Home Computer Training

Have decided to do an experiment with my old Dell laptop, running Windows 7. After January 14th I will continue to use it for daily browsing, checking emails, Facebooking and the like. I won't knowingly visit any dodgy sites or click on phishing emails, but lets see how long it takes for anything bad to happen!
PS. Don't try this at home unless, like me, you have everything backed up and it's not your main machine.

Support for Windows 7 ends on January 14th 2020.

Windows 10: Why it's finally time to upgrade from Windows 7 Support for Windows 7 ends in January.

The latest Windows 10 update, known as 1903, has been causing some computers to boot up with a black screen following the update. I had a text from one of my regular customers the other day, thinking that his screen was broken due to this issue. He solved it by removing and replacing the battery from the laptop, but here’s a link to some other methods to cure a 'black screen of death' should it happen to your computer.

Troubleshoot and fix the black screen problem on Windows 10 In this guide, we show you several methods to troubleshoot and fix black screen problems on your computer running Windows 10.

Beware of online shopping scams. They can be extremely hard to detect and very convincing.
A friend of mine was sent a link by someone she knew to a site which was offering shoes which normally retail for £60 upwards at a not-to-be-missed price of £20, for just a few hours.
She went on the site, which looked perfectly legitimate, with all the manufacturers logos, photos and descriptions of the shoes. Some of the pages were very slow to load, but she put this down to lots of people shopping for bargains at the same time. She purchased a pair of shoes using her bank card, then received an odd text message from her bank, asking for authorisation for a sum of money that wasn’t the same amount as she had paid for the shoes.
Having rung the bank, it turns out that two payments had been taken (fortunately for relatively small sums). They immediately put a stop on the account and cancelled the card.
The most embarrassing thing about this is that I was sitting next to her during the whole process, and didn’t spot the scam!
So the moral of the story is that if someone sends you a link to something that seems unbelievably cheap and only on sale for a short time, beware. The scammers are getting very good at duplicating genuine websites. Maybe the slow loading of pages was a clue. I will be much more cautious in the future and so will my friend.

If you live outside of a town area and you have a slow broadband connection, then you may be experiencing the same problems a lot of my customers complain about.
'My computer is really slow.'
'Web pages take forever to load.'
If you have a computer that is running Windows 10 Home version, the updates are automatically downloaded in the background, and this can make everything else slow right down. Like a lot of people, if you only switch your computer on a few times a week, each time it connects to the Internet it will resume trying to download Microsoft's latest updates.
Unfortunately, you can’t stop these, but you can make it less annoying by simply switching on your computer every now and then when you are going to be doing something else, such as watching TV, and letting it download those pesky upgrades without interfering with what you want to do.