Thursday, February 25, 2016

Class Summary 2-25-2016


Battery monitor for your PC is free. It reports on the condition of your laptop battery.
http://www.passmark.com/products/batmon.htm

Free data transfer tool from Microsoft allows you to easily hook two PCs together and move files from your old machine to the new one. And it is free until the end of July.
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/the-easiest-free-way-to-transfer-files-to-a-new-windows-pc/

Compress a PDF using this online service. It will take an existing PDF and compress it down to 50% or more in our tests. It also does a perfect job in our tests of converting a PDF to a Microsoft Word file. Better even than Microsoft Word itself.
http://smallpdf.com/

ccleaner in the cloud so you do not have to install it on your computer. Free for 3 PC’s at home. The downloadable version is still available.
http://www.piriform.com/ccleaner-cloud

Ccleaner remove cookies. And empties the trash. Glary also empties the trash (recycle bin). The four programs we suggest you run often are Glary, Ccleaner, Malwarebytes, and Superantispyware. I use the free versions. If you purchase them, they run on their own and you do not have to. There is a class each month on how to run them to clean your machine.

Anti Ransomware by Malwarebytes is free (beta version) and is said to protect you from an attack from ransomware.
http://tinyurl.com/h4wlrwg

Backup your bookmarks might be important to you if you somehow delete them. It seems Firefox and Chrome have made allowance for that possibility and store a backup copy right on your PC.
http://tinyurl.com/d9cvnao

Chrome has a new 64bit version. If you have a 64bit, the new 64bit version of chrome will make a big difference. Our club member, Paul tells us “I had the 32bit version and once I loaded the 64 bit version the speed ‘problems’ I seemed to be having with Chrome have gone away.”
http://www.howtogeek.com/241501/you-should-upgrade-to-64-bit-chrome.-its-more-secure-stable-and-speedy/

Google retires Picasa. Both the web version and the desktop version are going away and soon. You may still use the desktop version, but there will be no more updates. And support for it ends next month. The web version won't go away for a couple of more month. So get your images off the web version and onto Google Photos or downloaded to your PC. Read the details at:
http://tinyurl.com/zlg4bvg



Facebook has new like buttons. Mouse over the Like button and in a second or two these button appear. Click the appropriate one and you can show how you like the post.

Then

I was asked how to save someone's post on Facebook, like a recipe or some well written post I want to read later. The simplest was is to share it to your own page. But instead of sharing it with Friends or Public, share it as Only Me. This means it will display on your page, but you will be the only one to be able to see it. Note: always check the sharing option before posting as facebook remembers the last one used and will use it again. So if you shared as Only Me then your next post will be Only Me unless you change it back to Friends or Public.

We talked about how to stop email notifications in Facebook. When you get the email do not just delete it. Open the email and locate the unsubscribe link. Click it and those types of notifications will not come to your email anymore. There are a number of different types so do not be discouraged when other emails arrive. They will not be the same type as the ones you have already unsubscribed to. So just unsubscribe them as well.

Saturday, February 20, 2016

Class Summary 2-18-2016

Full class and lots of interest in Facebook. Only a handful were not on Facebook, so we showed how to sign up. Open www.facebook.com and ceate an account. Be sure to write down the email address you used and the password you choose.

There is no way to remember all we talked about, but here are some of the important highlights.

A friend is someone you have requested to be your friend, like me at facebook.com/dickevans. If I be you request that I be your friend I get to decide if I want that. So you do not have to make friends with everyone who asks. If I find you on Facebook, I can ask to be your friend and then you get to decide.

Everyone can see your page even if they are not your friends. However, the details on your page, the posts, can be set to not show unless someone is your friend. The default is Public and you would change that to Friends.

When you open Facebook, it open to your Home page. The bar across the top is used to go to your Home page, your personal page, or in the box to search for someone. The F in the ftar left and the word Home on the right will take you to your home page. Your name in the bar takes you to your personal page.

On your homepage you will see a list of links on the left to go to pages you have gone before and to groups you may belong to. A link to your personal page is at the top. The middle section displays the Newsfeed. It contains recent posts from your friends and might be quite long. Let's say you have 25 friends and they each post 10 things a day. Your newsfeed with have 250 entries just for today. The newest is first. If someone is constantly posting thing you really do not care to see, click the down arrow in the upper right of the post and unfollow that person. Unfollowing does not block them or unfriend them. It just stops their daily posts from cluttering up your newsfeed. If you want to see their posts simply open their page and view them.

When you open your page or anyone else's page the only posts appearing are ones posted by you or someone else to your page. You can set your account so if anyone is posting to your page you get to review the post before allowing it on.

All activity on your page and some activity on your friends pages is sent to your email as a notification. If you do not want to see these, then open each email and click unsubscribe. This does not affect what you see on Facebook. It just tell Facebook not to send this type of notification to you.

We looked into the system area of your profile to see how to set a number of these defaults. It is the down arrow to the right of the top bar.

We also looked at saving a picture from a facebook post and then reposting it on another page. And we reviewed using copy and paste to take from one post the copy into another.

There was much more. Come to any class and ask about the finer points you are having difficulty with.

Monday, February 15, 2016

Class Summary 2-11-2016

Google is giving away 2GB of Drive space for completing its account security checkup
http://tinyurl.com/jxsosvj

Reflect is the backup software we use at the club. Depending on how often you use your computer and add or change your data, you should at least backup your hard drive once a month or more often. If your computer crashes and we cannot get it going for you, we will have to use your last image backup to restore your system. Anything added since the date of that backup will have been lost. So, backup often. Set it to run at night and it will be done when you wake up. However, it will only an hour or less to run. To download the latest version of Reflect:
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

Forwarding emails can be an issue if the email you are sending to your friends comes from one you subscribe to, like the emails I send you each week. At the bottom of that email is a link to allow you to unsubscribe. If you forward it as is, your friend could unsubscribe you and you will not be receiving my emails anymore. Use the link on the email to forward and not the forward button on your email program. Or scroll down to the bottom of the email and remove the lines at the bottom that allow you to unsubscribe.

Passwords are necessary to insure that it is us logging into a particular website. It is not a good idea to use the same one for all sites. Some sites have particular rules to follow like having one capital letter, a number, a special character, and 8-10 total characters. So how do we remember them all?

Most of members in class today have a notebook where they keep all their passwords. Find their notebook and you can access all their sites. Lose that notebook and it will be a nightmare finding what they are. If you say yes to storing your passwords in your browser, then you can find them if you are logged into that browser. In Chrome I use an extension that allows me to mouseover the dots hiding the password on the login screen and my password appears.

I use a two step method to store my passwords on my computer in my OneDrive so I can access it from any computer through my Microsoft account. A simple program called Locknote works like Notepad, but needs a password to open. In that simple file I list all my accounts with their passwords. But I have a method of writing the passwords in a code that others would not know. So even if they got my file and hacked the password, they would have to know my codes to use any of the information. You can download Locknote at https://sourceforge.net/projects/locknote/

A few of the class members are using apps to store their passwords such as Password Safe and Keypass. They work great and keep track like my method above with a single password to access the list. Some of the password programs will generate passwords for you and some will automatically sign you in to sites you have stored.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2426845,00.asp
Article on password management

http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/chromepass.html
view passwords stored in chrome

Speaking of passwords. If you type the wrong password three times in a row to sign in to your PC, Microsoft Windows 8-10 locks and you cannot sign back in. You have to go on another computer to open microsoft.com and reset your password, which you may not know. We should all have made a password reset CD to recover from losing our Microsoft password.

Here are the instructions from Microsoft to create one:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/create-password-reset-disk#1TC=windows-7

Type chrome://downloads in the address bar and chrome will open the recent downloads in chrome if it does not show at the bottom of your browser window. Like when you have closed chrome and open it again.

Password protect your office files, like Word or Excel, by clicking Save As. On the bottom of the Save As dialog, click Tools. On the Tools menu, click General Options. Under File sharing options for this document, in the Password to modify box, type a password.

http://www.passmark.com/products/pt.htm
Performance test of your PC free for 30 days

Here is an interesting app for your smartphone. Flush is a free application for Google Android devices that provides you with options to find public toilets quickly. The app may use your current location for its searches if you allow it to access location information, or you may enter a location directly to display information about public toilets this way.

Thursday, February 4, 2016

Class Summary 2-4-2016

The first question was about how to show the bookmark toolbar in Firefox.



Open FireFox and click the icon on the address bar line that looks like a clipboard. Then click Bookmarks Toolbar and then click View Bookmarks Toolbar. In Chrome it is
Tools > Bookmark > Show bookmark bar. The Tools button looks like this .

OneDrive comes with Windows 7-8-10. It is a folder on your hard drive. But it is a special folder when you are signed into Windows using your Microsoft credentials. If you have a local account you will not see OneDrive active. When you save a file into OneDrive and one of it’s folders, it is saved on your hard drive. However, if you are on the Internet the file is also sent up to the Microsoft cloud. You can access those file at http://onedrive.live.com. Sign in with your Microsoft credentials and see your folders and files in the Microsoft cloud.

One member has a different gmail address then his wife, but would like to somehow sync their contact lists. There does not seem to be a way to do that in gmail. So we googled YouTube and found a solution. Check out http://www.kylook.com/en. It is free for up to 600 contacts. You can pay for more contacts.

We use the screensaver options to have our screen turn into a slideshow of our pictures. You can point to a particular folder of pictures and they will display after your screen has been idle for x minutes.

Right-click start button > Control panel > Personalization > Screensaver



Under Settings you can select the pictures. Change the wait time to the number of minutes you want the screen idle before the screensaver cuts in. The checkbox will make you sign back in when you come back to using the computer.


Change power settings > Change plan settings

Lets you set the number of idle minutes before the display turns off or the number of minutes you want to make it go to sleep. If you have a laptop you will see to sets of settings. If a desktop you will only see one set. I usually have mine set for when plugged in for a much longer time.

When in a browser you can use Ctrl + T to open a new tab. Or you can click the box to the right of the rightmost open tab,

We looked at wheregoes.com, a tool for tracing a link. We have talked before about mousing over a link and looking in the lower left of the browser window to see where the link is going to take you. If you copy the link address and paste it into wheregoes, it will trace the path the link will take and show you the ultimate destination.

To change File Explorer so it opens the This PC window (used to be called My Computer) instead of the default.

Open File Explorer. (File folder in the taskbar or Win+E).



File > Change folder and search options



Change Open File Explorer to: select This PC, then click Apply and OK.

Demonstrated how to use smile.amazon.com to have them give .5% to your favorite charity ever time you purchase something on Amazon. This does not cost you anything, just benefits the charity.



There are two “printers” on Windows that are not really printers. The first

creates a PDF of your document and allows you to save it to your computer for later retrieval and printing. Great to use when you are away from home and from your printer. Just choose this “printer” and it will end up on your hard drive. When you get back home open the PDF and print it to your printer. The XPS file is like the PDF. It prints to an XPS file format that only Microsoft can read. The PDF format you can send to others and they can open it with Acrobat Reader or in Windows 10, Edge.

Next week we will talk about passwords and the following week we will get back to basics with Facebook.