Home Computer Training

09/01/2020

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.

09/01/2020

Support for Windows 7 ends on January 14th 2020.

Support for Windows 7 ends in January.

02/08/2019

Changing the CMOS battery on a desktop motherboard is usually fairly quick, but on this gaming PC had to remove the graphics card, DVD and cooling fans for the CPU to find it!

21/07/2019

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.

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

05/05/2019

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.

13/04/2019

Watch out for the latest Windows updates.

Microsoft halts Windows 7 patches for Sophos users after updates trigger boot failures, which also affect Avast users.

29/03/2019

There are quite a few phone scams being reported recently in Hilton. Generally these calls pretend to be from your internet service provider and try to scare you by saying your account is about to be terminated and will try to get you to let them remotely connect to your computer to 'fix things'. The best thing to do if you get one of these calls is to hang up, find the real number of whoever provides your broadband and phone and call them directly to report it.
Never let anyone you don’t personally know or trust access your computer remotely, or give them account details.
Here’s a link with more info:

Received a call about an "expiring" modem or "illegal activities" on your ISP account? It's most likely a scam. Here's what you need to know about it.

03/02/2019

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.

16/03/2018

Earlier this week I had a call from a regular customer who had fallen victim to a phone scam. When he told me the details, I realised this was a bit more sophisticated than the usual 'tech support' scam. The scammers pretended to be from his ISP and (this may have been a lucky guess) asked if he had noticed work being carried out locally. As it happened, there had been work on running fibre optic cables in the area, so this supported the authenticity of the call. They went on to ask if he had been experiencing slow broadband speeds (which he had, due to having non-fibre broadband and being a long way from the telephone exchange). They got him to run some speed tests on his PC to show how slow the connection was, and then asked if they could connect remotely to 'do some more tests', which he allowed. He said they were connected for about an hour and showed him various issues due to his slow broadband speeds (similar to the usual scams where they show you all sorts of 'problems' with your PC). But rather than asking for money to fix it (which is the way these calls usually proceed) they then rang off and called back later to tell him that due to the poor service, he was entitled to a refund. At this point they asked for his bank details, which raised some suspicion. He asked them why they couldn't just credit his telephone account. They wanted to know if he used internet banking and when he said he didn't, became angry. By this time, he realised he had fallen victim to a scam, so cut the connection and called his bank in case they tried to take any money.
The trouble with this sort of scam is that now they have all kinds of personal details just from asking and probably found out a lot more rooting around in his PC during the hour they were connected. They may also have left some nasties there, so for the sake of his security and peace of mind, I will be doing a clean install of Windows for him and he will be changing a lot of passwords.
The main point of this post is to warn others. Scam calls of this kind are incredibly common, and even if you are an intelligent person you can get caught. So the best bit of advice is that if you receive any kind of unsolicited call, never believe it is whoever they say it is, even if they try to convince you otherwise. Con artists always have a good story or they wouldn't make a living from it. Disconnect, then call the real company (your ISP, telephone provider, bank etc.) using a number you know is authentic. And never, never, never let anyone you don't personally know and trust take remote access of your computer.

04/01/2018

While it's still cold and dark, why not learn to get the most out of that new gadget you got for Christmas?
As well as computers and laptops, I also offer tuition on tablets (Android and iPad) and smartphones.

18/09/2017

Most people know that they should back up their data, but a lot of them don't actually do it until after they have experienced the worst case scenario.