Episodes

Do you know what your laptop does when you close the lid without powering it down first? Does it shut it off, or put it to Sleep mode, or Hibernate, or maybe it does nothing at all? It’s interesting to find out what people think about this process. Some people assume that when they close the lid, it shuts off the power to the computer. For others, all they know is that when they open the lid the next time, they can just click to sign in and they can use the computer again (without having to wai...

Recently I got a message from one of my readers, Mike – Boo. I asked a question some months back which you mentioned, but did not answer. Perhaps I can ask again? I need to limit my search results by date. For example, I want to search for mythtv. This is sort of useless and I find many old out of date results. Some info is outdated, some is flat wrong, some companies or web sites have closed down. I waste lots of time checking the results. Is there a way to search for mythtv, but use a date li...

Thanks to a really good ad blocker (Ublock Origin), I see almost no display ads on most websites. It’s wonderful. But if that’s the only ad blocker you use, you’ll still see ads on one popular website – Facebook. Here’s how you can get rid of the ads on Facebook as well. Facebook is kind of tricky about how ads are displayed. They try to make the ads sort of “blend in” with the other content so you’ll maybe not notice that it’s an ad and you’ll just keep reading it. And they put ads all over th...

Do you have a bunch of pictures saved on your Windows 10 computer? It’s really easy to view them in a slide show, full screen. (yes, those are my pups – Lilly and Fenway – in that picture) There are lots of ways to view the images stored on your computer. You can see them on your actual monitor, you can connect your computer to your large screen television, or you could even connect a projector to your laptop and put them up on a big screen if you want. But you still need a way to have the pi...

A little while back I discovered a service that doesn’t cost anything and can sometimes be useful. Now my post office sends me a picture of what the letter carrier will be putting in my mailbox later that day. I don’t know how long the US Postal Service has offered this service, but I just discovered it and I like it. My snail-mail delivery is in the afternoon. Sometimes as early as 2:30 pm, sometimes as late as 5:30 pm. I don’t know why there is such a difference in time each day, but that’s ...

I love Airbnb and I’ve used the service several times. But unfortunately, like with many things today, the scammers have figured out a way to trick you out of your money using the Airbnb service. Here’s how it works and how you can avoid it. I love Airbnb (use this link to get $40 off your first trip if you want to try it out) and have used it several times. If you’re not familiar with it, Airbnb is basically an alternative to staying in a hotel. Anyone that has a home with a spare bedroom, or ...

Recently a client called me in a panic, because he was in the middle of using his laptop and suddenly it shut off and now it wouldn’t boot up again. By all appearances, his laptop was just dead. Here’s how we handled it. I have to tell you, I really love using this trick. To someone that watches it happen, it’s like magic. One minute their computer is completely dead – no lights, no fan, nothing on the screen, and pushing the power button has no effect at all. Many times when people contact me ...

Everyone seems to be in a panic about privacy these days. All the big companies want to know everything about you, and most people are reluctant to give up any more information than they really need to (with one exception – we willingly tell Facebook everything about ourselves). But when Google asks you for your phone number – you definitely should give it to them. “What??” “Google is evil! They want to know too much about me!” “I don’t want to give them any more personal details!” That’s fi...

Online scams are a huge problem, and it seems like they won’t be going away anytime soon. I recently had a client who almost got scammed and wasn’t even aware of it until I explained what happened. Laura contacted me about buying one of my refurbished laptops. Her laptop had been running really badly recently so she was considering getting a new one. I answered some questions (we were communicating via Facebook chat) and eventually we were talking about her current laptop and the possibility of...

Had this come up with a client recently. His email inbox was constantly showing the wrong time for incoming emails. He could receive an email at 2 pm, and yet when he looked at that email, it would show that it arrived at 9 pm. In fact, he demonstrated the problem while he was here at my home office. I sent him an email, it showed up in his inbox, but the “arrival time” displayed was several hours into the future. He had been dealing with this mystery for quite some time before telling me about...

Recently, Facebook has been overrun with all kinds of warnings about hackers and viruses. I’ve gotten numerous direct Facebook messages from friends, alerting me of these problems and encouraging me to forward the same message to all of my contacts. I won’t be doing that. Here are a couple that I’ve received recently – This reminds me of the old days when people would get these “alerts” by email, with the instructions to forward them to everyone in their email contact list. And believe it or n...

Chrome is great even if you just leave it alone and use it with the default settings. But I like to customize and “tweak” it a few different ways to make it even better. Basically what I’m describing here today is the process I go through when I’m setting up Chrome on a client’s computer they’ve just purchased, or on a laptop that I’ll have available for sale. The following steps involve going in to the Chrome Settings. To get to that area, you need to click the 3 little dots in the top right ...

Microsoft Office is a group of programs, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and others. Most of the time these programs work fine, but occasionally they can misbehave. What a lot of people don’t know is that there’s a quick fix you should try before you call your computer tech for a repair. The programs in Microsoft Office are large and complex. Most people, including myself, use just a very few features out of all that are available. I might use MS Word to write a letter to the Safety ...

Windows 10 has been out for almost 2 years now. If you’re still running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, is it time for you to upgrade? Maybe. A little background first. If you’ve been reading this blog or listening to my podcast for the past couple of years or longer, you know that I did not take kindly to Microsoft’s rollout of Windows 10 back in the summer of 2015. They were forcing the “free upgrade” on Windows 7 or 8 users, even if people specifically opted to NOT take it. And many of those that ...

Now that most people have smart phones, and we all have a high-resolution camera with us at all times, there are new ways to use them popping up all the time. What we’re talking about today is a great example of that. Who would have thought that your cell phone could actually save someone’s life – but it’s true. What we’re talking about here is human trafficking. This is something that’s easy to not really think about much because most of us don’t see it happening. But it is definitely happenin...

Think about when your internet connection isn’t working properly. Maybe you’re getting a “Page cannot be found” error, or your computer can’t find the wifi signal, or perhaps websites are just loading reeeaaallly slowly. If you call your internet provider, what’s the first thing they’ll tell you to do? Restart your modem and router. But even better than that – have your modem and router restarted automatically for you, every single day. Sometimes my clients will call me when their internet is n...

Recently I got some reports from people that something weird was happening on their Windows computer. Every so often a window would appear on the screen and then immediately disappear. It would happen so quickly there was no chance of seeing any words or error message – it would just flash on then disappear. Then I noticed it also happening on my screen. What is this weird thing that’s happening to our computers? Honestly, when I first heard about it, I kind of assumed it was virus or at least ...

If you’re on Facebook, you’ve probably seen this happen. You suddenly get a friend request from someone you’ve already been friends with for a long time. What’s the best thing to do in this situation? First off, I want to say up front that when this happens, it is not a “hack”. I put that phrase in the title of this blog post and in the graphic above mainly so that people would have an idea of what I’m talking about. That’s because whenever I see this happen on Facebook, the thing that happens ...

I recently got this voice mail from one of my podcast listeners: “Hi, my name is Bridget and I’m calling from Oregon and I appreciate your show so much. I do love my computer, but there is one thing I just don’t understand. But first – let me admit, I am over 50 (haha). What I don’t understand is Flash. I’ve been warned to remove Flash completely but then I go to websites that say you have to have Flash. Should I have this? Thank you Scott, tell me what to do.” Thanks Bridget! You’re definitel...

After last week’s post about the website with the large volume of ads that would have normally been eliminated by my ad-blockers, I got some inquiries asking what software I use to avoid seeing any website advertisements. For me, there are 3 basic reasons to use an ad-blocker: To stop seeing all the annoying ads. Of course, this is the big reason most people decide to use an ad-blocker. Many ads are disruptive, and are designed specifically to be that way. After all, if the ad just blended nic...

Last Monday we talked about taking some non-essential programs out of the “auto-startup” process in order to speed up your computer. Today we’ll go over an easy way to figure out if you should actually uninstall a program from your Windows computer. You know how it is – when you go into Control Panel to the area where it lists all the programs that are there (it’s in the “Programs and Features” section), it can be a little overwhelming to decide what programs are not needed. On the other hand, ...

When a Windows computer is running slowly, one of the first things I check is this: How many programs are running at the same time, both visibly and in the background? The more programs are running, the slower they all run. So let’s streamline your computer and run only those programs that are needed. This is something I see all the time, and it’s an issue that eventually returns even after it’s fixed. On a new computer – software companies pay to have Dell or HP or any other computer manufact...

All of my email is sent and received using Microsoft Outlook, and there’s one feature of Outlook that I use all the time – the ability to send an email at a future date and time, rather than having it go out immediately. Why would I want to create a new email, or reply to an email, but then send it at a later time? Mainly, to avoid getting into an email-based “chat” situation. Here’s what that means. I’m in my home office, working on various things, and an email comes in. Could be from a clie...

Usually I talk about stuff that pertains specifically to computers, but I recently started using a really handy program that will work on computers, tablets and phones (PC or Mac). It’s called Simplenote. For comparison, this is “kind of” a competitor to Evernote. If you haven’t used Evernote, it’s a program for capturing information and storing it no matter where you are or what you’re doing. For example, if you see a news article online that looks interesting but you don’t have time to read i...