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The Computer Tutor — Software How-To
The Computer Tutor

Computer repair, personal computer instruction in Safety Harbor, Clearwater, Tampa, St Pete

Latest Episodes:

browser tab sound — How to know which browser tab is playing sound Sep 15, 2014
Show notes

Any website that automatically starts playing sound as soon as it loads up should be on some kind of blacklist. Whether it’s a selection of background music, or a news video, or any other kind of audio – any web designer with a clue knows to not have that stuff automatically start up. You give your website visitor the option to play sound – you don’t force it upon them. Autoplay on a website is rude and tacky, and it guarantees that I leave that site immediately.

Can you tell I have a rather strong opinion about this subject? 🙂

What’s even worse is having sound come from your computer, and not knowing where it’s coming from – which makes it very difficult to turn off.

Here’s a common scenario:

Imagine you are doing some research on a subject for a blog post or a report for work. You have Internet Explorer or Firefox opened up, and you have a lot of different webpages opened – each one in its own tab. So you might have 10 or 15 tabs open, or maybe even more. Everything’s going fine, you’re making good progress, when suddenly… you hear someone talking. You know the voice is coming from your computer speakers. It sounds like a YouTube video maybe? But you can’t tell, because it could be coming from any of the 15 or more web pages you have open in web browser tabs.

What do you do at that point?

1. You could just close Firefox or Internet Explorer completely, but then you lose all of those web pages that you want to use as part of your research. It would take a long time to find all of them again.

2. You could go through them one by one, scrolling all the way down the page until you find the source of the sound, and turn off the video or audio player to silence it. That could also take a while.

3. You could hit the Mute button on your screen, or physically turn off your speakers. This could be the quickest, most practical solution to solve the immediate problem – especially if you happen to be in a library or some other place where such noise is frowned upon.

But really, the best solution is to prevent the mystery of “which browser tab is playing the sound” from happening in the first place. The way to do that is to NOT use Internet Explorer or Firefox. Instead, use Google Chrome.

Chrome recognized this problem and solved it. When one of your browser tabs is on a webpage that is generating sound, the tab itself will display a little “speaker” icon so you can immediately see which one it is.

Here’s what it looks like. This is a screenshot of my Chrome browser with 3 tabs open. The first one is Facebook, the second one is MSN, and the third one – the one that’s playing sound at the time – is YouTube. See the little speaker icon next to the X at the right?

Here’s a larger image of the YouTube tab so you can see the speaker more clearly:

So obviously, when you have a bunch of tabs open and you see that one has the speaker icon, you know that’s the tab that is generating the sound. You can either go to that tab and stop the video or whatever is causing the sound, or just close the tab.

Internet Explorer and Firefox don’t have this feature. Just one more reason to use Chrome!

The post How to know which browser tab is playing sound first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Google Chrome — How to know which browser tab is playing sound Sep 15, 2014
Show notes

Any website that automatically starts playing sound as soon as it loads up should be on some kind of blacklist. Whether it’s a selection of background music, or a news video, or any other kind of audio – any web designer with a clue knows to not have that stuff automatically start up. You give your website visitor the option to play sound – you don’t force it upon them. Autoplay on a website is rude and tacky, and it guarantees that I leave that site immediately.

Can you tell I have a rather strong opinion about this subject? 🙂

What’s even worse is having sound come from your computer, and not knowing where it’s coming from – which makes it very difficult to turn off.

Here’s a common scenario:

Imagine you are doing some research on a subject for a blog post or a report for work. You have Internet Explorer or Firefox opened up, and you have a lot of different webpages opened – each one in its own tab. So you might have 10 or 15 tabs open, or maybe even more. Everything’s going fine, you’re making good progress, when suddenly… you hear someone talking. You know the voice is coming from your computer speakers. It sounds like a YouTube video maybe? But you can’t tell, because it could be coming from any of the 15 or more web pages you have open in web browser tabs.

What do you do at that point?

1. You could just close Firefox or Internet Explorer completely, but then you lose all of those web pages that you want to use as part of your research. It would take a long time to find all of them again.

2. You could go through them one by one, scrolling all the way down the page until you find the source of the sound, and turn off the video or audio player to silence it. That could also take a while.

3. You could hit the Mute button on your screen, or physically turn off your speakers. This could be the quickest, most practical solution to solve the immediate problem – especially if you happen to be in a library or some other place where such noise is frowned upon.

But really, the best solution is to prevent the mystery of “which browser tab is playing the sound” from happening in the first place. The way to do that is to NOT use Internet Explorer or Firefox. Instead, use Google Chrome.

Chrome recognized this problem and solved it. When one of your browser tabs is on a webpage that is generating sound, the tab itself will display a little “speaker” icon so you can immediately see which one it is.

Here’s what it looks like. This is a screenshot of my Chrome browser with 3 tabs open. The first one is Facebook, the second one is MSN, and the third one – the one that’s playing sound at the time – is YouTube. See the little speaker icon next to the X at the right?

Here’s a larger image of the YouTube tab so you can see the speaker more clearly:

So obviously, when you have a bunch of tabs open and you see that one has the speaker icon, you know that’s the tab that is generating the sound. You can either go to that tab and stop the video or whatever is causing the sound, or just close the tab.

Internet Explorer and Firefox don’t have this feature. Just one more reason to use Chrome!

The post How to know which browser tab is playing sound first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

site certificate expired — Website blocked due to expired certificate? Quick fix Sep 08, 2014
Show notes

Today’s tip is not going to be very long and elaborate. It’s a pretty common problem with a simple fix (most of the time). But if you don’t know the solution, it can be very frustrating because it seems like something major is wrong with your computer.

Here’s what usually happens:

You try to go to a website and instead of the website content, you see a big warning on your screen. The warning is telling you that you should not try to access that website, because the website’s security certificate has expired. The warning would look something like this:

That might look pretty scary – like the website has been hacked and taken over by the bad guys or something. Or maybe the owner of the website forgot to renew the site’s security certificate, which means it is no longer secure to use. Or what if the site has been infected by a virus, and is infecting any computers that visit that website?

The most likely explanation is that it’s none of those things. The problem isn’t with the website – the problem is with your computer. But it’s easy to fix.

Look down in the lower right corner, where the date and time are displayed. I’ll bet you’ll see the date and time are incorrect.

In fact, the date might be off by a decade or more. What happens is this: inside your computer is a small battery, about the size of a nickel. It’s called the CMOS battery. That battery is what enables the computer to remember the date and time and some other things, even when the computer is turned off and unplugged from the wall. Many times, that little internal battery will last the computer’s whole lifetime without needing to be replaced. But in some cases, that battery wears out. You wouldn’t really notice this as a problem as long as the computer is plugged in. But when you unplug the computer, and the battery cannot hold the date and time any more, the system reverts back to a way-earlier date and time. You might not even notice that the date and time are wrong, since you probably don’t look at it very often.

But when you try to access a secure website, that’s when the fun begins! Your browser automatically compares the date of the website certificate with the date and time on your computer (since it assumes your computer’s date and time are correct). When it sees that the computer says that we are in the year 2005, and the site’s certificate was created in the year 2013, that sets off the alarm bells.

To the web browser, it appears that something very suspicious is going on – so it throws up the warning to tell you it’s probably not safe to access that website.

As I mentioned, the solution to this issue is a simple one. Just correct the date and time on your computer. To do that, right-click on the actual date and time that is currently being displayed and in the menu that pops up choose “Adjust date/time”. That opens a new window – just click on the “Change date and time” button and click OK a couple of times so that the proper date and time are displayed.

Now close your web browser and open it again, and see if you can access that same website. If so, problem solved – temporarily. You may need to have that internal battery replaced. It’s a small job and the batteries aren’t that expensive so for most computers it’s no big deal. For some laptops and a few all-in-one desktops, those batteries are a real pain to access, so it might be more of a project.

If the computer is showing the proper date and time and you STILL cannot access the website, trying checking a few other sites like Facebook or Google. If the problem is only with one site, then that’s something the website owner needs to address. If you still get that same warning on those other sites, there is probably still some issue with your computer that needs to be diagnosed and fixed.

But in most cases, changing the date and time will take care of it.

The post Website blocked due to expired certificate? Quick fix first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

site certificate warning — Website blocked due to expired certificate? Quick fix Sep 08, 2014
Show notes

Today’s tip is not going to be very long and elaborate. It’s a pretty common problem with a simple fix (most of the time). But if you don’t know the solution, it can be very frustrating because it seems like something major is wrong with your computer.

Here’s what usually happens:

You try to go to a website and instead of the website content, you see a big warning on your screen. The warning is telling you that you should not try to access that website, because the website’s security certificate has expired. The warning would look something like this:

That might look pretty scary – like the website has been hacked and taken over by the bad guys or something. Or maybe the owner of the website forgot to renew the site’s security certificate, which means it is no longer secure to use. Or what if the site has been infected by a virus, and is infecting any computers that visit that website?

The most likely explanation is that it’s none of those things. The problem isn’t with the website – the problem is with your computer. But it’s easy to fix.

Look down in the lower right corner, where the date and time are displayed. I’ll bet you’ll see the date and time are incorrect.

In fact, the date might be off by a decade or more. What happens is this: inside your computer is a small battery, about the size of a nickel. It’s called the CMOS battery. That battery is what enables the computer to remember the date and time and some other things, even when the computer is turned off and unplugged from the wall. Many times, that little internal battery will last the computer’s whole lifetime without needing to be replaced. But in some cases, that battery wears out. You wouldn’t really notice this as a problem as long as the computer is plugged in. But when you unplug the computer, and the battery cannot hold the date and time any more, the system reverts back to a way-earlier date and time. You might not even notice that the date and time are wrong, since you probably don’t look at it very often.

But when you try to access a secure website, that’s when the fun begins! Your browser automatically compares the date of the website certificate with the date and time on your computer (since it assumes your computer’s date and time are correct). When it sees that the computer says that we are in the year 2005, and the site’s certificate was created in the year 2013, that sets off the alarm bells.

To the web browser, it appears that something very suspicious is going on – so it throws up the warning to tell you it’s probably not safe to access that website.

As I mentioned, the solution to this issue is a simple one. Just correct the date and time on your computer. To do that, right-click on the actual date and time that is currently being displayed and in the menu that pops up choose “Adjust date/time”. That opens a new window – just click on the “Change date and time” button and click OK a couple of times so that the proper date and time are displayed.

Now close your web browser and open it again, and see if you can access that same website. If so, problem solved – temporarily. You may need to have that internal battery replaced. It’s a small job and the batteries aren’t that expensive so for most computers it’s no big deal. For some laptops and a few all-in-one desktops, those batteries are a real pain to access, so it might be more of a project.

If the computer is showing the proper date and time and you STILL cannot access the website, trying checking a few other sites like Facebook or Google. If the problem is only with one site, then that’s something the website owner needs to address. If you still get that same warning on those other sites, there is probably still some issue with your computer that needs to be diagnosed and fixed.

But in most cases, changing the date and time will take care of it.

The post Website blocked due to expired certificate? Quick fix first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

YouTube tricks — 3 Cool YouTube Tricks Sep 01, 2014
Show notes

This week I’m going to show you some interesting things you can do with YouTube. You might not use all of them, but hopefully you will find one or two of them helpful, or at least fun to try out. I love “discovering” these kinds of little-known things and bringing them to you here on my blog, and on my podcast.

Trick 1: Download any YouTube video to your computer, without installing other software

Sometimes you might watch a video you really like, so you bookmark it for easy access. But then you go back to YouTube a week later or a month later, and it’s gone. That happens all that time, for a variety of reasons. You can avoid that problem though. Instead of bookmarking it to go back and watch it on YouTube, just download the video to your own computer. Then you can watch it anytime – even if you aren’t connected to the internet.

Example:

You like this video of this guy ranting about waiting in line at the post office (it actually is a pretty funny video if you want to watch it). When the video is on your screen, look up at the address bar. You’ll see the web address of the video displayed there (it’s also called the URL). It looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDvaJJyUpTs

All you have to do is click in the address bar, and change the web address to this:

pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=vDvaJJyUpTs

and then hit the Enter key on your keyboard. This will take you to a page where you will see a little preview of the video, and links where you can click to download the video. Those links take you to a variety of other sites. Check them out and see which one you like best.

Yes, I know you could just go directly to any of those sites and copy/paste the URL of the video itself. The idea with these little YouTube tricks is that you don’t have to remember or bookmark all those other websites in order to download the video. Just add “pwn” to the YouTube address.

Trick 2: Download just the AUDIO from any YouTube video

Maybe you subscribe to a YouTube channel that puts out a new video each day or each week, but you don’t really need to see the video portion. For some videos, the only thing to see is the person talking to the camera. Or, maybe you want to listen to the content while you’re driving, and it’s obviously not safe to watch the video then, so all you need is the audio. When you have the audio file saved, you can listen to it on your computer, or you could put it on your MP3 player or your phone for listening at your convenience.

Example:

There’s a video of Eric Clapton performing unplugged in 1992. It’s a little over an hour long, so if you’re a Clapton fan, it would make a great sound file for while you’re out on a run, but obviously you don’t want to stream the video from YouTube and watch it while you’re running. You just need to do a little tweaking to the URL, similar to what we did in the first trick.

The web address of the video will look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w24A2eesrUA

You will want to move your cursor up there and change it to this:

listentoyoutube.com/watch?v=w24A2eesrUA

That takes you to a new page. Look for this image and click the Go button. NOTE: This site has a lot of display ads and you might be tempted to click on things other than what I describe below. Don’t do that.

That will take you to a different page, where you’ll see a link to click for your Download button:

Finally, you’ll see a button to actually download the audio file in MP3 format:

When you click that, the file will be saved to your computer (usually it goes in the Downloads folder, but it might go somewhere else if you have set your preferences differently from the default).

Trick 3: Play a video from a certain starting point

You find a video on YouTube, and it shows people walking on a sidewalk where there’s a patch of ice. We all love to watch people fall down, right? The problem is, this video goes quite a way in before you actually see someone fall down. You know if you post this on Facebook, people will get bored pretty quickly if they don’t see some slipping and falling pretty quickly.

So what you need to do is “tweak” the URL so that the video doesn’t start playing at the very beginning – it starts playing at the point you want it to. Here’s the video we’ll use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCwMfUhv24

You check the video and find out that there are a bunch of people that “almost” fall, but the first person that actually hits the ground happens at the 1:32 point in the video. So that’s where you want the video to start playing.

First, you have to convert that initial stretch of time to seconds. One minute and 32 seconds translates to 92 seconds total, so “92” is the important number here. All you have to do is add #t=92 to the end of the video address. So the adjusted URL would look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCwMfUhv24#t=92

Of course, you can substitute any number at the end, depending on exactly where you want to video to start playing when someone goes to that address.

What YouTube tricks do YOU know? Put them in the comments below!

The post 3 Cool YouTube Tricks first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

YouTube download — 3 Cool YouTube Tricks Sep 01, 2014
Show notes

This week I’m going to show you some interesting things you can do with YouTube. You might not use all of them, but hopefully you will find one or two of them helpful, or at least fun to try out. I love “discovering” these kinds of little-known things and bringing them to you here on my blog, and on my podcast.

Trick 1: Download any YouTube video to your computer, without installing other software

Sometimes you might watch a video you really like, so you bookmark it for easy access. But then you go back to YouTube a week later or a month later, and it’s gone. That happens all that time, for a variety of reasons. You can avoid that problem though. Instead of bookmarking it to go back and watch it on YouTube, just download the video to your own computer. Then you can watch it anytime – even if you aren’t connected to the internet.

Example:

You like this video of this guy ranting about waiting in line at the post office (it actually is a pretty funny video if you want to watch it). When the video is on your screen, look up at the address bar. You’ll see the web address of the video displayed there (it’s also called the URL). It looks like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDvaJJyUpTs

All you have to do is click in the address bar, and change the web address to this:

pwnyoutube.com/watch?v=vDvaJJyUpTs

and then hit the Enter key on your keyboard. This will take you to a page where you will see a little preview of the video, and links where you can click to download the video. Those links take you to a variety of other sites. Check them out and see which one you like best.

Yes, I know you could just go directly to any of those sites and copy/paste the URL of the video itself. The idea with these little YouTube tricks is that you don’t have to remember or bookmark all those other websites in order to download the video. Just add “pwn” to the YouTube address.

Trick 2: Download just the AUDIO from any YouTube video

Maybe you subscribe to a YouTube channel that puts out a new video each day or each week, but you don’t really need to see the video portion. For some videos, the only thing to see is the person talking to the camera. Or, maybe you want to listen to the content while you’re driving, and it’s obviously not safe to watch the video then, so all you need is the audio. When you have the audio file saved, you can listen to it on your computer, or you could put it on your MP3 player or your phone for listening at your convenience.

Example:

There’s a video of Eric Clapton performing unplugged in 1992. It’s a little over an hour long, so if you’re a Clapton fan, it would make a great sound file for while you’re out on a run, but obviously you don’t want to stream the video from YouTube and watch it while you’re running. You just need to do a little tweaking to the URL, similar to what we did in the first trick.

The web address of the video will look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w24A2eesrUA

You will want to move your cursor up there and change it to this:

listentoyoutube.com/watch?v=w24A2eesrUA

That takes you to a new page. Look for this image and click the Go button. NOTE: This site has a lot of display ads and you might be tempted to click on things other than what I describe below. Don’t do that.

That will take you to a different page, where you’ll see a link to click for your Download button:

Finally, you’ll see a button to actually download the audio file in MP3 format:

When you click that, the file will be saved to your computer (usually it goes in the Downloads folder, but it might go somewhere else if you have set your preferences differently from the default).

Trick 3: Play a video from a certain starting point

You find a video on YouTube, and it shows people walking on a sidewalk where there’s a patch of ice. We all love to watch people fall down, right? The problem is, this video goes quite a way in before you actually see someone fall down. You know if you post this on Facebook, people will get bored pretty quickly if they don’t see some slipping and falling pretty quickly.

So what you need to do is “tweak” the URL so that the video doesn’t start playing at the very beginning – it starts playing at the point you want it to. Here’s the video we’ll use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCwMfUhv24

You check the video and find out that there are a bunch of people that “almost” fall, but the first person that actually hits the ground happens at the 1:32 point in the video. So that’s where you want the video to start playing.

First, you have to convert that initial stretch of time to seconds. One minute and 32 seconds translates to 92 seconds total, so “92” is the important number here. All you have to do is add #t=92 to the end of the video address. So the adjusted URL would look like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDCwMfUhv24#t=92

Of course, you can substitute any number at the end, depending on exactly where you want to video to start playing when someone goes to that address.

What YouTube tricks do YOU know? Put them in the comments below!

The post 3 Cool YouTube Tricks first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Facebook Messenger — Send and receive Facebook messages on your phone, WITHOUT FB Messenger Aug 25, 2014
Show notes

It seems like Facebook is always involved with some type of controversy, and it usually involves the violation of the privacy of Facebook users. Of course, if you don’t like Facebook’s data collection practices, you can always just cancel your account (see last week’s blog about how to do that). The latest issue has to do with the Facebook Messenger app that works on a smartphone.

If you’re on Facebook, you have probably heard the recent uproar over the privacy settings on the Facebook Messenger app. This is the little app that goes on your smartphone that allows you to send and receive Facebook messages with other users. If you want to use that app, you have to agree to the terms that Facebook puts on it, including giving Facebook permission to have access to a variety of areas on your smartphone.

For Android phones, it wants access to your contact list, the phone’s calendar, your GPS location and your phone’s camera and microphone. That’s quite a takeover! For iPhone users I don’t think it’s quite as intrusive but I’m not sure since I don’t use an iPhone.

I’m not going to go into the whole debate about how much information is too much for Facebook to require or if the permissions they need on your phone are excessive. I will say this though – I removed Facebook Messenger from my phone.

It’s important to note that there is a difference between the Facebook app on your phone, and Facebook Messenger. The Facebook app lets you see your newsfeed and the stuff your friends are posting, and it’s what you use to make your own posts and check in from wherever you happen to be. Previously, you could also send and receive Facebook messages from within that app. Now, you can only send and receive Facebook messages from your phone if you use the separately-installed Facebook Messenger. And that’s where all the permission requirements are.

Oh, but there is one other way, although it’s kind of a hassle. You can access Facebook on your phone the same way you do at home: just open the Facebook website through a web browser. You do this just like you open any other website on your phone.

But that means you are viewing the Facebook site through the tiny screen on your phone. Yes, you can send and receive messages that way, but it’s a pain.

Hang on, I have the (almost) perfect solution. Here’s what I did:

Uninstall Facebook Messenger from my phone

Uninstall the Facebook app from my phone

Install the Tinfoil for Facebook app

Tinfoil for Facebook is a free app. It only requires a couple of minor permissions (Internet and Coarse Location) and it works ALMOST identically to the regular Facebook app. You can also send and receive Facebook messages from it.

The way it works is by accessing the Facebook website – just like your phone’s web browser does. Except the app takes the information from the site and rearranges it so that it looks just like the Facebook app. All of the data is easy to view and using the app is very intuitive. You’ll see when you try it out.

There is one difference, that I have not yet been able to resolve. When someone sends you a Facebook message, you don’t get the old notification “ding” like Facebook Messenger provides. So if you are expecting a message from someone, you will need to check it manually to see if it’s come in yet. For me, that’s not a deal killer anyway. If someone needs to reach me, I would rather they call or email. And if someone does send me a message through Facebook, I’ll see it the next time I’m on my computer. If you know of a way to make Facebook for Tinfoil automatically notify about messages, please put it in the Comments section below.

I’ve been pretty happy with this app so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook comes up with a way to keep the app from working, since it circumvents their marketing strategies. But for now it’s working fine, and Facebook isn’t squirming around my phone like bedbugs in a cheap motel.

Tinfoil for Facebook

The post Send and receive Facebook messages on your phone, WITHOUT FB Messenger first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Tinfoil for Facebook — Send and receive Facebook messages on your phone, WITHOUT FB Messenger Aug 25, 2014
Show notes

It seems like Facebook is always involved with some type of controversy, and it usually involves the violation of the privacy of Facebook users. Of course, if you don’t like Facebook’s data collection practices, you can always just cancel your account (see last week’s blog about how to do that). The latest issue has to do with the Facebook Messenger app that works on a smartphone.

If you’re on Facebook, you have probably heard the recent uproar over the privacy settings on the Facebook Messenger app. This is the little app that goes on your smartphone that allows you to send and receive Facebook messages with other users. If you want to use that app, you have to agree to the terms that Facebook puts on it, including giving Facebook permission to have access to a variety of areas on your smartphone.

For Android phones, it wants access to your contact list, the phone’s calendar, your GPS location and your phone’s camera and microphone. That’s quite a takeover! For iPhone users I don’t think it’s quite as intrusive but I’m not sure since I don’t use an iPhone.

I’m not going to go into the whole debate about how much information is too much for Facebook to require or if the permissions they need on your phone are excessive. I will say this though – I removed Facebook Messenger from my phone.

It’s important to note that there is a difference between the Facebook app on your phone, and Facebook Messenger. The Facebook app lets you see your newsfeed and the stuff your friends are posting, and it’s what you use to make your own posts and check in from wherever you happen to be. Previously, you could also send and receive Facebook messages from within that app. Now, you can only send and receive Facebook messages from your phone if you use the separately-installed Facebook Messenger. And that’s where all the permission requirements are.

Oh, but there is one other way, although it’s kind of a hassle. You can access Facebook on your phone the same way you do at home: just open the Facebook website through a web browser. You do this just like you open any other website on your phone.

But that means you are viewing the Facebook site through the tiny screen on your phone. Yes, you can send and receive messages that way, but it’s a pain.

Hang on, I have the (almost) perfect solution. Here’s what I did:

Uninstall Facebook Messenger from my phone

Uninstall the Facebook app from my phone

Install the Tinfoil for Facebook app

Tinfoil for Facebook is a free app. It only requires a couple of minor permissions (Internet and Coarse Location) and it works ALMOST identically to the regular Facebook app. You can also send and receive Facebook messages from it.

The way it works is by accessing the Facebook website – just like your phone’s web browser does. Except the app takes the information from the site and rearranges it so that it looks just like the Facebook app. All of the data is easy to view and using the app is very intuitive. You’ll see when you try it out.

There is one difference, that I have not yet been able to resolve. When someone sends you a Facebook message, you don’t get the old notification “ding” like Facebook Messenger provides. So if you are expecting a message from someone, you will need to check it manually to see if it’s come in yet. For me, that’s not a deal killer anyway. If someone needs to reach me, I would rather they call or email. And if someone does send me a message through Facebook, I’ll see it the next time I’m on my computer. If you know of a way to make Facebook for Tinfoil automatically notify about messages, please put it in the Comments section below.

I’ve been pretty happy with this app so far. It wouldn’t surprise me if Facebook comes up with a way to keep the app from working, since it circumvents their marketing strategies. But for now it’s working fine, and Facebook isn’t squirming around my phone like bedbugs in a cheap motel.

Tinfoil for Facebook

The post Send and receive Facebook messages on your phone, WITHOUT FB Messenger first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

cancel account — How to cancel any social media account Aug 18, 2014
Show notes

For some people, the novelty of social media has worn thin. Facebook is constantly wanting more and more of your personal information, because that’s their biggest selling point to advertisers. Twitter hashtags are displayed on just about any television show now, and YouTube videos are showing up virtually everywhere. If you get to the point where you say, “That’s it, I’m done – no more social media” do you know how to go about cancelling those accounts? I’ll show you a really easy way today.

Actually I shouldn’t say it’s definitely “easy” – it really depends on what account(s) you want to cancel. Some sites make it a simple process, and other sites make it nearly impossible.

But thankfully, there is one website that can guide you through the process for cancelling almost ANY online accounts, social media or otherwise. That site is AccountKiller.

Using AccountKiller is free, although they encourage you to make a donation if you find the site useful (and if you want to cancel some online accounts, it is definitely useful).

The site doesn’t actually cancel the account(s) for you. It just tells you how to do it, and even provides a link to the actual cancellation page when there is one available. There is also usually some handy advice or tips on how to go about cancelling, and what ramifications there might be for cancelling your account with that particular site.

For example, let’s say you want to cancel your Yahoo.com account. AccountKiller gives you the exact URL for the cancellation page (https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user). They also tell you:

If you have publicly visible images posted, those aren’t always deleted even when you cancel your account successfully. It’s a good idea to manually delete them before you cancel the account.

Your Yahoo account is connected to your Flickr account, so if you cancel Yahoo, you also cancel Flickr. But if you want, you can go and cancel your Flickr account separately without cancelling your Yahoo account.

There are details like that for hundreds of online accounts. They have the various accounts categorized by color:

White – easy to cancel, sometimes with just a click or two

Black – very difficult or impossible to cancel

Gray – somewhere in between

If you have an account you want to cancel and you don’t see it listed there (which would be fairly unlikely), you can send it to them as a suggestion and they will research it and eventually post it along with the others. Great resource.

http://www.accountkiller.com

The post How to cancel any social media account first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Account Killer — How to cancel any social media account Aug 18, 2014
Show notes

For some people, the novelty of social media has worn thin. Facebook is constantly wanting more and more of your personal information, because that’s their biggest selling point to advertisers. Twitter hashtags are displayed on just about any television show now, and YouTube videos are showing up virtually everywhere. If you get to the point where you say, “That’s it, I’m done – no more social media” do you know how to go about cancelling those accounts? I’ll show you a really easy way today.

Actually I shouldn’t say it’s definitely “easy” – it really depends on what account(s) you want to cancel. Some sites make it a simple process, and other sites make it nearly impossible.

But thankfully, there is one website that can guide you through the process for cancelling almost ANY online accounts, social media or otherwise. That site is AccountKiller.

Using AccountKiller is free, although they encourage you to make a donation if you find the site useful (and if you want to cancel some online accounts, it is definitely useful).

The site doesn’t actually cancel the account(s) for you. It just tells you how to do it, and even provides a link to the actual cancellation page when there is one available. There is also usually some handy advice or tips on how to go about cancelling, and what ramifications there might be for cancelling your account with that particular site.

For example, let’s say you want to cancel your Yahoo.com account. AccountKiller gives you the exact URL for the cancellation page (https://edit.yahoo.com/config/delete_user). They also tell you:

If you have publicly visible images posted, those aren’t always deleted even when you cancel your account successfully. It’s a good idea to manually delete them before you cancel the account.

Your Yahoo account is connected to your Flickr account, so if you cancel Yahoo, you also cancel Flickr. But if you want, you can go and cancel your Flickr account separately without cancelling your Yahoo account.

There are details like that for hundreds of online accounts. They have the various accounts categorized by color:

White – easy to cancel, sometimes with just a click or two

Black – very difficult or impossible to cancel

Gray – somewhere in between

If you have an account you want to cancel and you don’t see it listed there (which would be fairly unlikely), you can send it to them as a suggestion and they will research it and eventually post it along with the others. Great resource.

http://www.accountkiller.com

The post How to cancel any social media account first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

printer — How to make ANY website printer-friendly Aug 11, 2014
Show notes

Ever try to print a web page? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The reason for this is that website content is designed to be displayed on your computer screen, not sent to the printer to be put on paper. So even though it looks perfect on your monitor, the printed page is often completely messed up. I’ve even had people call me and complain that their printer isn’t working properly, because the words and images are all out of order and misaligned. The problem wasn’t the printer, though. That web page they were trying to print just wasn’t printer friendly.

Some websites are helpful and offer a “printer friendly” version of the content. This usually works, but most non-commercial websites don’t have that feature. And actually even a lot of business websites don’t offer it.

But now there’s a solution – and it’s free. It’s an online service called Print Friendly. You can see it at PrintFriendly.com.

Using this service could not be any easier. When you’re viewing a website you want to print, click one time up in the address bar to highlight the address, then do a right-click and choose “Copy”.

Then go to the Print Friendly website and paste it in the URL field and click “print preview”:

If the preview looks okay, print it!

Here’s an example. I went to an MSN news story. A screenshot of the website article is below. As you can see the screen is cluttered with all kinds of junk – navigation links, social media buttons, ads, links to other stories, and several images. There’s so much stuff that in order to read past the first few lines of the article, you have to scroll down. I don’t need all that extra stuff – all I want to print is just the words in the article.

So I copied and pasted the address, and here is what the print preview showed. Just the title and the text – ready to print!

To print, just hit the link at the top left on the preview. Next to that is the option to make the content into a PDF file, or you could click the “Email” button to send the article by email. There are some other options to control the text size and the appearance of images – you can play with those as you like.

I encourage you to experiment with it. It probably won’t be perfect each time, as there are a million different variations in the way a website can be arranged. But it should work okay in most cases.

http://www.printfriendly.com

The post How to make ANY website printer-friendly first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

Print Friendly — How to make ANY website printer-friendly Aug 11, 2014
Show notes

Ever try to print a web page? Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The reason for this is that website content is designed to be displayed on your computer screen, not sent to the printer to be put on paper. So even though it looks perfect on your monitor, the printed page is often completely messed up. I’ve even had people call me and complain that their printer isn’t working properly, because the words and images are all out of order and misaligned. The problem wasn’t the printer, though. That web page they were trying to print just wasn’t printer friendly.

Some websites are helpful and offer a “printer friendly” version of the content. This usually works, but most non-commercial websites don’t have that feature. And actually even a lot of business websites don’t offer it.

But now there’s a solution – and it’s free. It’s an online service called Print Friendly. You can see it at PrintFriendly.com.

Using this service could not be any easier. When you’re viewing a website you want to print, click one time up in the address bar to highlight the address, then do a right-click and choose “Copy”.

Then go to the Print Friendly website and paste it in the URL field and click “print preview”:

If the preview looks okay, print it!

Here’s an example. I went to an MSN news story. A screenshot of the website article is below. As you can see the screen is cluttered with all kinds of junk – navigation links, social media buttons, ads, links to other stories, and several images. There’s so much stuff that in order to read past the first few lines of the article, you have to scroll down. I don’t need all that extra stuff – all I want to print is just the words in the article.

So I copied and pasted the address, and here is what the print preview showed. Just the title and the text – ready to print!

To print, just hit the link at the top left on the preview. Next to that is the option to make the content into a PDF file, or you could click the “Email” button to send the article by email. There are some other options to control the text size and the appearance of images – you can play with those as you like.

I encourage you to experiment with it. It probably won’t be perfect each time, as there are a million different variations in the way a website can be arranged. But it should work okay in most cases.

http://www.printfriendly.com

The post How to make ANY website printer-friendly first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

bad computer habits — Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 2 Aug 04, 2014
Show notes

Last week I talked about 4 bad computer habits that I see happening pretty regularly. This week in part 2, I’ll cover the other 4. If you do any of these things with your computer, knock it off!

Picking up from where we left off last Monday –

5. Clicking on unknown links
Every time I get to the point where I think that by now just about all computer users must be aware of the danger of clicking on links that they aren’t sure of, I get a phone call from someone who did just that.

Just recently I got a panicked call from a client. She said she got an email from her credit card supplier, and it told her that her account had been suspended due to some suspicious activity. The email conveniently provided a link for her to click on to log in to her account and provide the necessary information. She clicked on that link, and of course the website she was taken to looked exactly like the credit card website – but it wasn’t, of course. She entered her email address and her password, and it “seemed” to log her in, because it then went to the next screen.

That next screen was where her suspicion level was raised high enough that she just closed the browser window and started to think “Have I just been scammed?”. At that point, the scammers had the login information to her credit card account. But fortunately, she logged in (to the REAL account this time) and changed her password before the bad guys tried to.

It goes back to the same fundamental rule – be suspicious of everything. An “unknown link” is any link that you don’t know for sure where it’s going to take you. If you get an email that simply offers some “generic” text such as “hey check this out” and invites you to click on a link, that’s not a known link. It doesn’t matter if it came from someone you know. It doesn’t matter if it came from your mother – don’t click it.

6. Automatically clicking “Next” when installing software
This is such an easy trap to fall into. Almost all software programs have all those legal disclaimers and Terms of Use that you have to agree to, and the simplest thing to do is just click “I agree” or “Next” without really reading what the screen says.

Unfortunately, the scammers have figured that out and they’re HOPING you just click those buttons without reading the text. In many cases, when you click those things you are telling the program to install lots of other junk software, extra toolbars, different search engines, and to change your home page to something else. So many times people will bring me their computer that is practically unusable because of all the pop-ups and other garbage, and they don’t know how it got there – “all I did was download a free desktop weather program”. There’s a reason some programs are free – they make money when you don’t pay attention and all that other stuff gets installed.

7. Going days or weeks without rebooting
Your computer should be restarted every 1-2 days. Each time it starts up, it has fresh memory and will just work better. In fact, when someone has a problem and the computer is not working properly, one of the things I will ask is, “When was the last time the computer was restarted?” Sometimes I find computers that have been on for several weeks or even months straight. Restarting often fixes whatever problem is happening.

Think about it like this – how long could you go without taking a shower or washing your hair? For most people it’s probably a day or maybe two days. Sure, you COULD go a week or even a few weeks, but think about how awful and dirty you would feel. Would you really be at your best if you went that long? And then imagine after all that time being able to take a nice long hot shower – how refreshing! That’s how your computer feels when you restart it after it’s been working for a while. It’s much happier.

8. Not having any backup
Of course – you didn’t think I could talk about bad habits and not mention the lack of a regular backup did you? That’s because it’s important!

What would you do if you hit the power button tomorrow morning, and the computer didn’t come on? Or the screen displayed the message “No disk found” (which indicates a hard drive crash). If that would cause your heart to skip a beat because of all the important documents and pictures that are stored on there that are not backed up anywhere else, it should be one of your priorities TODAY to get that taken care of.

And if I asked you right now, “Do you have all of your important stuff backed up?” and your answer is, “Well, I guess it’s backed up…” that means you don’t have a backup. The backup process doesn’t just set itself up. You have to do it deliberately. I do it all time for my clients, so let me help. Before it’s too late.

So there you have it, 8 bad computer habits that really should be avoided. If you’re not guilty of any of them, good job! Chances are a few of them applied to you though – so let’s get that fixed and avoid some headaches down the road.

The post Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 2 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

listen to my podcast in iTunes — Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 2 Aug 04, 2014
Show notes

Last week I talked about 4 bad computer habits that I see happening pretty regularly. This week in part 2, I’ll cover the other 4. If you do any of these things with your computer, knock it off!

Picking up from where we left off last Monday –

5. Clicking on unknown links
Every time I get to the point where I think that by now just about all computer users must be aware of the danger of clicking on links that they aren’t sure of, I get a phone call from someone who did just that.

Just recently I got a panicked call from a client. She said she got an email from her credit card supplier, and it told her that her account had been suspended due to some suspicious activity. The email conveniently provided a link for her to click on to log in to her account and provide the necessary information. She clicked on that link, and of course the website she was taken to looked exactly like the credit card website – but it wasn’t, of course. She entered her email address and her password, and it “seemed” to log her in, because it then went to the next screen.

That next screen was where her suspicion level was raised high enough that she just closed the browser window and started to think “Have I just been scammed?”. At that point, the scammers had the login information to her credit card account. But fortunately, she logged in (to the REAL account this time) and changed her password before the bad guys tried to.

It goes back to the same fundamental rule – be suspicious of everything. An “unknown link” is any link that you don’t know for sure where it’s going to take you. If you get an email that simply offers some “generic” text such as “hey check this out” and invites you to click on a link, that’s not a known link. It doesn’t matter if it came from someone you know. It doesn’t matter if it came from your mother – don’t click it.

6. Automatically clicking “Next” when installing software
This is such an easy trap to fall into. Almost all software programs have all those legal disclaimers and Terms of Use that you have to agree to, and the simplest thing to do is just click “I agree” or “Next” without really reading what the screen says.

Unfortunately, the scammers have figured that out and they’re HOPING you just click those buttons without reading the text. In many cases, when you click those things you are telling the program to install lots of other junk software, extra toolbars, different search engines, and to change your home page to something else. So many times people will bring me their computer that is practically unusable because of all the pop-ups and other garbage, and they don’t know how it got there – “all I did was download a free desktop weather program”. There’s a reason some programs are free – they make money when you don’t pay attention and all that other stuff gets installed.

7. Going days or weeks without rebooting
Your computer should be restarted every 1-2 days. Each time it starts up, it has fresh memory and will just work better. In fact, when someone has a problem and the computer is not working properly, one of the things I will ask is, “When was the last time the computer was restarted?” Sometimes I find computers that have been on for several weeks or even months straight. Restarting often fixes whatever problem is happening.

Think about it like this – how long could you go without taking a shower or washing your hair? For most people it’s probably a day or maybe two days. Sure, you COULD go a week or even a few weeks, but think about how awful and dirty you would feel. Would you really be at your best if you went that long? And then imagine after all that time being able to take a nice long hot shower – how refreshing! That’s how your computer feels when you restart it after it’s been working for a while. It’s much happier.

8. Not having any backup
Of course – you didn’t think I could talk about bad habits and not mention the lack of a regular backup did you? That’s because it’s important!

What would you do if you hit the power button tomorrow morning, and the computer didn’t come on? Or the screen displayed the message “No disk found” (which indicates a hard drive crash). If that would cause your heart to skip a beat because of all the important documents and pictures that are stored on there that are not backed up anywhere else, it should be one of your priorities TODAY to get that taken care of.

And if I asked you right now, “Do you have all of your important stuff backed up?” and your answer is, “Well, I guess it’s backed up…” that means you don’t have a backup. The backup process doesn’t just set itself up. You have to do it deliberately. I do it all time for my clients, so let me help. Before it’s too late.

So there you have it, 8 bad computer habits that really should be avoided. If you’re not guilty of any of them, good job! Chances are a few of them applied to you though – so let’s get that fixed and avoid some headaches down the road.

The post Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 2 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

bad computer habits — Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 1 Jul 28, 2014
Show notes

Since we use our computers just about every day, sometimes all day, it’s easy to get into a routine. As human beings, we have a set of habits. That means we don’t necessarily do things a certain way because it’s the safest or most efficient, but rather it’s just because we’ve always done it that way. These are some of the most common bad computer habits I see. I’ll cover 4 this week and 4 next week.

1. Weak and reused passwords
No one would ever guess your dog’s name followed by your birth date, right? Wrong. You have to get out of the mindset of thinking “this would be hard for someone to guess” or “no way could anyone ever know this about me”. That’s because in most cases, the bad guy is not sitting at his computer trying to guess your password. He has software that can do that at a much higher rate of speed, and it can work tirelessly for hours. Or days or weeks.

And even if you have a really strong password (random numbers, and upper and lower case letters and other characters), it’s just as unsafe if you use that same one across multiple accounts. If someone happens to get into one of your accounts, they can get into most of the others as well. Don’t be an easy target.

Lesson: use strong, unique passwords on every account.

2. Searching for a website when you already know the address
This one really drives me nuts. I used to work with someone who would do this. Here’s an example of how he would do it. Let’s say he wanted to go to Yahoo.com. Here’s the process he would use:

Open Internet Explorer and in the address bar, type “www.google.com”

When Google comes up, click in the search field and type “www.yahoo.com”

When the search results came up, Yahoo would be the first one listed, so he would click on that and it would take him to Yahoo

First, this is extremely inefficient. In step 1, he could have just typed “yahoo.com” and gone straight to the Yahoo website. That’s the quickest way to do it if you already know the website address (URL) that you want to visit. And if you go there regularly, make it a bookmark or you could even make it your home page.

Second, and probably more important, this is a dangerous way to visit websites. If you’re in the habit of typing a URL in Google’s search field and then just blindly clicking on the first search result in the list, there will come a day when you will click on something and it will take you to a malicious website. The scammers and hackers know that a lot of people do this, so they make websites that are designed to come up high in the search results. Or they will even purchase an actual Google ad, so that it definitely shows up at the top (it will technically labeled as an ad, but a lot of people won’t notice that and will just click on it anyway). As soon as that site is visited, the computer could be infected. Or it could pop up some fake “update” message that could trick you into clicking and downloading malware to your computer.

Lesson: If you know the actual website address, just type it in the address bar and hit Enter – no need to use Google.

3. Ignoring error messages
Sometimes I’ll get a phone call from someone, and the problem with their computer is this constant error message that keeps coming up. It’s really bugging them because it comes up every time they turn on the computer. My first question of course is, “What is the error message?”. Most of the time they don’t know because they didn’t write it down. My next question is when did this first start happening. In many cases, the client tells me that it started happening a long time ago, like several weeks or even months. They’ve just been ignoring it. Bad idea!

That error message could be indicating a serious problem – if so, it should be fixed quickly. You might not see any obvious symptoms or other things happening, but that doesn’t mean it’s having no effect. And from a practical standpoint, sometimes an error is easily remedied if we catch it right when it starts coming up. Even a System Restore could be a potential fix – but not if the error is 3 months old.

Lesson: Take action when you first see an error message.

4. Storing files and folders on the desktop
This is another pretty common one. There might be a folder that has some documents in it that you access all the time, so you want to be able to get to it quickly. So it goes on the desktop. Or maybe you download pictures from your phone regularly, and the easiest thing is to just thrown them in a folder on the desktop. Before you know it, your desktop is covered with files and folders, and you probably notice your computer running more slowly.

The desktop is not really designed for storage and having a significant amount of data there will slow down the computer. However, I understand the need for having quick access to certain files sometimes. There is a solution for that. Put the file or folder where it should really be stored (in Documents, or Pictures, or wherever appropriate). Then, do a right click on that file, move your mouse down to “Send to” and then click on “Desktop – create shortcut”. Now you will still have that same one-click access to the file or folder, but the only thing on the desktop will be the shortcut icon – which takes up almost no space at all.

Lesson: Put shortcuts on the desktop rather than the actual file or folder.

Are you guilty of these bad habits? It’s something to work on this week! Next Monday I’ll have the final four.

The post Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 1 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

listen to my podcast in iTunes — Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 1 Jul 28, 2014
Show notes

Since we use our computers just about every day, sometimes all day, it’s easy to get into a routine. As human beings, we have a set of habits. That means we don’t necessarily do things a certain way because it’s the safest or most efficient, but rather it’s just because we’ve always done it that way. These are some of the most common bad computer habits I see. I’ll cover 4 this week and 4 next week.

1. Weak and reused passwords
No one would ever guess your dog’s name followed by your birth date, right? Wrong. You have to get out of the mindset of thinking “this would be hard for someone to guess” or “no way could anyone ever know this about me”. That’s because in most cases, the bad guy is not sitting at his computer trying to guess your password. He has software that can do that at a much higher rate of speed, and it can work tirelessly for hours. Or days or weeks.

And even if you have a really strong password (random numbers, and upper and lower case letters and other characters), it’s just as unsafe if you use that same one across multiple accounts. If someone happens to get into one of your accounts, they can get into most of the others as well. Don’t be an easy target.

Lesson: use strong, unique passwords on every account.

2. Searching for a website when you already know the address
This one really drives me nuts. I used to work with someone who would do this. Here’s an example of how he would do it. Let’s say he wanted to go to Yahoo.com. Here’s the process he would use:

Open Internet Explorer and in the address bar, type “www.google.com”

When Google comes up, click in the search field and type “www.yahoo.com”

When the search results came up, Yahoo would be the first one listed, so he would click on that and it would take him to Yahoo

First, this is extremely inefficient. In step 1, he could have just typed “yahoo.com” and gone straight to the Yahoo website. That’s the quickest way to do it if you already know the website address (URL) that you want to visit. And if you go there regularly, make it a bookmark or you could even make it your home page.

Second, and probably more important, this is a dangerous way to visit websites. If you’re in the habit of typing a URL in Google’s search field and then just blindly clicking on the first search result in the list, there will come a day when you will click on something and it will take you to a malicious website. The scammers and hackers know that a lot of people do this, so they make websites that are designed to come up high in the search results. Or they will even purchase an actual Google ad, so that it definitely shows up at the top (it will technically labeled as an ad, but a lot of people won’t notice that and will just click on it anyway). As soon as that site is visited, the computer could be infected. Or it could pop up some fake “update” message that could trick you into clicking and downloading malware to your computer.

Lesson: If you know the actual website address, just type it in the address bar and hit Enter – no need to use Google.

3. Ignoring error messages
Sometimes I’ll get a phone call from someone, and the problem with their computer is this constant error message that keeps coming up. It’s really bugging them because it comes up every time they turn on the computer. My first question of course is, “What is the error message?”. Most of the time they don’t know because they didn’t write it down. My next question is when did this first start happening. In many cases, the client tells me that it started happening a long time ago, like several weeks or even months. They’ve just been ignoring it. Bad idea!

That error message could be indicating a serious problem – if so, it should be fixed quickly. You might not see any obvious symptoms or other things happening, but that doesn’t mean it’s having no effect. And from a practical standpoint, sometimes an error is easily remedied if we catch it right when it starts coming up. Even a System Restore could be a potential fix – but not if the error is 3 months old.

Lesson: Take action when you first see an error message.

4. Storing files and folders on the desktop
This is another pretty common one. There might be a folder that has some documents in it that you access all the time, so you want to be able to get to it quickly. So it goes on the desktop. Or maybe you download pictures from your phone regularly, and the easiest thing is to just thrown them in a folder on the desktop. Before you know it, your desktop is covered with files and folders, and you probably notice your computer running more slowly.

The desktop is not really designed for storage and having a significant amount of data there will slow down the computer. However, I understand the need for having quick access to certain files sometimes. There is a solution for that. Put the file or folder where it should really be stored (in Documents, or Pictures, or wherever appropriate). Then, do a right click on that file, move your mouse down to “Send to” and then click on “Desktop – create shortcut”. Now you will still have that same one-click access to the file or folder, but the only thing on the desktop will be the shortcut icon – which takes up almost no space at all.

Lesson: Put shortcuts on the desktop rather than the actual file or folder.

Are you guilty of these bad habits? It’s something to work on this week! Next Monday I’ll have the final four.

The post Bad computer habits you need to kick – part 1 first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

System Image backup — How to create a System Image backup (and why you should) Jul 21, 2014
Show notes

You know I’m always talking about having an automated, consistent backup process in place. This is partly because I have people bring me computers just about every week with a crashed drive, and they’re in a panic because they need the files and folders that are on that drive. But it’s also from first-hand experience – just a few weeks ago my OWN primary computer had a complete hard drive crash with no recoverable data. Of course I lost nothing because of my automated backup process.

That automated online backup process (which I can set up for you remotely in about 10 minutes) saves your individual files and folders – stuff like documents, pictures, emails, music, etc. It does not back up programs, just data. This type of backup is very important to have in place, for when your computer’s hard drive crashes.

But there’s another kind of backup, called a SystemImage, that I highly recommend you implement. This one is done manually to an external drive, and it serves a different purpose. The purpose of this backup is to get you back up and running with all your files and all your programs as quickly as possible.

Let’s consider the scenario of what happens when your hard drive crashes. Nothing to worry about really, if you have your file-by-file automated backup.

You swap out the crashed drive for a new one. At that point all you have is a blank hard drive. So you first need to install Windows. Then you need to download and install all the Windows Updates (this can take hours just by itself). Then you have to install your antivirus program and ALL the other software you use, such as Chrome or Firefox, Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, iTunes, your printer software, and whatever else you use. Then you have to configure all of them to work they way they used to work before the crash. THEN you have to copy all of your documents, pictures, music and everything else back from your backup to your new hard drive.

It’s a process. You didn’t lose any of your important files, but you will lose some time because it can take a while to get everything back in place.

How do you avoid spending all that time to get back up and running? By having a recent System Image backup as well.

The System Image is an “all-inclusive” backup. It takes all of the files on your hard drive – your Windows installation, your documents, your pictures, your music, your screensaver, your programs, EVERYTHING – and wraps it up all together into one folder, then that backup is put on your external drive.

So let’s say you create a new System Image on Saturday, and your hard drive crashes the next day. All you have to do is swap out your dead drive with a new one, and then tell your computer to restore that System Image you created on Saturday. Within a very short period of time (usually less than a couple of hours), EVERYTHING is back on your computer the way it was before the crash – all of your programs, all of your files, they’re all just like they were before. And you can go on using your computer just like nothing happened.

That’s a huge difference! Instead of losing a day (or more) trying to get everything back on and set up like you had it, you start the system image restoration process and go have lunch with a friend, and when you come back it’s all done.

That might bring up a question in your mind:
“If this backup does all that, why not just use the system image as my ONLY backup?“

The system image is the ideal one to have if the whole hard drive crashes and you have to replace it with a new, blank drive. But what if you accidentally delete a picture, and you really need it back. And you can’t find it anywhere, even in the Recycle Bin. Do you really want to spend 2 hours wiping out your whole hard drive and restoring it just to replace one file? That wouldn’t make sense and it’s not very efficient at all. For a single file, you can just go to your online backup account and download that file again – all done in a few minutes. So you need BOTH types of backup.

Here’s how you do a System Image backup:

1. First, you have to get to the right screen. In Windows 7, click the Start button and type two words: back up You’ll see the menu item “Back up your computer” at the top of the Start menu – click on it. In Windows 8, go to the App screen and just type the word “recovery” then click on “Windows 7 File Recovery”. In Windows 8.1, search on “File history” and click on “File History”.

2. When you follow the steps listed above, you’ll be shown a new window. Somewhere in that window is a link for creating a System Image. Click on that link.

3. A new window opens, and it asks you where you want to save the System Image backup. You should have your external drive connected at this time, and select it from the drop-down menu under “On a hard disk”:

4. When you click Next, it will now ask you which drives to back up. Usually it’s safe to just stick with the ones it has already pre-checked, but you want to make sure you are at least backing up your primary hard drive:

5. Almost there – now it will tell you what the total size of the backup will be. It will also tell you that your previous System Image backup will be overwritten by this new one (which is what you want). So all you have to do is click the “Start backup” button.

Now your work is done. You just have to wait for the System Image backup to complete. There will be a progress bar, so you’ll be able to see it happening little by little. If you don’t have a lot of data on your drive, it might not take very long – maybe less than an hour. Mine usually take 2-3 hours so I just let it run overnight. When it’s finished, it will say “Backup completed successfully”.

Two important notes:

– Don’t use the computer while the System Image backup is being done.

– When it’s done, disconnect the external drive. Your external drive should only be connected to your computer when you’re doing a manual backup such as this.

– The first time you do a System Image backup, when it’s done it will ask if you want to create a System Repair disc. Go ahead and do that – it only takes a couple of minutes. You’ll need a blank CD-R or DVD-R to create that. Then keep that in a safe place. You’ll only need that if you need to use your System Image backup to recover from a hard drive crash. Let’s hope that never happens, but be ready when it does!

If you need help setting this up, get in touch with me. I do this for my own computer regularly, and I have set it up for lots of my clients.

The post How to create a System Image backup (and why you should) first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

system image — How to create a System Image backup (and why you should) Jul 21, 2014
Show notes

You know I’m always talking about having an automated, consistent backup process in place. This is partly because I have people bring me computers just about every week with a crashed drive, and they’re in a panic because they need the files and folders that are on that drive. But it’s also from first-hand experience – just a few weeks ago my OWN primary computer had a complete hard drive crash with no recoverable data. Of course I lost nothing because of my automated backup process.

That automated online backup process (which I can set up for you remotely in about 10 minutes) saves your individual files and folders – stuff like documents, pictures, emails, music, etc. It does not back up programs, just data. This type of backup is very important to have in place, for when your computer’s hard drive crashes.

But there’s another kind of backup, called a SystemImage, that I highly recommend you implement. This one is done manually to an external drive, and it serves a different purpose. The purpose of this backup is to get you back up and running with all your files and all your programs as quickly as possible.

Let’s consider the scenario of what happens when your hard drive crashes. Nothing to worry about really, if you have your file-by-file automated backup.

You swap out the crashed drive for a new one. At that point all you have is a blank hard drive. So you first need to install Windows. Then you need to download and install all the Windows Updates (this can take hours just by itself). Then you have to install your antivirus program and ALL the other software you use, such as Chrome or Firefox, Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader, iTunes, your printer software, and whatever else you use. Then you have to configure all of them to work they way they used to work before the crash. THEN you have to copy all of your documents, pictures, music and everything else back from your backup to your new hard drive.

It’s a process. You didn’t lose any of your important files, but you will lose some time because it can take a while to get everything back in place.

How do you avoid spending all that time to get back up and running? By having a recent System Image backup as well.

The System Image is an “all-inclusive” backup. It takes all of the files on your hard drive – your Windows installation, your documents, your pictures, your music, your screensaver, your programs, EVERYTHING – and wraps it up all together into one folder, then that backup is put on your external drive.

So let’s say you create a new System Image on Saturday, and your hard drive crashes the next day. All you have to do is swap out your dead drive with a new one, and then tell your computer to restore that System Image you created on Saturday. Within a very short period of time (usually less than a couple of hours), EVERYTHING is back on your computer the way it was before the crash – all of your programs, all of your files, they’re all just like they were before. And you can go on using your computer just like nothing happened.

That’s a huge difference! Instead of losing a day (or more) trying to get everything back on and set up like you had it, you start the system image restoration process and go have lunch with a friend, and when you come back it’s all done.

That might bring up a question in your mind:
“If this backup does all that, why not just use the system image as my ONLY backup?“

The system image is the ideal one to have if the whole hard drive crashes and you have to replace it with a new, blank drive. But what if you accidentally delete a picture, and you really need it back. And you can’t find it anywhere, even in the Recycle Bin. Do you really want to spend 2 hours wiping out your whole hard drive and restoring it just to replace one file? That wouldn’t make sense and it’s not very efficient at all. For a single file, you can just go to your online backup account and download that file again – all done in a few minutes. So you need BOTH types of backup.

Here’s how you do a System Image backup:

1. First, you have to get to the right screen. In Windows 7, click the Start button and type two words: back up You’ll see the menu item “Back up your computer” at the top of the Start menu – click on it. In Windows 8, go to the App screen and just type the word “recovery” then click on “Windows 7 File Recovery”. In Windows 8.1, search on “File history” and click on “File History”.

2. When you follow the steps listed above, you’ll be shown a new window. Somewhere in that window is a link for creating a System Image. Click on that link.

3. A new window opens, and it asks you where you want to save the System Image backup. You should have your external drive connected at this time, and select it from the drop-down menu under “On a hard disk”:

4. When you click Next, it will now ask you which drives to back up. Usually it’s safe to just stick with the ones it has already pre-checked, but you want to make sure you are at least backing up your primary hard drive:

5. Almost there – now it will tell you what the total size of the backup will be. It will also tell you that your previous System Image backup will be overwritten by this new one (which is what you want). So all you have to do is click the “Start backup” button.

Now your work is done. You just have to wait for the System Image backup to complete. There will be a progress bar, so you’ll be able to see it happening little by little. If you don’t have a lot of data on your drive, it might not take very long – maybe less than an hour. Mine usually take 2-3 hours so I just let it run overnight. When it’s finished, it will say “Backup completed successfully”.

Two important notes:

– Don’t use the computer while the System Image backup is being done.

– When it’s done, disconnect the external drive. Your external drive should only be connected to your computer when you’re doing a manual backup such as this.

– The first time you do a System Image backup, when it’s done it will ask if you want to create a System Repair disc. Go ahead and do that – it only takes a couple of minutes. You’ll need a blank CD-R or DVD-R to create that. Then keep that in a safe place. You’ll only need that if you need to use your System Image backup to recover from a hard drive crash. Let’s hope that never happens, but be ready when it does!

If you need help setting this up, get in touch with me. I do this for my own computer regularly, and I have set it up for lots of my clients.

The post How to create a System Image backup (and why you should) first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

speech recognition — Use the speech recognition software you already have Jul 14, 2014
Show notes

Are you someone that would rather talk than type? Personally, I would rather type out words on the keyboard because then I can make sure that the message that is transmitted is exactly what I want to say. The downside of typing is that it usually takes longer since most people can speak much faster than they type. But if you prefer to control your computer by your voice, you can do that. And the software that allows that is probably already in your computer.

I remember many years ago I purchased a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking (company site). This was way back in the mid-90s, and the idea of controlling your computer with your voice was still a fairly new one. I remember that the error rate for the program was pretty high. In fact, it was high enough that I didn’t continue using it because it wasn’t worth the trouble of having to go back through every document and fix all the mistakes. It has improved a lot since then, and it’s still pretty much the standard for voice recognition software usage – IF you need to use a third-party program.

But before you go out and spend your money ($75 to $175) on that program, you should check out the speech recognition software that you probably already own – the one that is built into Windows. It’s been included with the Windows operating system since Vista, so if you use Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 you already have it to try out. In some cases, you don’t need anything more than the features that come with the Windows version.

To do this, technically all you need is a microphone connected to your computer. But ideally you will want a headset (headphones and a microphone).

Here’s how to use Windows Speech Recognition:

(these instructions and screenshots are based on Windows 7, but Windows Vista and 8 are similar)

1. Click the Start button and type (or in Windows 8, just start typing) “Speech Recognition” and you’ll see a link to click on with that name (actually you can just type the word “speech” and you’ll see it appear). Click on it and you’ll get your first screen to start the setup process:

2. Then you are asked to choose which type of microphone you will be using:

3. You’ll get a few handy tips on how to use a microphone:

4. And now here’s your chance to finally speak into the microphone. They want you to read a sentence so you can gauge if the microphone volume needs to be adjusted. You should see the volume level fluctuate as you speak – your words should mostly be in the green area. Yellow would be too quiet, and red would be too loud.

5. Microphone is all set

6. If you want the program to learn your particular patterns of speech more quickly, you can have it review your Documents and your Email. This is a good thing to do in order to improve the accuracy of the software, but some people might have concerns about a Microsoft product being able to read and review your documents. Which is kind of ironic, since Microsoft Word was most likely what created those documents in the first place. But you can skip this step if you want, and the program will still work.

7. Now you need to decide how you are going to activate the speech recognition software – manually or by voice. In the Manual Activation mode, when you are using the software and you say “Stop Listening” the program actually turns off, and you have to actually run it again in order to use it. In Voice Activation Mode, the “Stop Listening” command just puts the Speech Recognition program in a light sleep mode. When you want to use it again, just say “Start listening” and it’s running again.

8. On this next screen, you will want to view the reference sheet and print it. It’s a handy list of the common phrases that the software already understands.

9. Now you need to choose if you want to have the speech recognition software run all the time (each time you boot up) or if you just want to run it when you need it.

10. The next screen is another good thing to do, if you are planning to use this feature regularly. Take the tutorial – it will give you the basics of how to control your computer with your voice.

11. Once you are done with the tutorial, you’re ready to just start using the Windows Speech Recognition as part of your regular daily computer use. When the program is running, you will see the small window at the top of your screen, and it will say “Listening” if it is indeed listening for you to give it a command:

It’s up to you how extensively you want to use it. If you want to, you can use it to completely control your computer for just about everything. Or, you can just use it to dictate content into a Word document or an email. For most people, talking is faster than typing. It will take a little bit to get used to, but with practice you might find that you prefer it to typing.

There’s another tutorial here. It is primarily based on the Windows 8 user interface, but there is a lot of similarity there so even if you use Windows 7 you should benefit from it.

The post Use the speech recognition software you already have first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

speech recognition setup — Use the speech recognition software you already have Jul 14, 2014
Show notes

Are you someone that would rather talk than type? Personally, I would rather type out words on the keyboard because then I can make sure that the message that is transmitted is exactly what I want to say. The downside of typing is that it usually takes longer since most people can speak much faster than they type. But if you prefer to control your computer by your voice, you can do that. And the software that allows that is probably already in your computer.

I remember many years ago I purchased a program called Dragon Naturally Speaking (company site). This was way back in the mid-90s, and the idea of controlling your computer with your voice was still a fairly new one. I remember that the error rate for the program was pretty high. In fact, it was high enough that I didn’t continue using it because it wasn’t worth the trouble of having to go back through every document and fix all the mistakes. It has improved a lot since then, and it’s still pretty much the standard for voice recognition software usage – IF you need to use a third-party program.

But before you go out and spend your money ($75 to $175) on that program, you should check out the speech recognition software that you probably already own – the one that is built into Windows. It’s been included with the Windows operating system since Vista, so if you use Vista, Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 you already have it to try out. In some cases, you don’t need anything more than the features that come with the Windows version.

To do this, technically all you need is a microphone connected to your computer. But ideally you will want a headset (headphones and a microphone).

Here’s how to use Windows Speech Recognition:

(these instructions and screenshots are based on Windows 7, but Windows Vista and 8 are similar)

1. Click the Start button and type (or in Windows 8, just start typing) “Speech Recognition” and you’ll see a link to click on with that name (actually you can just type the word “speech” and you’ll see it appear). Click on it and you’ll get your first screen to start the setup process:

2. Then you are asked to choose which type of microphone you will be using:

3. You’ll get a few handy tips on how to use a microphone:

4. And now here’s your chance to finally speak into the microphone. They want you to read a sentence so you can gauge if the microphone volume needs to be adjusted. You should see the volume level fluctuate as you speak – your words should mostly be in the green area. Yellow would be too quiet, and red would be too loud.

5. Microphone is all set

6. If you want the program to learn your particular patterns of speech more quickly, you can have it review your Documents and your Email. This is a good thing to do in order to improve the accuracy of the software, but some people might have concerns about a Microsoft product being able to read and review your documents. Which is kind of ironic, since Microsoft Word was most likely what created those documents in the first place. But you can skip this step if you want, and the program will still work.

7. Now you need to decide how you are going to activate the speech recognition software – manually or by voice. In the Manual Activation mode, when you are using the software and you say “Stop Listening” the program actually turns off, and you have to actually run it again in order to use it. In Voice Activation Mode, the “Stop Listening” command just puts the Speech Recognition program in a light sleep mode. When you want to use it again, just say “Start listening” and it’s running again.

8. On this next screen, you will want to view the reference sheet and print it. It’s a handy list of the common phrases that the software already understands.

9. Now you need to choose if you want to have the speech recognition software run all the time (each time you boot up) or if you just want to run it when you need it.

10. The next screen is another good thing to do, if you are planning to use this feature regularly. Take the tutorial – it will give you the basics of how to control your computer with your voice.

11. Once you are done with the tutorial, you’re ready to just start using the Windows Speech Recognition as part of your regular daily computer use. When the program is running, you will see the small window at the top of your screen, and it will say “Listening” if it is indeed listening for you to give it a command:

It’s up to you how extensively you want to use it. If you want to, you can use it to completely control your computer for just about everything. Or, you can just use it to dictate content into a Word document or an email. For most people, talking is faster than typing. It will take a little bit to get used to, but with practice you might find that you prefer it to typing.

There’s another tutorial here. It is primarily based on the Windows 8 user interface, but there is a lot of similarity there so even if you use Windows 7 you should benefit from it.

The post Use the speech recognition software you already have first appeared on The Computer Tutor.

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