Home Technology Help

15/05/2020

If you are struggling with technology during the Covid-19 crisis may I suggest pop over to the Software Cornwall Community Tech Support page.
We have a whole community of techies who may be able to help you remotely solve your problem.
Naturally I'll be there too.

21/02/2019

31/01/2019

Keep an eye out everyone for my Crowdfunder starting next week.

We would like to Announce one of our speakers at next weeks Tech Meet Tremough Innovation Centre

Robert is our amazing Education Outreach Officer and will be joining us to discuss his School Outreach Crowdfund

Tickets are still available and are free for members. Book now at https://bit.ly/2DJitvW

16/05/2017

This was a good one. Mr T. called to say he was unable to install anything on his computer because the memory was full.
The PC had a 1TB drive and a 2TB external disc drive. Both of which were completely full! This is a lot of information. I have never managed to fill a 500GB drive yet with all the pictures I take.
Looking at the drive on the computer it had next to no pictures on it. These are quite large files normally. There was no music at all. Even bigger files. And there were only a few short videos, even bigger files. And yet the computer only had 90MB of space left. Cleaning the drives only freed up 2GB of space.
To give you an idea of the memory used up a letter written in Word might be 50KB. 1000KB is 1MB, a small image size. A big image might be 5MB or more. 1000MB is 1GB. A full length movie might be 1~2GB at DVD resolution. 1000GB is a terrabyte 1TB. Imagine 1000 movies saved as DVD on a book shelf in your lounge. Mr T. had 3000 such files saved on his discs, 3000 DVD cases in his lounge effectively! And yet his PC had nothing to show for it.
It was a puzzle. Then I did a search on a drive for any large files. Just to see what would turn up. Windows can do this. Instead of looking for a specific named file you can ask it to list by size everything that it small, medium, large or in Mr T's case Massive!
And there it was. File after file of computer backups. Every 2 weeks the computer backed up to secure his files. For nearly 2 years it had been doing this but it never cleared out of date back ups.
So I started clearing the old ones away leaving only the recent ones for security. I also turned off the automatic back up and demonstrated how to do one manually every now and then. Good idea really. Then Mr T. told me the only reason he bought the 2TB external drive was that the main drive had filled up in the first place. And after I had cleaned the drives up both were now nearly at 95% free to use.

27/03/2017

Mrs D called asking for help on how to use a PC.
Mrs D. has been given advice on how to use her PC before but because she doesn't use it very often she forgets how to.
So I took her through the basics of how to operate Windows. Opening a program onto the desktop. Resizing, dragging, maximising etc. How the browser works and the pieces of a web page. Scrolling in various ways through a page an how when typing it is possible to select, copy and paste. Also delete in various ways.
I also went over how to shop on line with a Supermarket. She was saying that she didn't think that she was quite at the time of her life where she needed that help. But I said that I used it and quite a lot of my friends do too. It has nothing to do with being house bound. This isn't the first time this has been said to me. There isn't a stigma with using online supermarket shop, but it does seem to exist.
It is only through practice and use that you will remember. And being shown how to do something that relates to you personally makes it all the more relevant. So Mrs D. is having a practice for a few days and writing down those problems she comes across. Next time I hope we can take it a bit further.

15/03/2017

Mr. G, called to ask if I could sort out some problems he is having with getting emails on his iMac.
The iMac would not log in to his email server even with correct credentials. We could view his email account using the Safari web browser and reading online. Email was obviously working but the program wasn't. Deleting the account from the program and adding it as a new account again brought all the emails back in.
This highlights a common problem where computer users do not realise the difference between the use of certain programs and ways of achieving the same task by a different method. The causes are probably that a computer comes with no instructions and sometimes it is set up by someone else who informs the user that this is THE way to do something. It's knowing the other ways which help.
Mrs G. didn't understand that the messages from her friends on Facebook via email were not really emails but notifications from Facebook sent by email that her friends were up to something. Again one program was being used to do something and yet a different program was also being utilised too.
It can get confusing.

28/02/2017

Mrs B. called asking for help with a new tablet purchased for her by her son.
Mrs B was a new user to a tablet but used to use her laptop which was too big to leave set up anywhere. Her son lives too far away to keep asking for help.
I went through the basics of using an Android tablet. The Play Store, emails, moving and finding apps and what some of them do. She also mentioned that her son was going to get the images from her laptop transferred onto the tablet. The easiest way would be to use a USB to MicroUSB cable but I didn't have one on me. So another way, as being an Android user and having a Google email address, was to use Google Photos app. Logging into Google on the laptop and then uploading to Photos there immediately had the pictures available on the tablet in the Photos app there. And it already had the few demonstration pictures we'd taken in the lounge backed up too.
Knowing how various pieces of equipment can be integrated can help. Such as linking with Google Photos. Unlike iCloud the images do not automatically sync across all the devices you have. They are there to view whenever and download if you wish. Much neater.
The best advice I could give Mrs B. and her son had also said it was not to be afraid of pressing a button and seeing what happens. It really is very hard to break these things. And if you don't know what something does if you click it, click it and find out.

26/02/2017

Mrs L. wanted to know how to back up documents and pictures from a PC and an iPad.
Here is the problem of using two conflicting systems. Microsoft PC and an Apple iPad. They don't like each other. The normal way of keeping things safe with an iPad is with iCloud but it is not really a storage system. And as Mrs L. had an Android phone and therefore a Google account (a Gmail address) I decide to use Google Drive. There is a Drive app on the iTunes store for the iPad. And logging into Google on the PC means that documents can be saved from the PC too and if saved form the iPad can be downloaded to the PC and vice versa. With of course the mobile phone joining in too.
This demonstrates how easy it is to get all your information from one device to another today. Even if they do not necessarily like it. There is often more than one way to do this but it is trying to find the simplest way that is understood that is the challenge.

26/02/2017

Mrs H. asked for help getting images from email.
I showed Mrs H. the trick to getting the images onto her drive in the Pictures folder. They can then easily be used in Word for mailings that she was producing. I also showed how the images can be copied to a pendrive and taken somewhere else.
Whilst there she also wanted to know how to edit contacts in Hotmail (now Outlook).
These may seem like simple things to do but unless you know then it's not. There is no such thing as a stupid question if you don't know the answer. Not all the questions are as silly as you may think.

26/02/2017

Mr & Mrs K called asking for help to demonstrate the features of their new Smartphones.
This was a case of the no instruction manual provided. So I went through the basic set up of an Android device. An Android phone is just the same as an Android tablet. Demonstrated the Play Store, downloading apps, the use of a few certain useful apps I always use, deleting SMS message, adding contacts, placing icons on the Home screen etc.
If you want to learn how to use these kind of devices the best advice I can give is not to be frightened. Just play with them like the children do. They may make mistakes now and then but it is really difficult to break the equipment. It won't go up in a puff of blue smoke. Just play with them and see what happens.

26/02/2017

Mrs D. called regarding a lack of memory in her iPad.
The iPad was full of images and videos. She needed to get these onto her computer and out of the iPad. Using iCloud would just sync them back into her iPad but she didn't have a Mac only a Windows PC. Problem was solved by using an empty images folder in her PC when the iPad was unsynced. When resynced the iPad automatically filled the folder with the images in the iPad. The images could then be deleted from the iPad. Then transferring movies across too opened up free memory on the iPad from 300Mb to 8.5Gb.
Apple products are proving really difficult to control. Especially as iCloud is not really a storage facility like DropBox or OneDrive. All it does is sync everything so that any image is available on any device but if you delete it from a device it is deleted from all. So you can't just delete from one device to save space as it will remove from all. And if you do then once on automatic sync again iCloud will just fill your device up again. I'm not a fan.

26/02/2017

Mr & Mrs R. called asking for help to get photographs from their phone and camera onto their computer.
It turns out that the phone was a really old one and the computer wouldn't connect to it easily any more. A little searching around found the solution and then the images could be dragged and dropped from the phone memory into the computer. The camera was a little easier and then we could free up the SD card to take more pictures.
I still can't get over how many people I meet who have one memory card for their pictures in a camera and when it gets full they delete the least favourite ones. They never transfer them to another device or get them printed. I've had a few cards break on me loosing all the data stored on them. I'd hate to loose all the pictures I'd taken.