds Left arrow = back 5 seconds Right arrow = forward 5 seconds Up arrow = increase volume Down arrow = decrease volume F = full screen M = Mute C = toggle Closed Captions on and off < = slow down a video > = speed up a video 1-9 = navigate through the video Once you practice these shortcuts for a little while, you’ll probably end up using some of them all the time since it’s a lot easier and quicker than using a mouse. And now you know some cool things that your friends don’t know! The post Hidden features of YouTube first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Every Windows keyboard has the same row of keys across the top – the Function keys. Those are the keys at the top of the keyboard labeled F1, F2, F3 and so on up to F12. One of the questions I get asked sometimes is, “What do the function keys actually do?” As with a lot of questions about computers, the answer is: it depends.   What it depends on primarily is what you’re doing on the computer at the time. Each one of them could have a specific task in one program, but a completely different task in a different program. For example, if you’re using Microsoft Word, here’s what the F1 key can do: If you just hit F1 by itself, it opens the Help window so you can search for help on a particular aspect of Word:   But – if you hold down Shift, then tap F1, Word will open the “Reveal Formatting” window off to the right side, so you can see all of the formatting information for the document that’s open:     And – if you hold down CTRL and tap F1, it will alternatively close and re-open the ribbon at the top of the window. Makes it easy to toggle that on and off if you want to do that. There are other things you can do with F1, but you get the idea. And that’s just ONE of the function keys, and that’s JUST for Microsoft Word. All of the other Function keys do different things in Word, and ALL of the Function keys do completely different things in other programs. It would be impossible to literally list all of the things that you can do with the Function keys on all the different software. However, several of the Function keys are kind of “known for” certain types of functions. Here are some of the more common tasks that are assigned to some of the Function keys: F1 – in most programs (and in any version of Windows) the F1 key will usually open a “Help” window. So if you’re stuck and not sure what to do, try F1. F2 – used to rename a file or folder – if you’re in your Documents folder or Pictures folder, highlight a folder or an individual file, and just type the name you want to use. F3 – opens a search field in many programs. If you’re looking at a website page with lots of text and you need to find a particular word, hit F3 and type the word so search for it on that web page. F4 – not so much this key by itself, but if you hold down ALT and tap F4, it will close the window that is “in focus” – the one that is in front of any other open windows. F5 – this key refreshes your web browser window – like if you’re watching an eBay item that’s about to close and you want to see if the high bid amount changes, you can just keep tapping F5 to update the screen. F6 – highlights the address bar in your web browser – so if you need to type in a new web address, you don’t need to move your cursor up to the address bar and click on it – just tap F6. F7 – the spellchecker – F7 activates spellchecker function in most Office and email programs. F8 – in Windows 7 and earlier, this is the key you tap when you want to boot up the computer in Safe Mode. Windows 8 and later made it a little more complicated (one more reason to stick with Windows 7). F9 – if you use Outlook, you can use F9 to tell it to Send/Receive email, instead of using the cursor on the Send/Receive icon in the toolbar. F10 – F10 does a few things, but not really too much that the average person would use. F11 – one of my favorites – it puts your web browser in full screen mode. Go visit a website, and tap F11 to see what happens. You can tap it again to bring it back to normal. F12 – this one has some functions in MS Word for opening and saving documents, but not much else that you would probably use. Don’t tap it while you’re using a web browser – unless you’re a web developer and you really want to work with computer code. Yeah, me neither.  The post What do the Function keys do? first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

When you get a new computer, especially if you get one of the more recent ones that are running Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, part of the set-up process is setting a Windows password. Most people don’t realize that you don’t NEED to have a Windows password on your computer, but the wording on the screen makes it sound like you are required to create one. I’ve even had some people go through this process without really thinking about it, then the next time they boot up their computer, they get prompted for the Windows password – and they don’t remember what it is.   We have ways of getting around the problem of a forgotten password. Most techs will know how to bypass a Windows password (which should tell you something about how well it secures your computer). Of course, the easiest solution is to never create the password requirement when you are first setting up the computer. When I’m setting up a new PC for a client, I always set it so there is no Windows password. The owner of the computer can always add one later on if it’s necessary. But what if you’ve already set up your computer, and it requires you to enter a password every time you boot up Windows? Here’s how you turn off the Windows password requirement: Click the Start button (Microsoft logo) in the bottom left corner of the screen, and in the search field, type: netplwiz then hit the Enter button. This is going to bring up a window called “User Accounts” which looks like this:   At this point, you could probably figure out what to do just by looking at the contents of that window. First, look at the list of users. In my case, there are 3 entries. On your computer, it might only list a single user profile name. Either way, click once to highlight the user name for whom you want to skip the password entry requirement. Then UNcheck the box next to “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer” and click OK at the bottom of the window. Then you will be prompted to enter your current password, and confirm it:   After you click OK on that screen, you’re done. Next time you boot up into that user profile on Windows, you won’t have to put in a password. A couple of things to remember about this: The “netplwiz” process works with Windows Vista, 7, 8 and 10. If you’re using a version of Windows older than Vista, you have bigger problems than being bothered with a password. You should only disable the Windows password requirement if you are not concerned about safety/security in relation to someone else having physical access to your computer. If it’s just you and your computer in your home, that’s one thing. If your computer sits in an office or some other place where other people are nearby, you might want to keep the password requirement in place. It’s not foolproof, but it would at least slow someone down if they are trying to access your files without permission. The post How to skip the Windows sign-in password first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I’ve used Paypal for years, and you probably have too. If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, you can set one up for free at www.Paypal.com. And with a recent change, Paypal has made it easier for people to send you money.   For my computer repair business here in Safety Harbor, Florida, I have an online accounting program that sends out invoices, which makes things really easy. Of course, I have to pay for that service. What we’re talking about here is not so much for business (although it could be used for that) – this is more designed for when individuals want to send or receive money from each other. In the past, if you wanted to send someone money through Paypal, you had to get the person’s email address, then go to the Paypal website, log in to your account, and click on “Send money” and put in the email address and the dollar amount. Not what you might actually call “difficult” but it did involve a few steps and it required the sender to know the Paypal email address of the recipient. Just recently, Paypal added a new feature that made it a lot simpler. You can create your own customized Paypal address, so that people can just click a link to send you money. You can even customize that link, so that the proper dollar amount is already configured. But you need to get your customized Paypal.me address as soon as possible, in order to get the name you want to use. Here’s how you set it up: 1. Go to the website www.Paypal.me and click on “Get started” 2. On the next screen, you will need to choose your link name. This is the name that will come at the end of your customized Paypal payment link.   When you type in the name you want to use, Paypal will automatically check and see if someone else has already grabbed that link name. Of course, just about all of the common names have been taken (I had virtually no chance of getting “Scott” for example). For me, I choose “PCTutor” so my full link is: Paypal.me/pctutor – you can actually click that link and send me money through Paypal. I encourage you to try that out! 🙂 3. Once you have chosen your link name, and Paypal has confirmed that it’s available, you just click “Grab This Link”. After that, Paypal will prompt you to sign in to your Paypal account so that they can connect your new link name with your account. If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, you can create one at this time. And you’re done! Now, if you want to make it easy for someone to send you money to your Paypal account, you just send them that link. And for even MORE customization, you can pre-select the dollar amount you want the person to send. For example, if someone owes me $15, I can send this link: http://paypal.me/pctutor/15 And it when someone clicks on that link, it takes them directly to the Paypal site to send that amount to me:   It doesn’t get much easier than that! You should also know that even though all you need in order to send someone money via Paypal is their email address, they do need to create a Paypal account in order to claim that money. But most people have a Paypal account anyway. The post Grab your personalized Paypal.me account name while you can first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I use the Google calendar to keep track of all of my activities, both business and personal. It’s super convenient because it automatically syncs between my computer, my phone and my iPad. And since I also use Gmail (another Google product) I can set the calendar to easily send me email reminders for anything. But recently I came across a really annoying problem with the Google calendar – it was tagging each day with names of people having a birthday on that day. Some of the people I knew. But some I didn’t know – they weren’t computer repair clients, they weren’t fellow Safety Harbor residents. But there they were, in my calendar that I use each day – even though I didn’t ask for them to be there.   It would be nice if you could just do a right-click on a particular birthday and choose an option like “Remove all birthdays from my Google calendar” but they don’t offer that as a solution. In fact, for a while there actually was no solution – you were just stuck with having them there, cluttering up your calendar. But now there is a way to do it. Here’s how to get those stupid birthdays off your Google calendar: While viewing your Google calendar, click on the gear icon in the top right, and in the drop-down menu, choose Settings.   2. On the Settings page, click the Calendars link:   3. Then, find the “Birthdays” calendar and uncheck that box:   And that solves the problem. No more birthday reminders for people you don’t (or barely) know. The post How to get all those birthdays off your Google calendar first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Yes, today’s tip is a little different than our typical “computer” tip. But by using the information I’ll give you today, you can go online and get $25 in cash, or $50 in Starkist tuna – if you meet the requirements.   Here’s what happened: A few years ago, Starkist Tuna faced a class action lawsuit. The lawsuit accused Starkist of “under-filling” each of their cans of tuna, by just a few tenths of an ounce each. Who cares, right? Well, apparently someone cared enough to go all the way with a lawsuit to get their “justice”. And when you think about the millions of cans of tuna fish that Starkist puts out each year, that minor amount of shortage in each can really could add up to a lot. So even though Starkist has not admitted that they did this, they have agreed to settle the lawsuit by offering their customers some compensation. What you can receive: $25 cash, OR Vouchers for $50 worth of Starkist Tuna   How you qualify: In order to be eligible for one of the above, you have to have purchased at least one 5-ounce can of Starkist tuna between the dates of February 19, 2009 and October 31, 2014. You don’t need to show a receipt or any proof of purchase, but you will be required to state (under penalty of perjury) that you did indeed make the required purchase within that period of time.   How to file a claim: Go to the website www.TunaLawsuit.com and click on “File a claim” in the menu on the left side. Then just follow the instructions on the screen. You will need to provide your contact information, and whether you want the cash or the vouchers. Make sure you complete it all the way to the end. After the claim form is submitted online, you will have the opportunity to print the final page as your receipt, which includes your claim number. It looks like this:   See, I told you this week would be a little different than what I usually do. But hey, if you qualify and you can get $25 cash or $50 in tuna, you should know about it, right? So if you’re eligible, go get it!   And if your computer has a problem, you know where to find me for computer repair – right here in Safety Harbor (of course, I can fix most computers remotely so it doesn’t matter where you are).The post Use your computer to get $25 cash – if you are a tuna eater first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

If you have a Dell laptop, it might have a built-in “feature” called Ambient Light Sensor (I put “feature” in quotation marks intentionally). This is not really a widely advertised function so a lot of people don’t know about it. In fact, I personally was not aware of it until my friend Bob did some research and discovered it. Love it when the client comes up with the solution, then tells me about it. Thanks Bob!   What is the Ambient Light Sensor? The ALS is something that Dell has built in to some of their laptops (I’m not sure all Dells have this). Basically, it’s a way for the laptop’s screen brightness to adjust based on how much light is in the room. So if the laptop is powered on, and you turn the lights up or down in the room, you will probably see the laptop’s screen get darker or brighter. I guess some people might like it, but for most people, it’s annoying to have the screen brightness always changing even though you are not actually trying to adjust the brightness level. And for those that don’t know about this special “feature” it might even appear that the screen is defective. Nope, it’s just a computer manufacturer thinking they would offer something new and clever, but in reality it’s just something most people would prefer to turn off. Here’s how you turn off the Ambient Light Sensor: 1. Find the “Function” key on the keyboard. It will be somewhere in the lower left area, usually between Ctrl and the Windows key:   2. Hold down the “Function” key and tap the left arrow key. Pretty easy, right? Just a matter of knowing what keys to use, then the problem is solved. Turns out there are a few other things you can do on your Dell laptop with that handy little Function key. In the list below, the Function key is abbreviated “Fn”. And remember, these might not work on all Dell laptops. Fn + F1 puts your computer to sleep Fn + F2 toggles the battery charging process on and off Fn + F3 shows status of the battery Fn + F8 toggles between screens if you have an external monitor connected Fn + F11 copies a screenshot to the clipboard Fn + Up Arrow key increases screen brightness Fn + Down Arrow key decreases screen brightness Fn + Right Arrow key adjusts brightness of the backlit keyboard (optional) Fn + Left Arrow key toggles Ambient Light Sensor on and off (as described above) The post Fix for Dell laptop display brightness randomly changing first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Everyone at some point gets really angry at their computer. Either it’s too slow, or it doesn’t do what you expect it to do, or some other thing – and you get really frustrated with it. Want to get even with your computer? Here are some ways to really mess it up! Whenever you see a link, click on it! Lots of opportunities here. Someone might send you a link in an email, or better yet, a friend might put a link on Facebook when they update their status. If you see one that seems to lead to something interesting, just click on it immediately without even thinking about it. After all, it’s on Facebook and your friend wouldn’t have posted it unless it was something he wanted you to click on, right? That link just might take you to some website or download that will really teach your computer a lesson. Let that thing overheat! Computers have it so easy – they can go to sleep after a little while, they don’t work all the time, and most of all – they are just about always running in a comfortable, temperature-controlled environment. No more! Laptops are the worst for this, and the easiest to mess up. Just fire up your laptop, then go use it while you’re in bed. You want to just set it right on your mattress or blanket, and make sure the exhaust port (where the fan blows out the hot air) is completely covered up so that the heated air has to stay inside the machine. Now your laptop can know what it was like in the days before air conditioning! Open every email attachment! You get emails all day, so there are LOTS of chances sitting right there in front of you to cause problems for your computer. IRS sending you a bill? Fedex says they can’t find your house and to check the attached invoice? State government says you drove through a toll booth without paying so they’re attaching the bill to your email? These are all scams and the “invoice” is really just a virus – so just open every one of them and your computer will have all kinds of regrets at ever acting up. Avoid all the updates for your computer! You know those stupid updates that are always popping up – Java has an update, Adobe has an update, iTunes has an update. Why all the updates? Most of them are to patch up security holes in programs that are already installed on your computer. Well, maybe your computer could use a little INsecurity as a wake-up call. So when you see an update come up, just ignore it. Pretty soon your various programs will be so outdated and insecure, your computer won’t know what to do! Ignore those error messages! Everyone hates when an error message comes up. If your computer had its way, you would write down the error message so that you could relay it accurately to your computer tech, and that is one step toward solving whatever the problem is. Yeah, your computer would love to have it that easy, right? So just do the easiest thing – close that message and forget about it. Sure, it will probably keep coming back since the underlying problem hasn’t been solved – but how does your computer learn who’s in charge if you just give it whatever it asks for? Thunderstorm? Leave that thing plugged in! Computers are such sissies. They just don’t know how to handle a little bit of thunder and lightning. Some computer owners actually go around and unplug their computers from the wall during a thunderstorm, since that means the equipment can’t be damaged by a nearby lightning strike or voltage surge. That’s just giving in to the whims of your machine. Leave everything plugged in, even during an electrical storm. A little high-voltage could give your computer a headache it will never forget! Okay… I hope you know that all of the above was sarcasm. If you really do want to mess up your computer, those are ways that I see happening all the time. But you should do the opposite of those things if you want your computer to run smoothly and do what it’s supposed to do. The post 6 ways to really mess up your computer first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

You read this blog. You also probably listen to my podcast. You most likely know that I do computer repair here in Safety Harbor, Florida (and remotely all around the country). So you know that I’ve been telling people, “Don’t upgrade to Windows 10 yet”. It’s too early, and there are bugs (as we knew there would be). I’ve had a few clients just this past week who went ahead and upgraded to Windows 10 anyway, and now their printer isn’t recognized. Or they can’t go online because the wifi doesn’t work. I even had one newly-upgraded Windows 10 desktop computer that didn’t recognize ANY keyboard or mouse – wireless, USB or even the old-fashioned PS2 style.   NOTE: for those of you that have upgraded to Windows 10 and your computer is working fine, that’s great. I know a lot of people already have done this and so far seemingly have had no problems. This particular blog post is for the other group – for whom Windows 10 is not working as it is supposed to. If you planned ahead properly, going back to Windows 7 or 8 is easy. You just restore from a system image backup. The catch is that you have to already have a Windows 7 system image backup created – BEFORE you do the Windows 10 upgrade. So if you haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 10, but you’re about to go ahead and do it (not recommended), you need to create that system image backup first. To do that, I use a free program called Macrium Reflect. I’ve set up this backup process on lots of client computers, and I use it on my own computer every day. (It’s actually one of the FOUR separate backups I do daily on my main computer. Yes, perhaps I’m overdoing it on the side of caution – you don’t really need to do 4 types of backups each day.) I’m not going to go into the full details of how to set up a system image backup with Macrium Reflect. If you want, I can help you get that in place, and I can do it remotely. You will need to have an external/portable drive just for that backup – you can get a 1 TB portable drive now for about $60. When this is created, Macrium Reflect takes a “picture” of your entire hard drive and puts it on that external drive. That’s why you want to do this BEFORE you upgrade to Windows 10, so the external drive will have that snapshot of your entire computer while it’s still running Windows 7 or 8. Then, if you upgrade to Windows 10 and something doesn’t work, or several things don’t work, or you just don’t like it, you can just restore that Windows 7 or 8 system image and you’re back to the previous version of Windows just like nothing happened. Important note: any work that you do while you’re in Windows 10 mode will not be carried back to the Windows 7 or 8 restore. So if you create anything important, or edit any critical documents, or make any other important changes, be sure to save them somewhere else BEFORE you run that system restore. What if you upgraded to Windows 10 and you don’t have a system image backup? Unfortunately, that’s the situation in which some people are finding themselves. If that’s you, you’re not completely out of luck. If you did the Windows 10 upgrade within the last 30 days, you should be able to use the “Go back to Windows 7” function that’s built in to Windows 10. To do that, use the search function in Windows 10 and do this search (exactly): Go back to Windows 7 or if that search does not work, try doing a search on just this one word: recovery In either case, what you are looking for in the search results is the option to go back to your previous installation of Windows 7. If you see that option listed, click on the “Get Started” link right under that phrase and follow the directions on the screen. It’s important that you have anything critical backed up before you start this process, and you also must know your Windows 7 login password (if you had one) – otherwise you won’t be able to log in to Windows after this is completed. It will take a few restarts and a good chunk of time, but if it is successful, you’ll be back to your previous Windows installation. What if you don’t have a system image backup, and the “Go back” function is not an option? If these first two processes aren’t available or don’t work, then you’re really looking at just a regular reinstallation of Windows 7 or 8. As you might suspect, this process could mean that any data that’s currently on the computer will be lost. In fact, you should assume that everything on the computer will be wiped out so you should copy anything important to an external drive or some type of backup. The important thing to know is this – you can avoid all of this hassle just by choosing NOT to upgrade to Windows 10 yet. As I have been saying

Today’s tip won’t take long to explain, but I can tell you that whenever I show someone how to do this, it is almost always a huge relief. People get very frustrated by MS Word because their top toolbar keeps disappearing and they don’t know how to make it stay there for good.   First off, even though many users call it a toolbar, that’s not the actual name for it. It’s called the “ribbon”. At least that’s how it’s referred to within MS Word, so that’s the term I’m going to use here. What I’m talking about is that row of icons and command options that is usually at the top of any window when you have Word open. It looks like this:   This is the nice collection of editing tools that allows you to make your Word documents look the way you want them to look. And for most people, these icons and menus are accessed all the time – so you probably want that ribbon to always be there. But sometimes it disappears, and the top of your Word document looks like this:   That’s usually when you want to scream at your computer or throw it out the window. Don’t give in to the temptation to take a hammer to it! Getting that ribbon back is easy. Here’s how you get the MS Word ribbon back: Hold down the Ctrl key, and tap the F1 key That’s it! I told you it was easy! That’s how I do it anyway, because I am much quicker using a keyboard shortcut than using the mouse to click on something. If you would prefer to click on something with your mouse, look in the top right corner of your Word document window. You’ll see a tiny icon that looks like it’s pointing up or down.   When it’s pointing upward, that means the Word ribbon is currently on display. So if you click that little icon, it makes the Word ribbon disappear, and the icon is then pointing downward. So you know if your ribbon is gone, you can click on the down-pointing icon to make the ribbon come back on display. If that sounds confusing, just do like I do and use Ctrl + F1 to make it simple to toggle back and forth. The example I used here was with MS Word, but the same thing applies to the other Office programs such as Excel, Outlook, etc. In fact, if you want to play a little joke on someone, wait until they are away from their computer, then go over and make their ribbon disappear. Eventually you’ll hear them getting frustrated (especially if it’s a co-worker that sits near your desk). Then you can be the “hero” and go over and fix it for them. A little harmless fun in the office! The post How to keep your MS Word toolbar from disappearing first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

These days just about everyone takes videos with their cell phone. It’s actually pretty handy to have that ability, whenever you see something happening that is worth recording, to be able to immediately make a video of it. But sometimes, you might record the video with the wrong orientation – so it plays on your computer at a 90 degree angle, or even upside down. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to fix this!   With a regular picture (a still image), rotating it to the proper orientation is easy. You just find the image on your computer, do a right click, and in the menu that pops up, just choose “rotate clockwise” or “rotate counterclockwise”:   But with a video file, you don’t get that option as a standard feature in Windows, so we need to use a different process. Fortunately, some enterprising person out there on the internet has created a website service that mostly automates the whole process. And of course, it’s free (but he welcomes donations for the service). The website I use for this is called – appropriately – Rotate My Video. You can see it at RotateMyVideo.net.   Using that website, here’s how you rotate a video: 1. First, you go to the website and click the button that says “Pick video”:   2. That opens up a window, and you need to navigate to where your video file is located on your computer. Most commonly this would be in the Videos folder, but the computer will let you store it in any of your folders. You just need to know where it is. Just click the video file once to highlight it, then click “Open”:     3. Now your video gets uploaded to the website, so they can prepare the editor for you. This shouldn’t take very long, but it can take a while if your video is a long one, or if you have a slow internet connection.   4. When the video is uploaded, you’ll see your editor screen. You’ll also see an image of your video on the right side of the screen. You just click the “Rotation” button arrows until the video on the right is displayed properly. Then you click the “Rotate video” button at the bottom to implement your change.   5. Now you just wait while the website processes your video rotation. Again, this might take a while if the video is large. When it’s all done, you’ll see the message “Your video is ready!”. You then need to click the “Download” link immediately under that “ready” message: IMPORTANT NOTE: The website is ad-supported, and some of the ads on the screen will have a big “Download” button – they’re hoping you mistake that for the actual Download link. Be sure to ONLY click on the one shown in the image above. Clicking on an ad might take you to an infected website, or download malware to your computer.   6. Click to download the properly-rotated video file, and save it to your computer. If you save it in the same folder as the original video (the one that is not properly oriented), your computer will probably give you a little warning like “There’s already a file by that name in this folder. Do you want to replace it?” and since the new one is the one that’s been fixed, you say YES, you do want to replace it. And that’s it! Now you can click on the new video and play it, to verify that it’s showing the way it’s supposed to. The website has even created a quick 2-minute video to show you the whole process. Even though the steps above might seem a little complicated when you’re reading them, it’s pretty easy. Here’s the tutorial they created for it: The post How to rotate a video file to right side up first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Sometimes I like to take a break from my “regular” computer tips and just show you some of the interesting websites I’ve run across recently. These are a few sites that are either helpful or informative in some way, or just plain entertaining.   Account Killer https://www.accountkiller.com/en/# You probably have a lot of online accounts at various social media sites. Let’s face it, they all make it very easy to sign up, and then you’re suddenly sucked in and overwhelmed by everything that comes with it. In some cases, you might decide, “Ok, I’ve had enough of this – I’m just gonna cancel that account.” Ah, but that process is not so easy or obvious, is it? You can spend hours searching the site for a “Cancel my account” link (which is very well hidden), or you can just go to the Account Killer website and get the exact instructions for how to do it. They have step-by-step processes for deleting accounts at all the most popular websites, including these and literally hundreds more: Facebook Twitter Skype Whatsapp Yahoo Google Hotmail Spotify Dropbox MSN MySpace Groupon   Down for everyone or just me? http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/ If you’ve ever gone to a website and gotten the dreaded “This page cannot be displayed” message, you have to wonder if the website itself is actually down, or if your computer just has a problem and can’t connect to it at the moment. This website provides the quickest and easiest way to see if a website really is down. Just go to the site and you’ll see there is just one thing to do there – you type in the address of the website you are trying to access. It will come back within a couple of seconds, and either tell you that the website is actually down, or that it’s just you.   ManualsLib http://www.manualslib.com/ This site is for those times when you have said to yourself, “What did I do with that manual?” Or maybe you purchased something used, and just needed the documentation on how to use it properly. It could even be something that you’ve had for a while, and maybe forgotten how to take advantage of all the features. Whatever the case, this website has what you’re looking for. The site’s subtitle is “The Ultimate Manuals Library” and it has over 1.7 MILLION manuals in PDF that you can download and even print if you want. These manuals cover over 1.3 million different products. You just go to the site and enter the model number of whatever appliance, TV remote, tool, car, truck or other item for which you need a manual. Pretty likely you’ll find it there. And all of the manuals are available to you at no charge.   Coffitivity https://coffitivity.com Some people are able to be more productive when they’re in a “coffee shop” environment”. I guess that’s why you always see so many people working away at their laptops in Starbucks. Or maybe they’re just on Facebook. I do see a lot of pictures of Starbucks drinks on Facebook. For me, I find coffee shops a little too distracting to do work that requires any degree of focus or concentration. But if you like the “background noise” of a coffee shop, you can now create that environment in your own home! The Coffitivity website is an audio website that “recreates the ambient sounds of a cafe to boost your creativity and help you work better” (that’s the description on the website). At the site, you can choose which “ambient sounds” you like: Morning Murmur – a gentle hum gets the day started Lunchtime Lounge – bustling chatter of the lunchtime rush University Undertones – the scholarly sounds of a campus cafe There’s even an app you can get for your phone, so you can enjoy the coffeehouse background noise no matter where you are.   Unsplash https://unsplash.com/ If you’re thinking about creating a website, and you need some images for that site, it’s very tempting to just hop on Google Images, find the perfect picture, and grab it for use on your site. Not so fast! Many of those images are owned by major photography and advertising companies, such as Getty Images. If you post one of their images on your website without purchasing the rights to use it, it’s very likely that you’ll get an invoice from them for several hundred or even thousands of dollars – and you will have a heck of a time getting out of paying that bill. Don’t fall into that trap! There are lots of websites that offer high-quality images for commercial or public use, but most of them require payment. Not Unsplash. This site has lots of really high-quality, high-resolution images and they are all free for you to use. You can even sign up for their email list and they’ll send you a few new ones each week. Even if you don’t want to use th

You’ve probably heard in the news lately that Adobe Flash continues to have security problems. There are constantly new vulnerability issues being discovered. Then they patch up those holes, and more are found. It’s a constant race to find a problem and patch it up before the hackers can exploit it and do substantial damage. Some people say you should just uninstall Flash from your computer completely. Some say you should just disable it in your web browser. Today I’ll show you what I think is the easiest solution.   What is Flash? If we’re going to talk about it, we should first describe briefly what it is. Flash is computer software that some websites use to display their content. Usually that content is some type of multi-media stuff, like audio or video. Some sites use it to enable some type of interactivity between the website and the visitor. If you see some type of movement on a website, it might be through the use of Flash. There are still a lot of sites that use Flash, but it is declining in popularity. For example, YouTube videos used to be all displayed using Flash. YouTube no longer uses Flash. Like many sites, it’s using a different type of website content display called HTML5. I won’t go into all the differences between the two, but the most important one is that HTML5 is much safer. Flash is constantly being compromised, so it’s an endless routine of updating and patching to be able to use it safely. It’s a pain for everyone involved. To make sure your computer is safe from any Flash problems, there are 3 ways to handle it: Just delete Flash from your computer completely (uninstall it) Disable Flash in your web browsers Use a browser plugin to approve Flash to run on a case-by-case basis For the examples below, in order to see what the Flash content is supposed to look like, I’ll be using a simple website called Ultrasounds. You can see it at Ultrasounds.com. Their home page is sort of a “test page” to verify that Flash is installed and running, because the entire rest of their website is created using Flash (not a good idea if you’re a website developer). If you go to www.Ultrasounds.com and you have Flash installed and enabled in your web browser, there’s an image at the top of the page that looks like this: Except that on the website, it will have some movement. The blue section in the middle will be constantly moving up and down. If that’s happening, you have Flash running in your web browser. So let’s look at these and see what the pros and cons are for each option. 1. Uninstall Flash from your computer This would definitely eliminate the problem. If Flash is not even on your computer, it certainly can’t get exploited or hacked and leave you vulnerable. And on top of that, you don’t have to every worry if it’s up to date or not. The downside is that when you visit a website that uses Flash, that website won’t work. For some sites, it means that a small portion of the page won’t be displayed. For other sites, the entire website will appear broken because it requires Flash in order to run properly. With this option, you will probably get a message on the screen that says you need to download and install the Flash player in order to view the content. That may be true – but be very careful about this. Malicious websites will often use a message like that just to trick you into clicking through and you end up downloading viruses and malware to your computer.   2. Disable Flash in your web browsers I would call this a “better” solution. You would still have Flash installed on your computer, but it really doesn’t do anything because Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Firefox all have it disabled. In this case, when you visit a website that uses Flash, that website won’t work. But if you know it’s a website that you definitely need to view or use, and it’s one that you trust, you can go into the browser’s settings and enable Flash temporarily while you use that site. Then when you’re finished with it, you have to remember to disable it again. This is what the “Flash is disabled” message looks like in Chrome:   3. Use a browser plugin This is what I would say is the best solution. A browser plugin is just a little piece of software that runs inside your web browser (Chrome or Firefox) and gives it some added functionality. In this case, we’re going to use the plugin called Flashcontrol. It’s free. In this scenario, you have Flash installed on your computer, and you have it enabled in your browser. But FlashBlock automatically recognizes when you are on a website that uses Flash, and wherever the Flash content is on the site, you would just see a space that is clickable. There will also be the Flashcontrol logo to remind you that this is Flash content. On our sample page, it looks like this i

I love exposing online scams. Really the biggest benefit is that you, the reader of this blog, is more likely to be suspicious of something if you’ve already read about similar things here. But in addition to that, I just like the idea that I’m ruining some scammer’s chance to steal money from people that actually worked to earn that money.   I try to stay up to date on the latest scams and what the bad guys are thinking up to try to trick people out of their money. But you know what? Sometimes there is a “new” type of scam or maybe a new angle to try and catch people off guard, but in reality, we just keep seeing the same things over and over again. That’s because they keep working, and a lot of people are still not aware of the basics of how these scams work. And there is still a big misconception about how our US banking system works – specifically, about depositing a check. Let’s take a very common example of a scammer target: someone selling something on Craigslist. If someone posts an ad on Craigslist, what does the scammer automatically know about that person? 1. They may or may not be “computer savvy” – Craigslist makes it very easy to post an ad, even for someone not very well versed in using a computer or the internet. 2. They want money – obviously, since they are wanting to sell something that they currently own. And it’s probably safe to say that even though they might be expecting to haggle a little bit, they would really love to just get the full price that they listed. 3. They are expecting inquiries from strangers about the item they are selling. So the scammer, posing as a potential buyer, contacts the seller with some story about being out of the country and wanting to send a cashier’s check for the price of the item PLUS more, in order to cover shipping to their “associate” in some other state. At that point, even though the newbie seller might be a little suspicious about the whole process, he might also be thinking, “I’m going to be protected, because after all, it’s a cashier’s check!” Wrong! Think about the extreme skill it takes to create counterfeit currency. There’s a LOT that goes into that. Well guess what – it’s a whole lot easier to create counterfeit cashier’s checks. You won’t detect that the check is fake. Your bank won’t detect that the check is fake. In fact, the bank won’t even try. They just take it as a deposit just like any other check. And in a day or two, you can check your balance and you’ll see that the bank has fully released the entire amount of the check to you in clear funds. So you could go to the bank, withdraw the full amount of that check in cash, and they would be fine with it. For a little while. Rest assured, that check will come back to your bank. And when it does, they will come back to you and want that money back. If you have enough in your account, they’ll take it right from there to cover the loss. If you don’t have enough to cover it, expect a phone call. And this matter is really more than just dealing with a bank overdraft – you deposited a counterfeit check. That’s going to require a pretty good and detailed explanation, and don’t be surprised if the local police get involved. Suddenly your story – “I got it from some guy on the internet” – doesn’t sound so plausible, even though it’s the truth. There’s a really good reason why Craigslist posts so many warnings about who you decide to do business with, whether you are buying or selling. This is the warning they give to all users: Avoiding Scams Deal locally, face-to-face —follow this one rule and avoid 99% of scam attempts. Do not extend payment to anyone you have not met in person. Beware offers involving shipping – deal with locals you can meet in person. Never wire funds (e.g. Western Union) – anyone who asks you to is a scammer. Don’t accept cashier/certified checks or money orders – banks cash fakes, then hold you responsible. Transactions are between users only, no third party provides a “guarantee”. Never give out financial info (bank account, social security, paypal account, etc). Do not rent or purchase sight-unseen—that amazing “deal” may not exist. Refuse background/credit checks until you have met landlord/employer in person.   Those guidelines are good to follow not just for Craigslist, but for any dealings you have online. The post A check that has cleared doesn’t mean it’s not a scam! first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Have you ever needed to tell someone exactly where you are standing, or where you’re parked, or even where you are at the moment if you’re driving or walking or biking? If you’re not near a street sign, or at a place where you know the actual address, telling someone your location can be sort of difficult. Recently I’ve found 3 ways that make this easier.   Here’s why I am interested in this type of thing at the moment. Later this summer, there will be a race here in the Tampa Bay area called the Pinellas Trail Challenge. It’s a 46-mile ultramarathon that takes place the Saturday of Labor Day weekend (September 5). I’m not running in it because it would be way too hot. However, I am going to work as “mobile crew” for one of the runners. I will be on my bike, and I’ll be pulling a small trailer with a cooler filled with ice and other supplies. I’ve already been incorporating the biking in with my regular training, and have about 25 pounds of weight in the cooler. This is what it looks like:   The Pinellas Trail is a paved walking/running/biking path that starts in downtown St. Pete (by the St. Pete Pier) and goes all the way up into northern Pinellas county. So this race just follows the entire 46-mile path of that trail. The thing about this race is that it’s unsupported. This means that it’s not like a 10k or a marathon where you have aid stations set up every few miles. Your “aid stations” are public drinking fountains and the convenience stores that are located near the trail (or volunteers, such as what I’m doing). So you have to really be prepared to carry what you can, and buy whatever else you need along the way. Inevitably, there will be people who will drop out before getting to the finish line. The Florida heat, in late summer, in the daytime, on a trail with very little shade, is no small factor. Everyone has to carry a cell phone just in case a call needs to be made for a friend or family member to come and pick up the runner.   But if the runner is just on some random stretch of pavement, how does he tell the friend where to pick him up? If you’re waiting at a business, you can use the address of the business. But otherwise, if you aren’t standing a an intersection of streets, you might not be able to verbally tell someone where you are. So I found these 3 apps that will work on your smartphone, and each one will enable you to tell someone exactly where you are waiting to be picked up. 1. What3Words (what3words.com) Free I actually wrote a full blog post on this one several weeks ago (here). This app divides the entire world into a grid of 3 meter square cells. Each of these cells has a unique name, which consists of 3 common words. So no matter where you are in the world, the spot where you’re standing has a 3-word address. You just pull out your phone, open the What3Words app, and get the 3-word location for where you are. When you tell someone else that location, they can plug it in on the same app on their phone, then just instruct their GPS to guide them to where you are. Here’s a quick video explaining how it works: https://youtu.be/czR4-7gP7f0   2. Glympse (Glympse.com) Free This is an app I’ve heard a lot of people talking about but I had not used it previously. I like it. Basically, it just gives someone the ability to see where you are on a map. So if you “send” someone a Glympse (by choosing them from your contacts list on your phone), they can see where you are so they’ll know when you will arrive. Or, you can “request” a Glympse from someone you’re waiting on, so you can have an idea of when they’ll show up. My daughter lives about 10 minutes away and one day last week I knew she would be coming over so I requested a Glympse from her. She accepted the request, and when I looked at the Glympse app on my phone, there was the green arrow, right at her condo. Then it started moving and I could “see” her traveling down the road. I could even tell when she was at a red light because the arrow would stop for a minute or two at an intersection. This might sound a little creepy. But one thing to remember is that your location is only viewable by the person (or group of people) that you send it to. And, you can authorize it for a set period of time. When my daughter used it, she just set it to track her location for 15 minutes. That would probably be the most common one, if you’re just using it for when you’re meeting someone. Here’s a video from when Glympse was featured on the Today show last year: https://youtu.be/LlZs5uesDmw   3. Map My Ride (mapmyride.com) $5.99/month for Pro version Map My Ride is the program I use to keep track of my bike workouts (if you use it too, friend me and we can see each other’s progress). They do have a free version (and the free ver

As the owner of a computer repair business, I spend my days solving computer problems for my clients. That often means removing viruses, but it also includes fixing things that no longer seem to be working properly, getting software set up correctly, getting a printer to work, those kinds of things. But there are a few questions I get from clients that just don’t have an answer.   Maybe a better way to say it is that I cannot answer without some more clarification. A lot of what I do is interpreting what the client is telling me is happening, and trying to determine what is actually happening. So I drill down and ask questions, and eventually we come up with a solution. These are things I hear all the time. Question #1: My computer won’t do anything I know, that’s not actually a question. But when someone says that, they are in fact presenting it as if to ask “What’s wrong with my computer, since it won’t do anything?” To clarify, my response is: “So when you push the power button, you don’t see anything at all happen on the screen, and you don’t hear any fans or other noises, and you don’t see any lights come on?” And in most cases, the customer replies, “Oh, well, it does turn on, but then I can’t get it to do anything after that.” So we’ve determined the computer actually is “doing something”, just maybe not what it “should” be doing. The funny thing is, in a lot of cases we determine that the computer does in fact turn on, it goes through the initial BIOS function, it loads Windows, it connects to the wifi signal, and it loads the other software such as the antivirus, etc. But when the client clicks to open a website, the web browser shows “page cannot be found”. That I can deal with – but it’s a huge difference from “my computer won’t do anything”.   Question #2: My AOL doesn’t work Yes, another one that’s really not a question. For this one, I have to really bite my tongue to avoid coming back with a snarky response such as, “Yes, that’s because it’s AOL” or something similar. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I’m not a fan of AOL. In fact, I despise it on many different levels. But I usually avoid getting into that debate, because most people that use AOL are going to keep using AOL in spite of my attempts to convert them to something better. The sad thing is, if the AOL software is screwing up, there really isn’t a lot you can do other than uninstalling it and reinstalling it. In some cases, it’s an issue with Windows or some other software that’s conflicting with AOL so it might be able to be resolved that way. But AOL is a free service (even though they make millions from the unknowing people that continue to pay for it monthly), so they don’t really offer a legitimate “tech support” service to help you figure out why their program isn’t working properly. And if you go online looking for help with your AOL software, there’s a good chance you’ll end up talking to a scammer who will point out all kinds of “problems” with your computer, then ask you for your credit card # in order to fix those “problems” (which don’t really exist).   Question #3: What’s the best free antivirus? This is a tough one. I am well aware that the customer is really saying, “I don’t want to pay for it, but I know I need to have some kind of protection installed.” And since most people don’t expect to get infected anyway, they might not place a very high priority on how good the software is that’s protecting their computer. There are a couple of issues with this question. First, many of the “free” antiviruses available now are actually purveyors of malware. It’s ironic, but the program you install to keep crap off your computer… puts crap on your computer. Because they make money from it. Second, if I named a particular program that may be better than the others, it might come across that I am somehow “endorsing” it. Even if I include all kinds of disclaimers with it, the bottom line is that if they use that freebie antivirus and then they get infected with a virus (or several), the thing they’ll remember is, “Well, you’re the one that recommended it.” So I in fact do NOT recommend any free antivirus because none of them are sufficient to protect your computer against the wide array of threats in circulation now. If you want to keep your computer safe, you will need to purchase something.   Question #4: I keep getting an error message This one actually might be the most frustrating, for both me and for my client. For the client, it’s maddening because this stupid error message keeps popping up

This past week I was talking to my friend Sue. She uses Facebook sometimes, and she was asking about videos that show up on her Facebook news feed. As you scroll down looking at all the things that get posted, you might notice that if someone has posted a video, it just starts automatically playing when you see it. You can turn off Facebook video auto-play if you want.   There are a couple of reasons why you might want to turn off video auto-play (there are probably others, but these two come to mind pretty quickly): 1. Data usage factor. Obviously, a high percentage of people use Facebook on their phone. If you do that, and you’re not connected to a wifi signal, you’re probably using up your monthly allotment of data on your cell phone plan. That can get expensive. In Sue’s case, she and her husband are only in this area temporarily. So rather than sign up for a full internet connection, they use a mobile hotspot just so they can get online and check email. But when they go on Facebook and start seeing all those videos start playing on their own, that means data is being downloaded and counts toward their monthly limit. Sue doesn’t care about seeing those videos, but if the videos start playing on their own, she’s paying for them. 2. Annoyance factor. Sometimes when I’m on Facebook and I’m trying to read something, there’s another post on the screen that has one of those videos. There’s no sound of course (unless I deliberately hit “Play” to watch it) but the movement can be pretty distracting. I’m trying to read a friend’s legitimate status update but an inch away from that text is a kitten chasing a laser pointer dot, even though I didn’t ask for it to start playing. The good news is, you can turn that off. If you disable autoplay, you’ll just see a still frame of the video. If you want to watch it, just mouse over it and click play. Here’s how to disable Facebook video autoplay on your computer: 1. In Facebook, look up in the top right corner. Click on the dropdown menu at the right:   2. In the new menu that is displayed, click on Settings:   3. In the next window, click on “Videos” over on the left side:   4. In the “Video Settings” window, click the dropdown menu next to “Auto-Play videos” and choose “Off”:     Here’s how to disable Facebook video autoplay on your Android phone: 1. Open the Facebook app, click on the phone’s “Menu” button, and then click on “Settings”:   2. In the Settings screen, click on “Videos play automatically” and choose “Off”:     Here’s how to disable Facebook video autoplay on your iPad (iPhone is similar I think): 1. Go to the “Settings” page and scroll down, then click on Facebook 2. On the right side, click the word “Settings”, then click “Auto-play” 3. In the Auto-play settings window, choose “Off”   (can’t verify this for sure on the iPhone, since I don’t own one to test it – maybe an iPhone user could verify in the comments below)  The post How to stop videos in your Facebook news feed from auto-playing first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I’ve written blog posts about LastPass, the online secure password manager. I have been using it for quite some time, and I have set it up for several of my clients. You may have heard recently that LastPass may have been compromised. I wanted to clear up what (may have) happened, and what you need to do if you use LastPass (and yes, I continue to highly recommend that you use it).   I’m not going to go into all the details of how LastPass works and why I recommend it – that is all covered in great detail in my blog post where I wrote about it (here). My purpose here today is for you to understand that it’s still fine to use, and what you need to do if you already have a LastPass account. LastPass dominated the “tech news” headlines recently. The details can get pretty technical. The underlying important facts here are these: 1. LastPass is a high-value target. Think about it – they store all of the important passwords for probably hundreds of thousands of people all around the world. If someone with malicious intent got access to all of that information, it would be hard to place a value on what it would be worth on the black market. So it’s very important that LastPass gets their security right. 2. LastPass does it right. LastPass does everything possible to make sure that data remains confidential. In fact, even LastPass themselves cannot access it because it’s all encrypted. In fact, they take precaution to a whole new level. That’s why, if there is any entity on the internet that you can trust, it’s LastPass (in my opinion, based on what I know and have heard about them). Not only because of their integrity and business philosophy, but also because of the security measures and procedures they have in place. You may have heard or read news stories that include phrases such as “LastPass got hacked” or “LastPass has had a data breach” or something similar. For the most part, that is media sensationalism. What actually happened, based on a report that was in the LastPass blog announcing the incident, was this: “…our team discovered and blocked suspicious activity on our network.” Furthermore (again, directly from LastPass): “…we have found no evidence that encrypted user vault data was taken, nor that LastPass user accounts were accessed.” The two things that might pertain to LastPass users that could be of concern, which may have been compromised: The user’s email address The password hint If a hacker has your email address, that does not give him access to your LastPass account. He also needs your password. Would your password hint give too much information about what your password is? Personally, I don’t like using password hints at all because it gives the bad guy something to work with. But frankly – for a good, strong password there is no hint anyway. I mean, if your password is “mPi4h7c$jrb&%” how do you come up with a hint for that? There is no hint that would work. But if your password is Florida, and your password hint is “the sunshine state” you might be in trouble. This just emphasizes the importance of using a password that is both unique (not used for any other account) and strong (random numbers, characters and upper and lower case letters). What action should you take? To make sure you’re LastPass account is completely safe, I recommend doing at least 2 things (and I’ll suggest a third action if you like to be REALLY cautious): First, change your master password. Make it a good one, as I mentioned above. But then that brings up the question, how do you remember it? You could write it on a little piece of paper and stick it in a drawer or in your wallet. Of course, don’t label it “LastPass master password”. Just write it down somewhere so that you know where to get it but if someone else finds it they won’t know what it is. In fact, even if you write it down and store it somewhere, you could include some fake characters at the beginning or end of the password, and only you would know that they don’t belong there. For example, if your actual password is yT5k9&3nMdCC you could add a random 4-digit number to the end so that what is written down is yT5k9&3nMdCC8346. Then you might at some point in the future try to use that full password and when it doesn’t work, it will remind you that you added the 4 numbers at the end to make it safer. To change your password, go to lastpass.com and log in. On the left side, click on Account Settings. In the new window, click on “Change Master Password”. Enter your old password, then your new password twice and click “Save Master Password”:   Second, enable country-restricted login. Let’s be honest here. I have nothing against the nice folks of Russia and China, but if someone is going to try to

Last week I wrote about what to do with the little “Get Windows 10” icon that showed up, and after that I got a number of questions about Windows 10 in general. Lots of people are wondering how it will work, what it will be like, and other details. So here are the answers to some of the questions you might have about the soon-to-be-released Windows 10.   What actually happens when I click to reserve my upgrade? It might appear that nothing happens. But in the background, the Windows 10 upgrade is downloading in bits and pieces over time. That way, by the time the actual release date gets here, you already have the full download and on that day the only thing left is to actually install it. And even the installation will happen automatically, just like other Windows Update installations. If your computer is on at 3 am, that’s when it usually happens. Otherwise it would be the next time you boot it up.   I clicked it for the reservation but changed my mind. How do I cancel it? Click the icon again. In the new window, click the “menu” icon in the top left:   In the new menu that slides out on the left, side, click on “View confirmation”:   In the next window, click on “Cancel reservation”:   On the next screen, confirm that you do want to cancel. Now it’s cancelled. You can get it back again in the future, and you will still be able to upgrade even though you cancelled this early reservation.   What if I didn’t get the upgrade icon? There are a few reasons why you may not have gotten the upgrade icon. You might not have the updated Service Pack for Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. You also might not have Windows Updates set to install automatically. Or maybe Microsoft just doesn’t like you (not true – they love everyone equally). You could go to Control Panel – Windows Update and run it manually if you want, and see if that brings in the upgrade icon. But the bottom line is, you don’t need that icon right now anyway because it’s best to not click it yet for the “automated” upgrade. You will always be able to get it later. The best thing to do right now is to wait.   How long will Windows 10 be free? If you’re upgrading to Windows 10 from Windows 7 or 8 or 8.1, you can do that anytime from the day it’s released (currently scheduled for July 29, 2015) and for one year after that, and you will not have to pay anything.   If I upgrade in the first year for free, how much will I have to pay in the second year and following? Nothing. If you upgrade in the first year, you will have the Windows 10 license and it is good for life. There is no subscription in place at this point. There have been some speculations that Microsoft might make Windows into a subscription-based product (like they have done for Office) but there is nothing to substantiate that at this point.   How much will it cost if I upgrade after the free period? Microsoft has not yet published the pricing for upgrades after the free year. If you’re running a version of Windows that is older than Windows 7, you’ll need to purchase the full version of Windows 10 (rather than getting the free upgrade). That full version will be $119 for Windows 10 Home, and $199 for Windows 10 Professional. The pricing for upgrades would be less than these of course.   How will Windows 10 be different from Windows 7 or 8? There will be several differences, and at some point after the release date I will probably do a full blog post on this. But here are some of the basic things that are different: Start menu – this is probably the one that most people are excited about. The Start button and Start menu are not only back, but greatly improved and expanded. No charms bar – if you are one of the millions of people that hated that stupid charms bar, you’ll be happy. New web browser – this replaces Internet Explorer. Earlier, this new browser was called Spartan. Now Microsoft has renamed it the Edge browser. Internet Explorer was really crappy for a long time, which is why so many people switched to Chrome or Firefox. You’ll still be able to use those other browsers, but it will be interesting to see what Edge is like.   Do I have to backup my computer before getting the upgrade? Technically, no. You are not required to. But the smart users will do a full system image backup before getting any Windows 10 upgrade. You want to be included among the “smart users” group, don’t you? Seriously, I cannot over-emphasize how complex a computer’s operating system is. With this upgrade, you’ll be changing out the current operating system to a whole new one – can you see where there is a potential for things to go wrong? If you have a system image backup, you can just go back to your current version with no hassle and nothing lost. For me, I do a new

On June 1, 2015 – about a week ago – you might have noticed something new on your computer. You would have seen this if you are using Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1. It’s the Windows 10 notification, encouraging you to “reserve” your free upgrade to Windows 10.   That morning, I started getting questions from lots of my clients who noticed it and wondered what to do about it, if anything. So I sent out a “special edition” email newsletter to advise this: You can ignore it for now. In fact, if you want to, you can remove it from your screen (I’ll show you how to do that later in this post). The full release of Windows 10 is not out yet. The current planned release date is July 29, or roughly 2 months from now. So why is Microsoft sending out this notification already? They’re planning ahead, since on July 29 their servers will be slammed with people trying to get the upgrade on that day. It’s about a 3 gb download, which is significant even on a high-speed connection. With this notification that popped up on your screen, you can choose to “reserve” your upgrade. That means that the installation file will download in the background AHEAD of the July 29 release date, and then once that date has passed you can choose to install it whenever you wish to. My current recommendation: wait. If you’re currently running Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 the upgrade to Windows 10 will be free for an entire year – from July 29, 2015 to July 28, 2016. You can upgrade anytime during that year at no cost. It’s not yet known what the cost will be to upgrade after the free year. It’s common knowledge that a new piece of software – particularly one as complicated as an operating system is – will have some bugs.   When Microsoft releases a new OS, let other people be the pioneers. Let their computers get the bugs, the crashes, the freeze-ups, and the subsequent updates to fix those problems. Then, after the dust has settled, maybe 6 months later, go ahead and get the Windows 10 upgrade if you want. Anyone that reads this blog, listens to my podcast, or gets my Monday email newsletter will know when I have begun to officially recommend getting the upgrade to Windows 10. I’ve been checking out a “preview” version of Windows 10, and the early indications is that it will be very good. So most likely, at some point, I will be recommending the upgrade during that first year. But right now, we know Windows 7 works fine and is fast and stable. Even if you’re using the cumbersome and unpopular Windows 8 or 8.1, I really can’t recommend doing the upgrade right away. Let Microsoft get the kinks out of the system first. In the meantime, what can you do with that little Windows 10 icon at the bottom of your screen? Ignore it Explore it Remove it Ignore it: Really, that icon sitting there doesn’t hurt anything. So you can leave it there if you just don’t want to mess with it right now. Explore it: If you do one left-click on the icon, it brings up a new window. In that window you can click to reserve your upgrade (not recommended yet) or you can click on the “advance slide” link on the right to scroll through Microsoft’s little sales pitch on how great Windows 10 is going to be:   When you close that window, you will still see the icon sitting down there at the bottom of your screen. So you can click it anytime to reserve your upgrade, if you want to. Remove it: if you just don’t want to have it there for whatever reason, you can just get rid of it. This doesn’t actually remove it from your computer; it just keeps it from showing up down there in the Notifications area. To do this: – Right click in a blank area on the taskbar (the bar across the bottom of your screen, and in the new menu, choose “Properties”:   – In the new window, click the button that says “Customize”:   – Now look for “GWX” (it’s probably the first one in the list), and in the drop down menu choose “Hide icon and notifications”, then click OK   No doubt over the next couple of months, we will hear many times from Microsoft about all the cool new features in Windows 10 and why everyone should upgrade. And in time, you probably will upgrade. But there’s no real advantage to being first in line. Be a settler, not a pioneer. The post What to do about Windows 10 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Summer is almost here, time to do some traveling! When you’re on a once-in-a-lifetime vacation, and taking hundreds (or thousands) of pictures, one of the worst things that could happen is for you to lose those pictures. How could this happen, and how can this be prevented?   Here are a few ways this could happen: You drop your digital camera in the water. Your camera gets stolen. Your camera gets left behind in the hotel room and the staff checks and can’t find it. Your camera’s memory card gets corrupted. You accidentally delete the pictures you intended to save. Of course there are other bad things that can happen to electronics while traveling, but you get the idea. A lot can happen, and the risk of loss is pretty high since these photographs are essentially irreplaceable. But there’s a simple process you can use that will virtually guarantee the safety of your pictures. First, you will need a few things: 1. A memory card for each day of your actual vacation. 10 day vacation, 8 memory cards (assuming the first and last days are spent in transit). If you use SD cards that are 8 GB in size, and your pictures are 10 mb each or less, that means you can take 800 pictures each day. Cost of 8 of these memory cards: around $50.   2. A laptop computer. I’m going to assume you already own one.   3. A portable USB drive. If you don’t already have one, this is something you can use at home even after you are done traveling. These are about the size of a pack of cigarettes, and the only cable is the one that plugs into the USB port of your laptop. If you get a 1 TB drive, that will provide more than enough storage space. Cost: about $55.   Here’s the strategy you use for taking pictures each day: 1. Spend the day having fun and taking as many pictures as you want. 2. At the end of the day, connect your camera to your laptop and COPY the pictures to a folder named “Day 1”. It’s important that you do not move the pictures, you just want to copy them. Now the pictures are still on the memory card in your camera, and they are also on your laptop. You would do the same thing the next day, using a folder called “Day 2”. 3. After you have copied the pictures to the “daily” folder on the laptop, connect the USB portable drive to your computer and copy the folder of pictures from the laptop to the portable drive. Then disconnect the portable drive and put it back in your suitcase or in the hotel room safe. At this point your pictures for that day are in 3 places: the memory card, your laptop, and the portable drive. 4. Take the memory card out of your camera and put it in a safe place, such as a small envelope inside a purse. Then put the next day’s memory card in the camera and you’re ready to get started the next morning, capturing a bunch of new memories for that day. As you read through the steps detailed above, it might seem like this is a big hassle and too inconvenient. But in reality, it just takes a few minutes at the end of the day and after a couple of days it will be such an easy routine you won’t even think about it being a bother. So if you accidentally leave your camera behind and never see it again, who cares. You have the pictures on your laptop and external drive. If you lose your camera AND drop your laptop in the ocean, you still have the pictures on your external drive. If you lose your camera, AND your laptop, AND your external drive, you still have all the originals on the individual memory cards. That might seem like overkill or paranoia, but consider the alternative. You just get a 64 gb camera memory card and take a few hundred pictures each day, just adding them to that same card continually. This means all of your 800 pictures are all on that one card, in that one device. You take one last picture on the airplane flight as you head home, and stick the camera in the seatback pouch in front of you. As you are driving home from the airport, you remember it – but it’s never found. That’s when you would wish you had been a little more “paranoid”. This is all based on the assumption that you are using a digital camera to take all these pictures. If you use your phone, you could actually use the same process and just pop a different memory card in your phone each day. But you can also set up a process so that whenever you take a picture on your phone, it’s automatically uploaded to Dropbox or Google Drive or some other online storage service. But uploading to the cloud assumes you have internet access, which may not be the case depending on how remote your vacation destination is. The post The safest way to never lose your important vacation pictures first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

In the past I’ve written about third-party services that will alert you to new Craigslist postings. One of the ones I have used over the years is Blogtrottr, and I have definitely gotten some good deals as a result. But now there’s an even better way – getting new ad alerts directly from Craigslist.   What’s the value in this? Let’s talk about an example situation. In our example, I’m looking to buy a used car. I want to get a Honda Civic. My requirements are: model year must be 2009 or newer no more than 50,000 miles I only want to see ads that include pictures of the car automatic transmission I only want to look at cars that are priced $11,000 or less So I go to my local Craigslist site at Craigslist.org, and I do a search based on those preferences. In that search, 5 cars come up. I call about a couple of them but don’t end up buying any of them. Of course, people are listing cars for sale all the time on Craigslist. Sometimes they are overpriced because the owner thinks it’s worth more than it really is. But some are actually amazing bargains. Of course, it’s the bargains that you are really looking for. But the key to getting a bargain on Craigslist is being the first (or one of the first) to see that ad. There are LOTS of people shopping on Craigslist for a good deal on a car. If someone posts their car for sale at a really good price, chances are someone looking for a car is going to just happen to search Craigslist a short time after the ad is posted, and go buy that car. They found it just because they were lucky enough to be searching right after the ad was listed, so hardly anyone else had a chance to even see that ad. But if you check Craigslist each day at 8 am and 5 pm, what if the hugely-discounted car for sale gets listed at 9 am? That means it’s going to sit there all day, with tons of other people looking at it, before you even do your next check at 5 pm. That car would likely already be sold by then. So you could just save that Craigslist search on your smartphone and keep checking it throughout the day, but your employer might not be too happy with that. Not to mention that it’s kind of a pain. That’s why there have been some services that have popped up, to notify you about new Craigslist ads. That way you don’t have to keep checking it all the time. You just get an email when a new ad gets posted that meets your criteria. As I said, I have used Blogtrottr for a while. It was okay, but not perfect. The emails they send have third-party advertisements, and I can’t really fault them for that since they have to make money somehow. But the real problem with Blogtrottr and others is the fact that it’s not really an “immediate” notification. Sometimes I would get an email and check the ad on Craigslist and see that it actually got posted several hours earlier. In some cases I didn’t get the email alert until the next day. That kind of defeats the purpose if you’re trying to know about a new listing right away in order to get there before anyone else can. Well, I don’t use Blogtrottr any more, because Craigslist now offers this alert service directly. And of course it’s free. Of course, I wanted to be sure that the notifications were immediate, so I checked it by creating a “test” alert request. Then I posted an ad on Craigslist that matched that alert. Within a few minutes, I was sent an email telling me about that new posting. Bingo! One of the keys to this strategy is to make your search as specific as possible, based on as many criteria as you wish. In fact, it’s even better if you create multiple detailed searches and save them in your Craigslist account, and get an alert for each one. With a specific search like that, a bargain that matches that search might not show up in Craigslist very often – but when it does, you’ll be the first to know about it! To set up an email alert, first you have to create the search and see the results of that search on your screen. Then look for the link at the top that says “email alert”:   That will show you your list of saved searches, and you can toggle the email alert on or off if you want. You can always see all of your saved searches by clicking on the “Searches” tab when you’re logged in to your Craigslist account:   As far as I know, there is no limit to the number of searches and alerts you can save in your Craigslist account. For those people that are sort of “entrepreneurial” by nature, this alert service could present an opportunity to make some money. Do you have some type of specialized knowledge in a particular area? If you know about certain specialty items and their value, you could use that to your advantage. You could set up an alert for a particular item that you know is worth $500. But you only get notified if someone posts o

There’s one thing that is widely hated by Windows 8 users everywhere – the Windows 8.1 Start Screen. I usually refer to it as the App Screen, since that’s what it’s filled with – each tile represents an app. Microsoft originally called it “Metro” but changed later to just “Start Screen”. And there are some people that refer to it out of frustration, using words that, in the interest of good taste, I won’t repeat here in my blog.   I think most people dislike it for a couple of primary reasons: They’re not used to it, so using it is not really “intuitive” It keeps showing up when they aren’t expecting it and they don’t want to see it The Start screen is part of Windows 8.1, but you don’t have to use it. The problem is, with a lot of the Windows 8.1 computers I work on, I see that when the computer first boots up, it goes directly to that Start screen. Then you have to find the “Desktop” app to click on and get back to the more familiar environment of the Windows Desktop. It would be much more convenient if the computer just booted up directly to the Desktop screen, right? If that’s what you prefer (as most people do), you can set it to do that. After all, your computer is not the boss, you’re the boss! The computer has to do what you tell it to do! You just have to know how to tell it. Here’s what you do: 1. The taskbar is the bar that runs along the bottom edge of the screen. In an open area on that bar, do a RIGHT click and in the new menu that comes up, choose “Properties”. 2. In the new window that comes up, click on the “Navigation” tab. 3. Checkmark the box that says “Go to the desktop instead of Start when I sign in”:   4. Click OK. That’s it! Now, whenever you sign in to your Windows 8.1 computer, it will just go straight to the desktop view – no more Start Screen. Of course, if for some reason you wanted to see the Start Screen again with all the apps, you can get there – just move the cursor to the top right corner of the screen, then in the “Charms bar” that slides out from the right, you can choose the Start screen icon from there. One thing to note – the procedure described above will only work if you have the Windows 8.1 update. If your computer is still running just Windows 8, the procedure is different and a little more complicated. But you need to get the 8.1 update anyway, so just do that. The post How to get Windows 8.1 to start up in the Desktop view first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I think right now is the best time ever to be alive, because we are seeing so many amazing innovations in lots of different areas. I’ve just recently learned of something that I believe will change the way we think about location and mapping around the world. It’s called What3Words. What3Words.com is where you can get the app, and you can play with the mapping concept it’s based on, right there on the website at what3words.com. This innovative idea solves a big problem. The problem is trying to describe to someone where you are. This can be a problem in a variety of situations: – You’re at the state fair. This is an event that covers hundreds of acres because there’s a lot there – all the animals, the midway with all the games, the entertainment area, the rides, the huge fields that are used for parking. Your wife might want to go and browse the 4H vegetable growing competition, and you want to take the kids to see the pig races. An hour later you are trying to find each other. You might be able to describe nearby landmarks, but it can be difficult to walk straight from where you are to where she is since the place she is standing doesn’t have an actual “address”. – You’re in your car, driving on a long, desolate country road. Suddenly you have a flat tire, and you discover that your spare is also flat. You can call AAA to come out and change your tire, but you’re not even sure of the name of the road you’re on, much less what the address would be. How do you tell them where to come? – You’re visiting your friend in Australia for a week. You go out for a walk, and end up walking farther than you originally planned, and now you’re out in the middle of nowhere without a sense of which direction to go. You could call or text message your friend to come and get you, but the only “landmarks” to describe are trees. How can your friend find easily find you? What3Words has solved this problem. They have divided the entire planet into little 3 meter by 3 meter squares – 57 trillion of them in fact. And every one of those squares is designated by a unique set of just 3 words. This is so much better than the “system” we have now: – It’s more accurate. More specific. – It’s universal worldwide. Currently, each country has its own system for addresses. You might know the system for the country where you live (for example, I know that each town in the US has its own 5-digit ZIP code) but if you travel somewhere else, such as Canada, that’s all different (I have no idea how the postal codes in Canada designate locations). And in third-world or developing countries they might not even have a workable system for every location. But they do now – every 3m by 3m square has an address. – It’s MUCH easier to remember. It doesn’t even compare. For example, there’s a nearby hair salon with this mailing address: Hair Cuttery, Bayside Bridge Shopping Plaza, 1500 North McMullen-Booth Rd, Suite A15, Clearwater, Florida 33759. Instead of that long address, you could instead use these three words: weep.hilltop.myth. That would take you right to the front door of that business, and that location is the only location in the WORLD that has that 3-word address. Of course you can pinpoint a location somewhere in the world with latitude and longitude coordinates, but words are much easier to remember. All of the 3-word addresses for the entire world fits into an app small enough to run on your smart phone. So wherever you happen to be, it can figure out which 3-word address you’re in so that you can communicate that to AAA, your spouse, or your friend in Australia. And it even works offline, so you don’t need a data connection in order to use it. The way this will change things is astounding. From the website: They have also made this explanatory video that gives a good overview: https://youtu.be/EW2PuGwYmjY The post Every location on earth now has a simple, 3-word address first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

What would you do if you had a large file on your computer, and you needed to send it to someone by email? For example, you used your phone to take a video of your dog doing some tricks, and you want to email it to your friend who lives 500 miles away? To send an email by regular attachment, most email services have a strict limit on file size – and most video files are fairly big. But thanks to Google, there’s an easy way to do that now. You can use Google Drive. For this example, I’m going to use my Gmail account. Google owns Gmail, and Google obviously owns Google Drive, so they all work together perfectly. Google Drive is basically just data storage space that Google gives you as part of your Google account. You get 15 gb total, which is quite a bit of space. Keep in mind, however, that this 15 gb is used for your Gmail account (including any attachments such as pictures), Google Docs, Google Pictures and your Google Drive general storage. But to put things in perspective – I have had my Google account since Gmail first became available back in 2004, and I archive most of my emails. And even now after 11 years, I am using less than half of the 15 gb of space I am allowed. And if for some reason you need more space, Google sells it cheap: 15 gb is already free with your account 100 gb is $1.99 per month 1 tb (1000 gb) is $9.99 per month So the first step is to get your Google/Gmail account if you don’t already have one. If you want to, you can install Google Drive on your computer (you can get that free at drive.google.com). That just makes it easier if you want to put files or folders there on a regular basis, but having it on your computer is not necessary for sending a large file by email. If you already have the large file stored in Google Drive, that’s fine. But for this example, we’ll assume you just have the file stored on your computer and not yet in Google Drive. Here’s how you email the large file: 1. Go to gmail.com and log in to your email account. 2. Click on “Compose” in the top left, to create a new email. Put in your friend’s email address and the subject line, and any text you want to include in the message area. 3. Now you need to attach the video. Look in the bottom row, and you’ll see the Google Drive icon:   4. Click on the icon. That opens a new window, and one of the options is “Upload”.   5. When you click “Upload”, a new window opens. You want to click on “Select files from your computer”.   6. Now you need to find the dog tricks video, wherever that is stored on your computer. When you find it, double click on that file.   7. Now you will see your video file is listed as the file that will be inserted. It even shows the file size (in this case, 65 mb). If this is showing correctly, click the “upload” button at the bottom of the screen.   8. You will see the progress bar as the file uploads: 9. When it’s done (usually pretty quickly, depending on the file size) you should be back to your email “Compose” window with the file listed. If you want to, you can click to attach another file. When you are done adding files to this email, just click the “Send” button:   10. Since you just now uploaded that video file, you might get a window that comes up telling you that this particular file is not currently “Shared” with the person you are sending it to. That’s no problem. Just click “Share and send”:   And that’s it! Usually within a few minutes it will be waiting for your friend to check email and find it in their inbox, waiting to read. But here’s the great thing – since it wasn’t actually sent as a traditional “attachment”, your friend doesn’t have to wait for it to load in his email inbox. All he sees is a link to click on. When he clicks that link, he will see your video, in your Google Drive folder. He can watch the video, or he can save it to his computer if he wants to.   So even though Gmail limits file attachments to 25 mb or smaller, you just sent your friend a 65 mb video file. And by using this method (sending via Google Drive) you can send up to TEN GIGABYTES of files (that’s 10,000 mb)! You might not need to do that, but it’s nice to know that you can if you run into that situation. There are definitely other methods for transferring large files from one computer to another one over the internet. You can use Dropbox and share a file. You could upload the video to YouTube, and then send your friend the link to it. Using Google Drive is just one option, but it’s a very simple one. And simple is usually good. The post The easy way to email a huge file first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Many of the things I cover here on my blog and on my podcast are products or services that I discover just in my routine daily work. Recently I came across a couple of handy things – one is an online service, the other is a product that’s sold online – and I know that a lot of people will find one or both of these useful.   I was recently involved in a transaction with a client out of state, and part of the process was that the client needed to send me some money via Paypal. I know there are a few people that don’t like Paypal, but I use them all the time and so far have not had any problems. When someone pays you money through Paypal, Paypal takes a small percentage of the amount. That’s how they make their money. But in this case, I needed for the NET amount to be a certain dollar figure, so the client had to add on the amount of the Paypal fees to what he sent so that I would actually receive the right dollar amount. That meant we needed to figure out what Paypal would charge for their fees. I know as a rough figure Paypal is usually around 5%, but that percentage gets adjusted based on the amount being sent. So I didn’t know exactly what percentage we would have deducted. And if you go on Paypal’s website, it’s not the easiest thing to find (although I know they do publish the information somewhere). I also could have called them, but going through the phone menu with a big company can sometimes be a hassle. So I found an easier way – the online Paypal Fee Calculator. You can try it out at TheFeeCalculator.com.   To use it, the process really couldn’t be any simpler. Right there on the front page is the place for you to enter the dollar amount of the transaction. For example, if my client is going to send me $475.00 through Paypal, and I want to know how much Paypal is going to deduct for their fees:   You enter the amount, and hit “Calculate” and it immediately gives you this answer (with a little bit of editorializing):   In most cases that’s what you need to know, what amount you will net. But there’s another little bit of information that is also processed. If you know the amount that you NEED to net, what is the amount that the sender needs to send? That calculation is also offered on the same page:   The site is run by a guy named Derek. He tells about how it came about back in 2005:   So now, whenever I need to calculate a Paypal fee, I know where I can go to get it quickly and easily. But while I was on the site, I noticed what appeared to be an advertisement, right below the place where you enter the dollar amount:   It’s talking about nametags, like the ones that people wear when they work in a service business. Normally I don’t even notice ads such as that, much less click on them. But for some reason I clicked on this one. I do wear a name tag. It has my company logo and my name on it. There’s no real requirement for it, but there are some benefits. When I’m doing on onsite appointment in a client’s home (or business), and it’s the first time they have met with me, a name tag with the company logo adds a degree of credibility. And actually I even wear it when I’m working at home, because sometimes first-time clients drop off their computer at my home office. And in addition to the credibility factor, if I happen to stop in a store to pick something up, or I stop to fill up with gas, there have been several instances where people notice the name tag and comment on it. When they see “The Computer Tutor” the most common remark is “Boy, I sure need someone like YOU!” and in a few cases it has resulted in a new client. So I do definitely find value in wearing my name tag. But I’ve had this one for a few years, so it’s starting to look a little worn. The colors are fading a bit and it’s just not as sharp as it once was. When I clicked on the text link advertisement, it took me to a different website – Nametag Ninja (NametagNinja.com).   What caught my eye were the 3 main features displayed on the first page: Free shipping No setup fees 24 hour turnaround At that point I knew that as long as the prices were reasonable, I was going to order a new nametag. When I checked into the pricing options, I saw that a new nametag was only going to cost me $8. I don’t remember what I paid for my current one but I know it was more than that, and that was from a local business that took a week to get it done. Here’s the interesting part. In placing my order, there was a problem with the online ordering process. I was trying to customize the nametag to a particular size, and to have a magnetic attachment rather than a pin. But it wasn’t showing up that way in the final order. So before I completed the process, I sent an email to inquire about how to get this resolved. Almost immediatel

Today I’m going to show you a couple of things that you might find to be pretty handy. Nothing fancy really, but each of these could definitely be a solution for someone that’s in need of either one of them.   Tool #1: Simple countdown timer It doesn’t get much easier than this. Just go to Google, and in the search box type: timer 1 minute and hit Enter on the keyboard. Right away you will see a countdown timer at the top of the Google search results. But you don’t have to click on it or do anything else – it is already running, counting down from one minute.   Right under the numbers you will see the link to Stop, if you want to pause the timer. Or you can reset it back to 1 minute. When the timer gets down to zero, it sounds a little beeping alarm that sounds like a digital alarm clock. Easy and free. You can set the time for any number of minutes or hours up to 23 hours. I couldn’t get it to work when I tried putting in 24 hours, but I didn’t mess around with it for very long so maybe there’s a way to do that. How would you use this? The possibilities are unlimited. For me, I try to take a break from working at my computer sometimes, but I don’t want to get sucked into Facebook or YouTube for so long that it becomes a big waste of time. So when I take a break, I just open up a new tab in my browser and start the countdown timer for 5 or 10 minutes, and when I hear the beep I get back to work. But really, anything you do that needs to be tracked for time is a potential use for it.   Tool #2: Video blocker This is an extension that works with Chrome and Firefox. I love this little thing because it solves an annoying problem. The problem has to do with YouTube. YouTube tries to be smart about what videos it offers you when you first go to the site. If you’re subscribed to any particular YouTube channels, it will often display new videos from those channels. It tries to display up front the videos it THINKS you want to see, based on what videos you’ve looked at previously. So if you watched some videos about football yesterday, then when you go to YouTube today, you’ll see that they’ll show you some links to some other football videos. They’re just trying to give you what you want, in order to keep you on the site and viewing videos as long as possible. That, in itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. The problem arises when I might click to view a video that outside my typical areas of interest. For example, a friend might tell me, “Hey, you have to check out this video of this guy – he’s the best man at his brother’s wedding and for the Best Man Toast, he SINGS a song that he wrote himself!” And to be fair, it is a pretty amazing video that has recently gone viral. You can watch it on YouTube, and right below the video itself are the lyrics so you can follow along. So if I watch that video today, then later today or tomorrow when I go back to YouTube, it’s likely that the front page is going to be offering me more wedding videos. Actual full weddings, dancing at wedding receptions, people falling down at weddings, wedding photography services, and on and on.   This might even continue for days and weeks – every time I go to YouTube I have to wade through all the wedding-related videos in order to see the things that I actually want to see. Video Blocker solves that problem. When you have Video Blocker installed, you can go to YouTube and right-click on any video thumbnail, and you are given the option to block all the videos from that particular channel from being displayed.   It’s great! So now, with the help of this little tool, I can have some actual control over what gets displayed whenever I open up YouTube to see what’s new. To get Video Blocker, do a Google search for video blocker. If you’re using Chrome, you would want the Chrome extension: If you’re using Firefox, get the Firefox version: When you click the link to get it, it will ask you to install it as a browser extension or add-on. Go ahead and do that, then restart Chrome or Firefox and go exploring YouTube and try it out. The post A couple of handy computer tools first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

If you buy a new computer, part of your purchase decision is what software you need to also purchase. If you have a lot of specialized needs, you could probably spend more on the additional programs than you did on the computer itself. But the fact is, you don’t necessarily NEED to do that – there are free alternatives to almost every program available today. First a big word of warning – don’t go on Google and start searching for “free software”. If you do that, just about every website you find in the search results will almost certainly infect your computer with all kinds of malware and viruses. Searching Google for “free” anything (games, music, software, screensavers, etc.) is one of the most common ways to choke your computer with bad stuff. You need to know specifically what you’re looking for, which is what I’m going to tell you about here. Expensive software: Microsoft Office (shelf price $115 – $200 depending on version, or by subscription) Free alternative: LibreOffice (get it here) LibreOffice is the suite of programs that I usually install on the refurbished laptops that I sell. It allows you to create, open or edit just about any document that would normally be associated with Office programs such as Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. So if you create a document in Word format and email it to someone, they will be able to open it in Word. There’s another program called Open Office, also free, which has been around for quite some time as an alternative to MS Office. For me, I just find LibreOffice to be more intuitive and easier to use. They have similar functionality, so you can try each one and see which you prefer. Expensive software: Adobe Photoshop ($1525 for an older version, or newer one by subscription) Free alternative: Gimp (get it here) Gimp has been around forever and has quite a following. If you have used Photoshop before, you will probably catch on to Gimp fairly easily. However, they are both full of features that can take some practice to learn well. But there are lots of tutorials online if you are dedicated to learning it and taking advantage of all that it can do. Expensive software: Microsoft Outlook ($110 alone, or also available as part of certain versions of Microsoft Office) Free alternative: Windows Live Mail (get it here) One of the most popular email programs ever used was Outlook Express, which came installed as part of Windows. But the last version of Windows that included it was XP, so Outlook Express is no more. However, Microsoft replaced it with Windows Live Mail and I think it’s just as good or better than Outlook Express. It does just about everything you would want an email application to do. But it’s not included with your Windows installation now – you have to go and download it as part of the Windows Essentials group of programs. Expensive software: Adobe Audition ($800, or by subscription) Free alternative: Audacity (get it here) These programs are for creating and editing audio files. If you have any occasion to record your voice or someone else’s voice (or both), either of these would work well. Audition has a lot of “bells and whistles” that the average person would not need, which is one reason it’s pretty costly. For most people, Audacity is sufficient (and it has quite a few features itself). One of the most common uses for an audio editing program is to create a podcast, and both of these programs are very popular with podcasters around the world. Expensive software: Acronis True Image ($50) Free alternative: Macrium Reflect (get it here) These programs are for backing up your computer files and folders. I use Macrium for 2 types of backup every day: First, I clone my primary hard drive to a second internal drive in my desktop computer. So if the first one dies, I just switch over to the second one and I’m back in business. Second, I have Macrium create a system image that gets stored on an external drive. This means that everything on my computer is compressed and put into one file, in case I need to put all of it on a new hard drive after a crash. Yes, it’s sort of a duplicate effort. I do 2 other different backups each day as well – after preaching “back up your files” for so many years, it would not look good if I lost anything in a crash! To be fair, Acronis is not that expensive at $50. And Macrium Reflect is only free for personal use, and they do have other versions with extra features that they do charge for. But for most people, the free version will work fine. Expensive software: Windows ($75 – $200 depending on version) Free alternative: Linux (get it here) I know you’re probably not likely to make this switch, but I had to include it. If you have a computer that needs an operating system and you don’t want to spend money on it, this is a viable alternative to buying Window

I recently got a phone call from a business client. I’ll call him Matt for this story. Several months ago, Matt had a hard drive crash on his business computer. For a lot of people, this would have been a disaster. But thankfully, Matt had allowed me to set up an automated online backup for him, so all of his important files were safely stored away from the computer. I replaced the hard drive and reinstalled Windows, and Matt said that he and his partner could download his backed-up files and get them back on the computer. So that was the last I heard of that situation, until this past week when Matt called me.   As soon as he asked me the question, I knew what had happened. He said, “Back when we had the new hard drive put back in the computer, we downloaded all the documents from the online backup and they were all there, no problem. Now we want to go back and download the pictures, but we can’t find them. Do you know how we can get them from the backup account?” Not good. Those pictures are now gone. Here’s what happened: 1. Matt’s computer crashed. 2. Replacement hard drive was installed, and Windows was reinstalled on the new drive. At this point, it’s a functioning computer but all of the backed-up files are still not back on the computer. 3. Matt logs into the online backup account and downloads the Documents folder to his computer. These are the important files that he needs for his business, so he gets those documents and decides to just come back and get the rest of the files (pictures) later. 4. Now the computer starts doing the online backup again. But what does it back up? The important files that are on the computer (as it’s supposed to do). But at this point, the only important files on the computer are the Documents. So the pictures are not getting backed up. 5. Online backup services typically only save backups for 30 days. So when you do a backup today, the backup you did 30 days ago gets bumped off (deleted). So 30 days after the crash, the backup that had ALL the original files got deleted and now the only thing to be found in the online backup account is the Documents folder. So today’s lesson is this: When you are recovering your files from your backup service after your hard drive crashes, make sure you recover ALL of them at the same time – NOT just the ones you need right away. Or, if you aren’t sure what to do, just call me. The post Recovering from your online backup – don’t make this big mistake! first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

I got this question from one of my clients, Jim, recently: “Scott, whenever I move the mouse to wake up my laptop from Sleep Mode, I can’t access any website. I open Internet Explorer and it just says “Page cannot be found”. If I close Internet Explorer and wait a minute or two, I’m always able to connect to a website on the second try. Why is it doing this?” This probably happens to a lot of people, but they don’t bother trying to figure it out because they know after a couple of minutes it will start working properly anyway. But there’s actually a pretty easy fix for it. To know how to fix this issue, we have to first know why it’s happening. If you have seen this happen with your computer, it’s just because it’s configured to save power. You read that correctly. If you want to wake up your laptop and access a website, you might have to wait 1 or 2 minutes, but overall it’s worth it because you are saving multiple pennies off your electric bill each month. (Yes, that was me being sarcastic.) What’s happening is that your wifi adapter – the thing that connects your computer to your wireless router in order to access the internet – gets shut off when the computer goes into sleep mode. In a way, this sort of makes sense, because obviously if the computer is in sleep mode you won’t be using it to view websites, get your email, or anything else really. So there’s no reason to be connected to the internet either. But when you “wake up” your computer, it isn’t online immediately. It has to find the wifi signal and go through the process of connecting to the internet. In some computers that happens quickly, and in others it can take a minute or so. For Jim, it seemed like the connection was successful just because he tried a second time. But that’s kind of misleading. The reason it always works on the second try is simply because enough time has passed so that the wifi adapter has had time to connect to the router again. It really has nothing to do with how many times he tries. It’s kind of the same idea that drinking coffee can help you sober up after you’ve had too much to drink. In reality, coffee does not speed up the process. But it does give you something to do while time passes – and really it’s only the passage of time that gets the alcohol out of your system. So you could just wake up the computer, wait a minute, then go about the tasks that require an internet connection. But if you’re like me, that wait is just wasted time – and that time is far more valuable to me than the extremely tiny amount I’m saving in electricity each month or each year. If that’s you, then you’ll probably want to turn off this “feature”. How to turn off wifi power-saving mode: 1. Go to Control Panel, set the view in the top right corner to “Small icons”, and double click on the “Device Manager” icon. 2. In the list, look for the “Network Adapters” section, and click on the little triangle next to it to expand the items under that section. Then you want to look for any item in the list that includes the words “wifi” or “wireless”:   3. Now, for each of the wifi or wireless entries, do a right click on the name and choose “Properties”. This will open a new window where you will click on the “Power Management” tab, and UN-check the box that says “Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”:   4. Click OK, close the open windows, and you’re done. You just need to make sure you do this for each wifi or wireless device in the list. Now, whenever your laptop goes into sleep mode, it will stay connected to the internet. And when you wake it up, you can immediately start getting your work done because you have access to the internet right away.    The post Can’t go online straight out of Sleep Mode? Here’s the fix first appeared on The Computer Tutor.