Help! I’m locked out of my Windows system and I don’t know the password. What do I do?

 

 

The answer is, simply, I can regain access for you to your Windows system, be it XP, Vista or Windows 7. This can be accomplished by either setting the password to your account to whatever you desire or by removing the password.

The method of doing this is somewhat complicated and geeky. It involves creating a CD and then booting into a Linux system, and Linux isn’t even English-like.  So I simply offer it as a service. If your system is locked, I’m the locksmith.

 

The simple joy of listening to an audiobook on your phone…for FREE.

 

 

I have an Iphone. I also have a library card for the Jefferson County, Colorado Public Library. Why this is important is I can download audiobooks for free.

The Jeffco library has what they call the Overdrive Media Center. This is a location that contains many, many audiobooks which can be downloaded to Android and Iphone alike. There is a search feature and you can search by author, title, or subject.

Here’s how it works: You download a piece of software that uses either Windows or Mac called the Overdrive Media Console. Then, on your computer you choose a book and it will say either “place on e-hold” or “add to e-cart”. If it says add to e-cart, you can do so and then check it out. When you download the file that the e-cart gives you the Overdrive Media Console will open and you can download the book to your computer. From your computer you can then use the Overdrive Media Console to transfer the book to your phone. The book will play perfectly sequentially.

You can also download the Overdrive Media Console directly to your phone and download books directly. But I found that I had problems using the library’s search engine on my phone. And it will only download books when you have your phone connected to Wi-Fi.

This is not very complicated if you’ve seen it done once. The first time, however can be a trial. Plain & Simple Computing offers tutoring in all things Itunes.

I don’t recommend wireless printers

I think the idea of a wireless printer is magical. You set up your printer on an end table in your living room, it attaches to your router and you can magically print to this printer, WITHOUT WIRES!! This is all fine and great. But watch out. Here comes the disclaimer: Expecting this to work out flawlessly over the long term is like wishing to win the lottery. Forget it.

Here’s what happens: Most wireless printers ask your router dynamically for an address to join the Internet. this is called DHCP: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol. And the router gives your printer an address. Then a driver is installed on your laptop or desktop that knows the address your router has assigned to the printer. Here’s the catch: When you have a power outage, like we all do occasionally, your router may not necessarily assign the printer the same address. This fouls things up completely. And the routines to fix this type of problem don’t work reliably. Sometimes you can get it to work and sometimes you can’t without taking drastic steps such as reloading operating systems. And you can spend hours talking to printer manufacturer support.

So don’t. If you have a laptop you can set up a desk with your printer and a USB cable that sticks out for attaching to your laptop. this is a much better solution than relying on wireless printing.

One antivirus to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.

I’ve run into this problem twice in the past two days so I thought it was a good idea to blog about it: I think having an antivirus program is essential if you are a Windows user. But I’m seeing computers running two antivirus programs side by side. And folks, that ain’t good. The two antivirus programs fight with each other continuously and slow a computer down to a crawl. Most antivirus programs will do the job adequately, although I have my favorites. But just pick one. Uninstall the one or ones you don’t like and you will improve your computer’s performance instantly.

As to which antivirus I like, it is AVG Antivirus Free Edition 2012 available here.

Help! My Youtube videos starts and stops and I HATE it!

Top four reasons your Youtube videos won’t play smoothly:

4. Your computer is infected with a virus that uses up all of your processor capacity.
What you can do here is run a full scan using your antivirus program. If you don’t have one, AVG Antivirus Free Edition 2012 is available here

3. Your computer is infected with a piece or several pieces of spyware that use up all of your processor capacity.
What I recommend here is Super Antispyware available here.

2. You are starting up too many programs when your computer starts, many of them useless.
You can look at every program that is starting up using MSconfig. I created a video blog on the subject which you can find here

1. You don’t have enough RAM.
You can check how much RAM your system has by looking at the system icon in control panel. I created a video blog on the subject that you can find here.

If your computer crashes and you have no backup, are you still in business?

I have a customer that is a construction management company–a small company with 6 computer users. They all tie into a big, old server that keeps all of their business data on it. It started crashing and ultimately became unusable Tuesday morning. The customer had no backup, despite the fact that I kept telling them that they needed to. In this case, fortunately, all I needed to do was change the power supply and the disks were OK, so everything came back up. But if the hard drive in that computer had crashed, then that construction company would have been out of business. The customer realized his mistake and now backs up offsite to Mozypro. For $35.00 a month they backup all the business files on the server–about 55 GB in this case.
And they’re protected. Now, if their server fails the worst thing that might happen is they might have to get a new server, and resurrect they’re data off of Mozy. Mozy also has a home version available here:. How do you feel about potentially losing all of your pictures, all of your music and all of your stored e-mails? My answer is: I don’t like it at all. That’s why I do backups.

If you don’t want to use a cloud based service because you don’t trust the cloud, there are ways to create backups locally that give you back the control. Talk to me and I’d be glad to help.

No! Facebook Administration didn’t send you a message. Beware!

Keeping yourself safe on the Internet

Internet Safety turns out to consist of two major elements: programs and behaviors. We’ll tackle programs first.

Every computer should have all four of the following things:

1.) An antivirus program. This does not have to cost money. AVG Antivirus 2011 Free edition is quite good and available for free from http://free.avg.com. It both updates and runs every day and if you leave your computer on all the time it can be configured to update and run in the middle of the night.

2.) An enabled firewall. Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7 have their own built in firewall. All that needs to be done is to turn it on, which can be done from the Windows Firewall icon inside of Control Panel.

3.) An antispyware program. Almost everyone knows what computer viruses are, but not everyone knows what spyware is. Spyware is stealthy programs that install themselves on your computer against your will. They have two purposes: to make you buy something or to steal your identity. Once again, you can get a program to deal with these threats for free. It’s called Super Antispyware, available from www.superantispyware.com. The free version won’t run itself automatically. It must be run manually. Running it once a month is usually sufficient.

4.) All of the applicable Microsoft Windows updates. The Automatic Updates icon in Control Panel will let you set up to receive these updates automatically. Just remember that your computer may reboot in the middle of the night on the second Tuesday of the month when Microsoft releases its latest batch of updates.

In addition to having these programs protect you, there are certain behaviors which are necessary to keep you safe:

1.) If you receive an e-mail that has an attachment and you don’t know the sender, DON’T OPEN IT. Even if you do know the sender, look the attachment over carefully. Do you think the person you know would send this?

2.) If you receive an e-mail purporting to be from a firm that you do business with that asks you to go to a website and enter personal information such as passwords, account numbers or social security numbers, DON’T. This is called phishing and no matter how official and proper the e-mail looks, it is usually a scam.

3.) If you want to buy something on the Internet, look at the address in the address bar. If it doesn’t start with “HTTPS:” don’t make the purchase. The “HTTPS:” indicates that the website to which you are giving your personal information is securely linked to your browser so that it cannot be intercepted. If the website only says HTTP that is NOT secure and makes you vulnerable to identity theft.

4.) Please recognize that free downloads, such as screensavers, games and music may not really be free after all. They may contain spyware, viruses and other nasty software that you really don’t want on your computer.

5.) If you really feel that you must enter that sweepstakes, respond to that free offer or fill out any form that asks for your e-mail address, first set up a free e-mail address with one of the web providers that have these. Websites that provide free e-mail accounts include Yahoo, Google and Microsoft Live Mail. Once you have set up a free account, you can use that address to deflect spam and other undesirable items away from your true e-mail address.

How to back up your web-based e-mail

As mentioned in the previous blog, safety is not guaranteed using web-based e-mail. So if you are doing business using a free e-mail you might want to consider using Microsoft Outlook or a similar e-mail program to download all of your messages to your hard drive. Your contacts can also be transferred. All of this is still free, except in the case of Yahoo, where the service costs 20.00 a year. What we are talking about here is using what’s called POP and SMTP servers to allow you to get your web-based e-mail through Outlook and have all of your data reside on your computer.

From then on, you use Outlook to receive your e-mail and if you back up properly, you are protected.

All of the e-mail setups are available by Googling “Yahoo E-mail settings”, only with your favorite e-mail provider substituted. If you need help accomplishing all of this, I’d be glad to help.

Owning a domain and customizing your e-mail address

In the first of my three part e-mail blog, I commented that having an e-mail that ends with Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail.com for a business is unprofessional. What I suggest instead is domain e-mail.

My e-mail is Jonathan@PlainAndSimpleComputing.com. In an e-mail name caps don’t matter, so I’m just being grand in the capitalizations in mine. I own plainandsimplecomputing.com. I pay a domain name registrar a small fee every year to continue buying the exclusive right to use plainandsimplecomputing.com. You can check to see if the domain name you want to use is available to buy here: www.networksolutions.com
Once you own a domain there are Internet hosting companies that will host your domain. This means two things: First, you have a place that will host a website for you, if you want, and second you can establish e-mail addresses that end in your domain name such as yourname@yourdomainname.com. You can’t use spaces or special characters but numbers and letters are OK. You can put your business name inside your domain name if you wish. This is the least expensive form of advertising in the known universe.

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