The Computer Tutor

Last Monday we talked about taking some non-essential programs out of the “auto-startup” process in order to speed up your computer. Today we’ll go over an easy way to figure out if you should actually uninstall a program from your Windows computer.

You know how it is – when you go into Control Panel to the area where it lists all the programs that are there (it’s in the “Programs and Features” section), it can be a little overwhelming to decide what programs are not needed. On the other hand, you don’t want to just forever accumulate more and more software and never get rid of any of it. In most of the computers I see, there are programs installed that the owner didn’t even intentionally put on there – they just “slithered in” with some other program – so you definitely want to get rid of those.

There are probably several programs installed on your computer that have names you aren’t familiar with. How do you know if it’s something you can get rid of, or if it’s something you need? That’s where ShouldIRemoveIt comes in. It’s free software you can get at ShouldIRemoveIt.com. It’s free.

I found out about this from my podcast listener Ron, who sent this email after last Monday’s blog/podcast:

Hi, Scott. In my old age I can’t remember whether I heard about the Should I Remove It program from your podcast or not! You can download it from www.shouldiremoveit.com. It kind of goes along with this week’s suggestion about background programs and it might help folks decide whether or not to disable them from the startup area. Best regards, Ron

Thanks Ron!

I checked out the program and it seems to do a pretty good job. But here’s the trick – the program itself doesn’t make a particular recommendation about whether or not you should uninstall something from your computer. It just gives you more information about it, AND it tells you what most other people have done with it. Then you can decide for yourself if you want to keep it or get rid of it.

Go to the website and just click to download the program. Watch out for some misleading ads on the site – they’ll have a big green “Download” button to, in hopes that you’ll mistakenly click on that instead. Hate those ads. If you use an ad blocker, you won’t see them. I disabled my ad blocker just for this review, and believe me – this site is pretty bad with the deceptive ads.

Download and run the installer as normal. I was happy to see that it didn’t try to sneak any junk in with it.

When the installation finishes, you can choose to launch the program immediately. At that time, it will also open a new webpage with an invitation to download some other program that you don’t want (the one I was presented with was some program to check for outdated drivers and update them – those are always junk). That’s some irony – the website that’s showing you how to get rid of unwanted programs is also advertising unwanted programs.

When you run the program, it immediately shows you a list of the programs installed on your computer:

As you can see, for each program it also displays a column for “Ratings” and another column showing the percentage of people who removed that particular program from their computer.

When you click on one of the programs, you can get more information about it. For example, I clicked on the first one in my list, called CDBurnerXP. This is what it shows me then:

So I can see that 29% of other users have removed it, and also some other information such as what version it is, when I installed it, and the size of the installation.

If I want to, I can just click to uninstall it. But there’s that other button that says “What is it?”. That’s where you can get more information about that program… but only after you view and close another obnoxious ad for crappy “driver update” software. This one is a huge display ad right in the middle of the page, covering all the text. Just click the “X” to close the ad (or better yet, use an ad blocker and never see that junk).

I was surprised at how much information is actually provided on this page – much more detail than I expected to find. It tells me:

As I said, that’s a lot of data about one program. I don’t know if all of the other programs in their database are covered in that much detail. Most users probably wouldn’t even need that much information, but it’s nice to know it’s there if you do need it.

There’s one other thing about this program that’s good – it doesn’t run all the time in the background. It just gets installed on your computer and you can run it when you want to use it, so it’s not constantly using your memory and processor and slowing things down. And of course, you can uninstall it whenever you want to.

So overall, I would recommend giving this one a try – just make sure your ad blocker is ready for the barrage.

When a Windows computer is running slowly, one of the first things I check is this: How many programs are running at the same time, both visibly and in the background? The more programs are running, the slower they all run. So let’s streamline your computer and run only those programs that are needed.

This is something I see all the time, and it’s an issue that eventually returns even after it’s fixed.

On a new computer – software companies pay to have Dell or HP or any other computer manufacturer include their software on any newly built PC. It’s bad enough that the machines are loaded with this bloatware, but in addition the computers are instructed to automatically run a lot of these programs every time the computer boots up.

On an already-in-use computer – Got a new HP printer? After you install the software for it on your computer, check that startup list – you’ll find several HP programs that have been added. Do you need these things running in order to print? No. All they do is slow down your computer. And HP isn’t the only culprit here – most printer manufacturers do the same thing.

So the end goal here is to make sure that the only programs running on your computer at any given time are the ones that you need to have running.

Here’s how you do that:

For Windows 7:

For Windows 8 or Windows 10:

And the big question: What should I uncheck or disable? In most cases, you can disable:

Things to remember:

Don’t disable everything in the list. Some things SHOULD be running all the time, such as your antivirus, or your online backup service, or maybe Teamviewer (if you have a service that monitors your computer’s security).

By disabling or unchecking a program, you aren’t removing it from your computer. If it turns out a particular program does need to run in the background, you can just go back in an re-enable it.

If you see something in the list and you don’t know what it is, leave it enabled. If you want, you can research the file name and see if it should be running or not.

All of my email is sent and received using Microsoft Outlook, and there’s one feature of Outlook that I use all the time – the ability to send an email at a future date and time, rather than having it go out immediately.

Why would I want to create a new email, or reply to an email, but then send it at a later time? Mainly, to avoid getting into an email-based “chat” situation.

Here’s what that means.

I’m in my home office, working on various things, and an email comes in. Could be from a client, a friend, a relative, doesn’t matter. They’re asking a simple question, like “Do I need to bring my computer to you for a virus removal?”. On the surface, that seems like a “yes or no” question, and that’s kind of true. The answer is no, I don’t need to have physical access to the computer in order to remove a virus. But really, in order to give a thorough answer, I need to ask other questions, such as

This is because in some cases, people might THINK they have a virus when it’s something completely different.

So when that question comes in by email, I COULD immediately reply with those questions and then just go back to what I was doing. But guess what – since I responded immediately, there is always going to be another email following up on those questions with answers and more questions. And this person knows I’m at my computer, and will naturally expect another quick response. And it continues back and forth – I call this “email chat”.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t mind communicating by email, and I certainly don’t mind when someone inquires about hiring me for my computer services. The problem arises when I’m in the middle of doing something else that requires a certain degree of concentration, and every 3 minutes I have to stop and reply to the most recent email.

So why not just ignore that first email, and reply later? That’s an option, but the problem with that is that I’ll forget about it, and more emails will come in, and before long that first email is buried in the mix and I don’t notice it until a few days later. That’s not professional and I don’t want to make anyone wait that long for an answer.

But there is a solution, thanks to Outlook.

When you use Outlook for your email, you have the option to create an email now, but send it at a later time. Or even a later date. That solves the problem! I can write the email now and schedule it for later in the day. So I don’t forget to reply, but I also don’t get caught in the immediate back-and-forth email discussion right at the moment.

Here’s how you schedule an email in Outlook (images are from Outlook 2016 but are similar for Outlook 2013 and 2010 – and if you’re still using 2010 you really should upgrade):

1. In Outlook, click to create a new email.

2. In that window, look up in the top left and click on this icon. The icon is like a landscape note in the front and a portrait note behind it:

3. When you click that, you’ll see a new window open with lots of options. You might have fun checking out all the stuff in this window, but the one we’re concerned with now is down in the “Delivery options” section. Check the box that says “Do not deliver before” and then just choose your date and time when you want the email to be sent. Then click Close.

4. Now, that email will sit in your Outlook outbox until it’s time for it to be sent.

A couple of things to be aware of with this:

First, if you have an email scheduled for a future date or time, and you click to close Outlook, you’ll get a little warning telling you that you still have emails in the Outbox waiting to be sent. Don’t worry about that, just tell Outlook you want to exit and send them later.

Second, Outlook has to be open and running at the scheduled time in order for a scheduled email to get sent at that time. If your computer is turned off, or not connected to the internet, or Outlook is not running, it won’t get sent at that time. But it will get sent the next time Outlook is running.

Usually I talk about stuff that pertains specifically to computers, but I recently started using a really handy program that will work on computers, tablets and phones (PC or Mac). It’s called Simplenote.

For comparison, this is “kind of” a competitor to Evernote. If you haven’t used Evernote, it’s a program for capturing information and storing it no matter where you are or what you’re doing. For example, if you see a news article online that looks interesting but you don’t have time to read it at the moment, you can click to store it in Evernote and read it later. It runs on all your devices (including your phone) so you have all your stored notes with you all the time.

There have been a few times that I’ve tried to really get into using Evernote because it offers SO much in terms of what it can do. The funny thing is, Evernote has so many “bells and whistles” that it became kind of overwhelming. There is a bit of a learning curve in using it because of all that it does. There are whole books written about how to use it, and Evernote has its own podcast about using it. For some people, it’s more than is needed. And, in order to use all the features, it costs between $35 and $120 per user, per year.

Then recently I came across Simplenote. You can get it free at Simplenote.com.  It’s free.

Using Simplenote really couldn’t be any easier. Just set up a free account at the website, then download the program to your computer. You might use it primarily on your smartphone, but it’s good to have a copy on your computer also. It installs without trying to sneak any bad stuff in.

When you run it on your computer, you’ll see how clean and simple the interface is. To create your first note, click File – New note:

You’ll see “New note” listed on the left side, and the cursor is flashing out in the main part of the window. Whatever you type on the first line will be the name of the note. Everything on the next line and following will be the contents of the note.

So let’s say I wanted to make a grocery list. I might call the note “Shopping” which means it will also be in a larger font. Then below that, I’ll make my list of items. So the screen will look like this:

So far, nothing too exciting, right? I mean you could use good ol’ Notepad on your computer if all you needed to do was make a list.

BUT now go to your smartphone and get the Simplenote app (either from Google Play, or from the Apple Store, depending on what kind of phone you have). With the app open, log in to your Simplenote account, and what do you see? Your grocery list, that you created on your computer. So you can have this ongoing grocery list that you can update whether you’re at home in front of the computer, or out somewhere when you just have your phone.

But that’s not all!

Once I have this list created, there’s something else I can do with it. I can share it.

Now my wife creates an account and gets the Simplenote app on her phone. Then I go back to my computer and click on the “Share” button in the top right corner:

That gives me this new window, where I just enter her email address (the one she used to create her account).

Now, that particular note (the grocery list) shows up on BOTH of our phones and computers. And we can each edit it in real time. So if I think of something to add, I put it on the list, and it’s on the list on her phone almost immediately. So each of us always has the most current version of the list.

So far, that’s what we’ve used this for mostly. But for me, I have lots of computer stuff I’ll make lists for (such as email server settings for the various local internet providers). But the uses for this are endless –

I haven’t been using Simplenote for very long, but I can imagine it’s going to become an important part of my daily routine. What would YOU use it for?

I’m on Facebook quite often, and it’s not just to talk about my computer repair business here in Safety Harbor, Florida. I’m in groups with a variety of topics, including ultramarathon running, using diet to avoid preventable diseases such as cancer and heart disease, cooking with my Instant Pot, and lots of others.

When someone posts a really good question or idea on Facebook, and you want to hear what others have to say about it and make sure you don’t miss anything, what do you do? A lot of people think they need to post a comment in order to be notified about future comments, but that’s completely unnecessary.

If you’re on Facebook, I’m sure you’ve probably seen this. You might be in a Facebook group about cooking, and someone posts a question like “What’s your favorite recipe for a quick and easy evening meal?”. Well, you know that’s going to prompt a lot of answers and input, and the people in that group want to be sure to not miss any of the comments. And everyone knows, if you comment on a post, then you get notifications when someone else comments on the same post.

That means that everyone sees things like people commenting with the single word “Following” –

Or the more “minimalist” people who feel like they have to leave a comment but don’t want to write a whole word, so they just type a few dots –

And here’s the most obnoxious one – someone took it upon themselves to create a large image of a dot. So instead of just typing a few dots, some people actually post this large image as a comment:

As a result, it’s disappointing and frustrating when you see an interesting post on Facebook and it shows lots of comments, but then you find out that lots of them aren’t really comments at all.

Or even worse, you get a notification on your computer or phone like, “Robert has commented on your post” or “Jill has replied on a post you are following” so you click over to read what they had to say, and it was just “following” or a few dots. Waste of everyone’s time.

The solution is really easy, if people just knew about it. Facebook has a system already in place that will notify you of any new comments or replies on any post you want to follow.

How to follow a Facebook post without commenting on it:

1. Look in the top right corner of the post for the link that gives you a drop-down menu:

2. When you click that drop down menu, find and click the option that says “Turn on notifications for this post” –

That’s all you have to do. Now you’ll get a notification each time someone comments, or replies to your comments, anywhere in that particular post.

And now you can spread this tip! Whenever you see someone post “following” as a comment, just reply to their comment with this link:

ComputerTutorFlorida.com/followtip

That will lead them right to this article so that they can know how to get notifications without commenting, just like you now know how to do.

If you found a flash drive on the ground or someplace out in public, what would you do with it? A kind-hearted person would of course want to get it back to its rightful owner. But to do that, you would need to connect it to a computer and see if anything on the drive might indicate who the owner is. But… you might want to think twice about doing that.

There’s a new kind of flash drive being made now, and anyone can buy one for $50. But it doesn’t store any files or folders. In fact, you couldn’t put any data on there even if you wanted to. The purpose of this flash drive – the actual reason it is built – is to kill your computer. Or any computer into which it’s inserted.

Here’s how it works:

The USB port on your computer actually has a little bit of electricity in it. That’s why you can plug some things into a USB port, and you don’t have to plug them into an electrical outlet (like a portable drive for doing a backup). Some things require just a little bit of voltage, so they can run on just the power that’s being delivered by that USB port.

But this new drive has an electrical part on the inside known as a capacitor. A capacitor stores electricity. So when you plug this “killer” flash drive in to a computer, the capacitor takes that little bit of electricity being delivered, and it stores it. Then it gets some more and stores it too. And again, and again. It just keeps storing up more and more electricity until it eventually has a very large electrical charge being stored.

When it gets to that point, where it’s storing lots of electrical energy, it suddenly releases all of it at once. All of that voltage and current is way more than a computer can handle, so it fries the motherboard and that computer is dead.

And how long does it take for that entire process to happen? A small fraction of a second. It’s pretty much instantaneous.

And of course, the big question – why would anyone buy one of these things? Supposedly, for techs to use for “testing”. There are all kinds of warnings about how you shouldn’t use this device to destroy anyone’s computer, but you know those warnings are only there for legal protection and to avoid liability. People are going to use these things to kill the computers of people they don’t like, or maybe as some kind of a “prank” – but it’s sure not a very funny one.

An interesting aspect of this is that there are people who know what this thing does, and yet they still stick it in their own computer just to watch it happen. Check the video below – it shows a bunch of these guys doing just that. And one of them even sticks it in the USB port on his CAR.

That area in the bottom right corner of your Windows screen is just loaded with valuable information. But in a lot of cases you don’t see everything that’s going on down there because some of the icons are hidden. Here’s how to get all those icons to be visible all the time.

The image shown above is the Notification Area on my main computer. I don’t always have all of those icons there, but what I like is that whatever is running there at any given time is visible at a glance. Microsoft does not have it set that way by default.

If you don’t make any changes, you’ll be able to see some of the icons down in that area, but not all of them. There will be a little triangle icon at the left end of that row, and when you click that you’ll have the option to see all of the icons that aren’t displayed naturally. But that’s a pain! What if you just want all of them to show, all of the time, without having to making any extra clicks to view the hidden ones?

Easy!

Here’s how you get all of the Notification Area icons to be visible, all the time:

In Windows 7 or 8:

Click the little triangle, then in the new small window click on “Customize”.

In the new window, at the bottom, check the box that says “Always show all icons and notifications on the taskbar” and click OK:

In Windows 10:

Anywhere in the taskbar, do a right-click and choose Properties (or on some computers, “Settings”). In the new window, click on Customize:

On the next screen, click “Select which icons appear on the taskbar”:

On the next screen, turn on “Always show all icons in the notification area”:

That’s it! Now, you will always see what icons are there without having to click on anything else to see the “hidden” icons, since none of them will be hidden.

Sometimes it’s nice to know how to do things really quickly on your computer. And sometimes you might need to delete your browser history (the list of all the websites you’ve visited in a certain period of time).

Why would you need to delete your browser history? Lots of reasons. Maybe you’re shopping for a Christmas or birthday gift and you don’t want your spouse to see that you’ve been visiting some jewelry websites. Maybe you borrowed a friend’s computer and you don’t want your web history mixed in with his. Or how about this – you’re writing a novel that includes some terrorists or a serial killer, and you’re researching “how to kill someone and not get caught” – that’s not really a Google search that you want your spouse to stumble across, right?

Whatever your reason is for needing to delete your browser history, that’s your business. What I’m explaining today is how to do that as quickly as possible, no matter what web browser you’re using. That’s the thing – when you try to do this by the “regular” way, each web browser has a different process. You have to find the History section in the toolbar or the drop-down menu, then you have to get to the spot where you can clear the history, and these things are different in Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Here’s the simple way to clear your browser history:

In Chrome, when you hold down Ctrl and Shift and tap the Delete button, you get this window:

That drop-down menu gives you the option to clear your history for the last hour, the last day, the last week, the last 4 weeks, or the entire browser history.

In Firefox, that keyboard combination gives you this window:

As you can see very similar and pretty intuitive. For Internet Explorer, also similar (but you don’t really still use Internet Explorer, do you?):

So whatever your reason, now you know how to very quickly get in and delete your browser history.

And before I get a bunch of email – yes, there are ways of searching the internet via one of the above-mentioned browsers, and have it not record any of the history in the first place. That’s a different tip for a different day.

The hackers and scammers continue to come up with new ideas to trick you into downloading a virus to your computer. The latest scheme is a pop-up in Chrome that says the page won’t display properly because you’re missing a font. Here are the details so you don’t fall for it.

This is targeted at people who use the Chrome web browser (which is currently over half of all computer users). Here’s how it works:

You’re browsing whatever sites you normally visit, and maybe a few you haven’t visited before. Suddenly the site you’re on has text that is not readable – just a bunch of characters that don’t make any sense.

Then an error message comes up in the middle of the page, looking like this:

I have to admit, this error message is pretty well crafted. It has the “clean” look of a message from Google. The spelling and grammar are much better than we usually see from virus creators. The “Update” button looks accurate, as does the Chrome logo in the top right. And since the text on the screen (behind the error message) is unreadable, it makes perfect sense that the website is using a particular font that you don’t have installed as part of Chrome. So there is seemingly nothing suspicious about the message that tells you you need to update your Chrome Font Pack.

So it’s pretty easy to understand why someone would just click on the “Update” button without really thinking anything nefarious is going on. But when the update button click leads to a file being downloaded called “Chrome Font v7.5.1.exe”, that should start to raise some concerns. First, you should never download a .exe file and run it unless you are 100% sure what it is and what it will do. Second, the “Help” prompt on the screen says you should see the download file called “Chrome_Font.exe” which is different from the actual downloaded file name.

Also, Chrome might even pop up a little warning to tell you that this file is kind of suspicious so you might want to think twice before running it. As this virus becomes more well-known, the antivirus programs in use will be more likely to catch it as well. But your best first defense is to follow the best guidelines, and never download anything if you’re not sure what it is.

In Windows 7 (and earlier versions of Windows), the Start menu was simply a way to navigate to whatever program or file you needed to open. In Windows 10, Microsoft seems to think that it should now be used as their own private little billboard on your computer. Today we’ll talk about how to take back some control of that space.

One thing that I really, really dislike is advertising being forced on to me. It’s one of the reasons I don’t watch television, and it’s the primary reason I don’t listen to commercial radio while I’m driving (I either have a podcast on (and I can fast forward through the commercials), or Pandora (the $3.99/month ad-free version).

So when I got my Windows 10 desktop computer several months ago, I was less than pleased to see how Microsoft freely posted all kinds of stuff I don’t need or want all over the Start menu by default. Stuff like:

Not to mention the actual ads that Microsoft throws in there unless you disable that “feature”, which is turned on by default.

The good news – it’s easy to get rid of all that junk if you know how.

First thing you need to do is turn off the blatant ads that Microsoft wants to push to you (of course, MS doesn’t call them “ads” – they’re merely “suggestions”. Whatever.)

To do that, get to Settings. You can click the Start button, then click on Settings, or you can just hold down the Windows key and tap the letter “I”. Then click Personalization, then Start.

Look for the “Occasionally show suggestions in Start” and turn it off:

Then, the second thing to do is clean up all the clutter that Microsoft puts in your Start menu. This is really easy.

Click the Start button (lower left corner, the Microsoft Windows logo) so that  the Start menu appears:

Now pick one of the tiles you want to get rid of. I’ll start with the green X-Box tile in the top row. Do a right click on it, so that this little menu comes up, and choose “Unpin from Start”:

As soon as you click that, you’ll now see an empty space where that tile used to be displayed. So just go through and do that for every tile you don’t want to see, until the Start menu is trimmed down the stuff that might actually be useful.

Now, with your Start menu having a fresh “start”, you can drag the tiles around in whatever order you like. You can also add things the Start menu, just by right-clicking and choosing “Pin to Start”.

See – Windows can actually be useful when you kick Microsoft’s junk out of the way and put your own stuff there!