Author: The Friendly Tech Guy

There have been some significant advances in home internet technologies over the past couple of years. As more of our leisure and business pursuits shift to the internet, and our adoption of smart home devices increases, the demands on the home network, especially for efficient Wi-Fi coverage within the home, have increased.

Many people are confused by the different components that go together to form a complete internet service to the home: which service provider, whether to rent or buy the modem and router components, how to get reliable Wi-Fi coverage where it’s needed – these are all important pieces of a puzzle that can be tricky to solve and infuriating when not operating correctly. Let me help you to optimize your internet service and resolve any annoying issues you may be experiencing. Call me for a free phone consult – 408-647-6824, or email me at support@thefriendlytechguy.com.

Everyone should have a system for generating strong, unique passwords. Having only one password that you use everywhere is simply not a safe practice.  

For every internet service that you use which requires a password online, you should ensure that you have a unique password for that service.  This presents something of a problem: how will you create and remember so many passwords?  Furthermore, they need to be unique passwords, strong enough to be able to ward off any automated hacking attacks….. Continue reading “Strong, Unique Passwords”

Research data shows that Google’s “Chrome” browser is currently the most used browser by quite a large margin.  Indeed, I use it almost exclusively and it does pretty much everything I need.  There are other choices though – Firefox and Opera to name two.  Plus every Windows PC comes with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) or, with Windows 10, their new “Edge” browser (which is quite good, albeit five years overdue!)…… Continue reading “Which Web Browser Should I Use?”

Sadly, as wonderful as the internet is, computers can easily become riddled with problems thanks to malicious programs that “infect” them with computer viruses, usually as a result of unsafe (and often unwitting) web browsing or email usage.  These programs, or “malware” as they have become known, find their way onto computers in various ways. They can be hiding out on websites or attached to emails.  Some do little harm, while others (or many together) can render a computer unusable eventually. Then there are the tricksters that try to get people to disclose personal information, usually via unsolicited emails, and there’s “spyware” that runs in the background, capturing information about what websites you are visiting, what you are searching for and sometimes even monitoring your typing to try and capture your passwords for the websites and services you use.  It all sounds very scary but by following some key rules it is possible to stay very safe. Continue reading “Staying Safe Online”

One of the key skills needed for operating a computer is effective mouse control combined with a knowledge of the various conventions and jargon involved.  It’s a bit like learning to drive a car!  The mouse controls the pointer that you see displayed on the screen, usually as a little arrow.  Moving the mouse causes the arrow to move, at least until it reaches the edge of the screen.  A mouse also has two or three clickable buttons – one on the left, one on the right and sometimes one in the middle that looks like a wheel.  The wheel is used less for clicking and more for scrolling up and down, by rolling it forward or backward, for example when browsing through a long document which doesn’t fit on the screen.  The left mouse button is used more frequently than the right one.  It has two distinct functions – a single-click and a double-click.   Continue reading “Mastering Your Mouse”

How many times have you saved a document and not been able to locate it again afterwards?  How about all those photos that you’ve received in email attachments?  Do you ever have trouble finding them again after you’ve viewed them the first time?  Did you download them?  Your computer is really one big filing cabinet and it’s definitely worth taking the time to understand the basics of file management.  It could save you hours of trouble and frustration!

If you are using Windows on a laptop or desktop PC, your files are organized by something called “File Explorer”.  This can be found in the start menu – just click on the start button (or Windows Icon) down at the bottom left of your screen, then click on “File Explorer”. Continue reading “File Management – The Basics”

For the past three years I have been using a “Cloud” service for storing my photos.  Photos that I take with my smartphone are automatically uploaded.  I still have to manually transfer photos that we take with our digital camera to a computer, and from there I upload them to the cloud.  I can view my photos from any web browser or via an app on my smartphone.  I have 1TB of free storage, and when that runs out I can pay to add more.  The service I use is Flickr by Yahoo.  I had to create a Yahoo account first, before I could use Flickr, but it’s all free.  I do get a little concerned about whether Yahoo will still be in business in ten years time, so periodically I select and store my favorite photos to a hard drive that sits on our home network (known as a NAS drive – Network Attached Storage). Continue reading “Keeping Your Digital Photos Organized”

In addition to email the internet has enabled voice and video chat to provide excellent communication capabilities, so long as you and the people that you want to connect with are using the same software application / service and happen to be online at the same time.  There are quite a few services to choose from.  Some services are integrated into social media platforms like Facebook Chat or Google Hangouts.  Your family members may be on Facebook, but you might prefer not to have to open a Facebook account for yourself, in which case Skype might be a better solution for you.  A less-well known service is Ooyoo, but the quality of sound is slightly better than with Skype and that might be important for those people who are hard of hearing.   Continue reading “Connecting With Family and Friends”

A toolbar is something that lives at the top of the window of an application.  Apps like the ones in Microsoft’s Office suite (Word, Excel, etc.) have toolbars built into the apps, to provide users with quick access to certain “tools” used by the app (hence the name “toolbar”).  

About ten or so years ago, people started making add-on toolbars for web browsers.  Some of them were quite useful back then, but as time has gone one, that usefulness has been eroded.  In fact they have more or less become the opposite of useful.  Microsoft even deemed one of them to be “malware” last year.

Continue reading “Beware of the Dreaded Toolbar!”