Never Forget

How to solve the 10 most common tech support problems yourself

And if/when you get frustrated, call me! :-)

This comes from pcworld.com.

"Whether you’re dealing with your dad’s decade-old computer or your own custom-built gaming rig, troubleshooting PC problems is a part of everyday life. Before you make that $50 support call, though, try your hand at homebrew tech support. We spoke to some of the best support reps in the business about the most common problems they fix—and how you can do it yourself.

Read the whole article here

5 budget laptops for college students: We name the best

If you are serious about buying a new laptop, this is an excellent article. This is from PCWorld.com.

"So you’re heading back to school and you need a new laptop—but you didn’t manage your finances over the summer. Your bank account is nearly tapped out, and you still need to buy text books and lay in enough ramen noodles to last through the winter.

Yeah, we’ve all been there. Fortunately, Moore’s Law is still in play, so today’s budget notebook is yesterday’s workhorse. Pretty much any modern laptop can handle the gamut of productivity chores—word processing, number crunching, email, and the like—but all of the machines in this roundup can also tackle media editing and encoding sessions, and deliver respectable entertainment experiences.

To strike the best balance between performance and affordability, I gathered the top five notebooks I could find for $650 or less. Benchmark busters they’re not, but they aren’t budget busters, either."

Check out the whole detailed article here

Google Maps adding real-time traffic updates

One more reason I need a smartphone!

From USA Today:

"The first benefits of Google's $1 billion acquisition of map software service Waze will appear today.
Real-time traffic reports from Waze app users will now appear on the Google Maps app for Apple iOS and Android, says a blog post from Google.

The reports include accidents, road closures, construction and other incidents.

Meanwhile, Waze users will gain access to Google search and Street View. The updates to both services will be available today.

In June, Google scooped up the Israeli startup for $1 billion in an effort to bolster its already powerful Google Maps service. Social network Facebook had been rumored to consider an acquisition of Waze prior to the deal.

Waze is a social mapping app that provides turn-by-turn directions and real-time incident reports filed by its community. The app boasts about 30 million users."

The Best All-in-One PCs

OK, all-in-one PCs may not be the most popular tech items out there today, but there is still a market, and there are some pretty nice product offerings too. This article and table of the best 10 (in the author's opinion) product offerings comes from pcmag.com today. Of interest to me is that he includes offerings from Apple under the umbrella term PCs.

"The all-in-one desktop PC is an interesting beast. It has gone from being the only game in town (think Commodore Pet/Apple III/TRS-80) to a tiny niche (the original Apple iMac) in a sea of tower PCs, to today, where the All-in-One PC is replacing the tower PC as the form factor you picture in your head when you hear the phrase "desktop computer.""

More, including comparison table here.....

GMail a little too open? Google says users should have no ‘expectation of privacy’

I found a link to this article today on boston.com. The link below to protecting electronic communications has lots of detailed information on how to proceed if you want to do something about this, but it gets pretty technical very quickly.

"In a recent court filing, Google admitted what privacy researchers have warned for years: Users of the service have “no expectation of privacy,” likening itself to a secretary who screens a bosses snail mail. Here’s what you can do to change that.

As RT reported, the assertion was made in response to a class-action suit regarding how the company scans users’ emails for advertising purposes, such as offering up vacation destinations when it can tell you’ve got time off coming up.

But while the group that publicized the statement, Consumer Watchdog, claims that it’s a sign that Google does not respect users’ privacy, the problem goes deeper: The concept of third-party, private hosted email is almost fundamentally flawed, particularly now that it has come to light that court orders can secretly get access to corporate servers while preventing user notification.

Email was already deeply flawed since much of it is transmitted unencrypted between servers unless a user adds on an extra level of encryption such as PGP or GPG, and even then leaks of e-mail metadata are common.

Fortunately, Micah Lee of the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation has put together a good, relatively comprehensive guide on protecting electronic communications, and the better news is that much of what you need to do is not that hard, and is getting easier. And that means that, no matter what GMail or any other corporation, government, or hacker wants, you have major control in keeping your privacy protected.

As Lee writes:

“But even with direct access to all the data traveling at the speed of light through the Internet’s backbone fiber-optic cables, even with cooperation of the major United States tech companies (which are extremely difficult for people to boycott), the largest, most powerful, and best funded surveillance apparatus that humanity has ever seen cannot defeat mathematics.”"

 

No, your data isn't secure in the cloud

From computerworld.com:

While online data storage services claim your data is encrypted, there are no guarantees. And with government surveillance programs crawling the web for metadata and email, there's little doubt online privacy can exist without strong safeguards.

Read more...

Two Providers of Secure E-Mail Shut Down

This is very interesting: "Taken together, the closures signal that e-mails, even if they are encrypted, can be accessed by government authorities and that the only way to prevent turning over the data is to obliterate the servers that the data sits on."

See more of this NYT Technology article here

iPhone sinks as Android seizes market share

From the Wall Street Journal:

"Google's Android software continues to steamroll the competition in smartphones, posing bigger problems for companies like Apple and BlackBerry.

New data Wednesday from research firm IDC found that Apple's share of the global market slid to 13.2 percent in the second quarter from 16.6 percent in the year-earlier period. Handsets running Android, meanwhile, jumped to 79.3 percent from 69.1 percent.

The signs are particularly ominous for one-time market leader BlackBerry, despite some high-profile product announcements recently. Devices running its software accounted for just 2.9 percent of global smartphone shipments in the three months ended in June, compared with 4.9 percent for the same period in 2012.

Android is given away free to handset makers by Google, whose strategy is to make money on advertising associated with mobile devices. It has long powered smartphones offered by industry giant Samsung, but has lately also benefited by Chinese companies such as Lenovo, Huawei and ZTE. that are grabbing a bigger chunk of the smartphone market.

"You are seeing tremendous growth in the developing world," said Steve Mollenkopf, president and operating chief of mobile chip giant Qualcomm Inc. Companies selling there are "picking up Android and driving that.""

You can keep your PC clean, tuned, and problem free.

I am posting this for new visitors and regulars who might need a refresher. I continue to use this suite of programs and aids and have no problems on any of our 3 systems, two running Windows 7 and one running Windows XP. One of my objectives is to continue running Windows XP long after the end of Microsoft support in April of 2014.

From time to time I refer to my security baseline. My security baseline is merely a list of programs I use (all free) and recommend for anyone to use to keep their systems secure. This applies to YOU if you use Windows XP, Vista, or Windows 7. The only difference in Windows 8 is that Windows 8 comes with its own Anti-virus program. It is called Windows Defender. It too is free.

Remember, all of these products are FREE, but will do as good a job as any fee products you may use. I make that statement and stand by it based on 45 years of experience with computers.
 
1. Microsoft Security Essentials. This is a very impressive anti-virus program and can replace any you have now. There is no need to pay a fee for an anti-virus program. DOWNLOAD HERE

2. Windows Firewall (Standard part of your operating system. Check the Security Center to be sure it is on.)

3. MVPS HOSTS File - download the current month's version and update monthly DOWNLOAD HERE

4. CCleaner - check for newer version than you may already have. Run weekly. DOWNLOAD HERE by clicking on Download Latest Version in the upper right hand corner of the page.

5. Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware - run bi-weekly. DOWNLOAD HERE

6. SuperAntiSpyware Free Edition - run bi-weekly in the off week after #5. DOWNLOAD HERE

7. Spybot Search & Destroy - run monthly just before downloading new HOSTS file.  I recommend, for now, downloading Version 1.6.2 under "old versions". DOWNLOAD HERE

I will be happy to assist you with any or all of the above installations. This can be done remotely.

Questions?  Comment below or write me, pcdoc@brpcdoc.com

PC sales still smashing tablets on college campuses

This surprises me. I figure it's only a matter of time before tablets take the lead.

This comes from bgr.com:

"There is absolutely no question at this point that tablets are responsible for the global decline in PC sales. This was an inevitability that top market research firms fought at first in an effort to guard their clients, but the numbers don’t lie: PC sales are falling as tablet sales skyrocket. There are still signs of life for PCs though, and one is that people for whom work is a priority still need the software and multitasking benefits afforded by laptops and desktops. Recent market research from Deloitte found that 82% of college students own computers and 80% own smartphones, but just 18% own tablets. “The combination of smartphones and laptops makes the tablet redundant for students,” Deloitte’s Brent Schoenbaum told MarketWatch. Dealnews.com’s Louis Ramirez added that “unless you’re shooting for a degree in Angry Birds, tablets are a horrible back-to-school purchase.”

More.....

Need LIKES on Facebook

If you visit this site regularly or even just once in a while, and if you have a Facebook account, please consider liking my Facebook page.

You will find it at https://www.facebook.com/BRPCDOC

Once there please click on LIKE!

Thanks. Some FB features are only activated for Pages with so many Likes, and I don't have enough right now.

Chromecast, Simply and Cheaply, Flings Web Video to TVs

This comes from David Pogue of the New York Times:

"Ever hear the old saying, “Information wants to be free?” Well, here’s a corollary for you: “TV wants to be à la carte.”

Take the story of the iTunes store. The instant somebody offered the chance to buy songs individually, the world changed forever. Hello, music à la carte. Goodbye, Tower Records.

Now it’s cable TV’s turn. 

We are engaged in a great civil movement, testing whether that business, or any business so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The number of people who cut the cord, or cancel the satellite, in favor of getting all their TV from the Internet is still small — maybe 1 percent of us a year. But the online alternatives to cable TV are growing. And once it becomes simple and easy to get Internet video from our laptops and phones to the actual television, well, the term “TV drama” will have a whole new meaning. 

Actually, that has just happened. Google’s new Chromecast gizmo is the smallest, cheapest, simplest way yet to add Internet to your TV. It looks like a portly flash drive or maybe a fat keychain — and it costs $35. That’s not a typo."

More......

Feds tell Web firms to turn over user account passwords

Going too far?

From cnet.com:

"The U.S. government has demanded that major Internet companies divulge users' stored passwords, according to two industry sources familiar with these orders, which represent an escalation in surveillance techniques that has not previously been disclosed.

If the government is able to determine a person's password, which is typically stored in encrypted form, the credential could be used to log in to an account to peruse confidential correspondence or even impersonate the user. Obtaining it also would aid in deciphering encrypted devices in situations where passwords are reused."

More.....

Dashlane redux

Please see my post on this subject on June 8.

I installed Dashlane on my XP laptop. I couldn't install it on my Windows 7 desktop due to a technical problem: Dashlane was unable to detect my internet connection (a hard-wired, hich-speed connection). It seems to me that their error message was not describing what their REAL problem was. I wrote their support team 2 days ago, but no reply yet.

I installed Dashlane on my XP laptop last night and this morning I UNINSTALLED it! I did not like it at all. I think their problem is that they do not have very user-friendly prompts or instructions.

Although I dd not exactly recommend it on June 8, I can say unequivocally today thet I DO NOT RECOMMEND DASHLANE.

If you try it and like it, please let me know. I would be glad to hear your two cents.

Follow this blog on Facebook

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Go to my Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/BRPCDOC

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Happy Independence Day

Happy 4th! Have a great day.

Windows 8

Okay, perhaps it's a little early to christen Microsoft's Windows 8 as the heir-apparent to its Vista operating system.

Microsoft hears the complaints loud and clear and is doing what it can to avoid another total disaster. For those of you already suffering with Windows 8 you might be interested in this PCmag.com article.

How to Upgrade to the Windows 8.1 Preview

 As for me, my laptop runs Windows XP and my desktop runs Windows 7. I like them both very much. I intend to keep running XP for as long as the hardware lasts. As most know, Microsoft will stop adding updates to Windows XP in April 2014. Won't that be loverly? Just imagine, no more annoying and nagging reminders that you have updates to run! I love the thought, and just hope that the old iron keeps chugging along.

 

Scanning a Signature for Digital Documents

Here is a handy tip from the NY Times.

"If you have access to a scanner, writing your name solidly in dark ink in on white paper and scanning the page is one way to go. Once you save the image file of your signature, you can insert it into Word documents, PDF files or as an image in your e-mail program’s signature area. (When saving the scanned file, choosing the black-and-white bitmap or PNG formats may result in a crisper signature, but the JPG format is more common.)

Image-editing programs like Adobe Photoshop have tools for cleaning up and enhancing your scanned signature, as demonstrated in this tutorial. Adobe TV has a video that shows how to use its Adobe Acrobat software to do the same thing. If you have a Mac with a built-in Webcam and at least OS X 10.7 (Lion), you can also use the Preview app to create a digital signature file you can use to sign documents.

If you do not have a scanner — but have a smartphone — a free or inexpensive document-scanning app can capture an image of your signature; many of these can also convert photos of documents into PDF files or images. Some apps can also directly digitize your signature, so you may want to browse around your phone’s online store to see what solution works best for you."

SOS Online Backup

I love my SOS Online Backup service. I regularly back up all of my important files on their systems in "The Cloud". It is very comforting to know that should I lose any of the 45,385 digital photos I have taken since 2001, I can download them in a matter of minutes from SOS. Same goes for all of my Music files, Video files, and miscellaneous Documents of all sorts.

When I first started with SOS I backed up my data on a daily basis, but now I have gained a lot of confidence in SOS and back up weekly.

If you are looking for an affordable solution to your back up needs, consider SOS. They are the best!

(Did I mention their technical support is superb?)

Check them out by clicking here