The Computer Tutor

One of the changes Microsoft made with Windows 10 was how to create a shortcut to a file or a program and have that shortcut on the desktop screen.

A lot of people – myself included – weren’t too happy the first time we tried to make a shortcut to the desktop using Windows 10.

The “old” way, which was used for years with Windows XP and Windows 7, was to just find the file or the program in the “All Programs” list on the Start menu, do a right click and choose “Send to” then “Desktop – create shortcut”.

Try to do that with Windows 10, and you’ll see that you can still right click on a program name in the “All apps” list, but there is no more “Send to” option in the right-click menu. For a while in the beginning I just wrote it off as Microsoft taking away something handy for no good reason. I actually figured out a different (more complicated) way of putting shortcuts on the desktop – until I discovered the better and easier way to do it.

This is so simple it’s ridiculous:

Click the Start button and All Files, then find the program you want to make a shortcut for. Then, use your left mouse button and just drag it to the desktop area. Done!

You can do the same thing with any of the tiles that are in the Windows Start menu – just drag them to the desktop.

BUT – Microsoft actually has not completely done away with the old process. If you have a file in your Documents folder, or a picture in your Pictures folder, or any other type of file or sub-folder in one of those areas, you would use the old process for making a shortcut to it on your desktop. Just do a right-click, put the cursor over “Send to”, and in the menu that slides out, choose “Desktop – create shortcut”.

Today’s tip came about as a result of a question from a reader, Mike. He wrote:

“A topic for your podcast: How to limit search results. I use Google, Yahoo, and Duckduckgo for making searches. Today I happened to search for “episodic dvd ripper” and got many hits as old as 15 years back. Is there a way to limit searches to only posts from 2015 and newer? The older stuff is out of date, wrong, or misleading. Thanks.”

Yes, you can narrow down your searches based on lots of different criteria.

For Google searches, this is really easy. Just go to Google.com and before you type anything in the search field, look down in the bottom right corner of the screen and click on “Settings”:

Then, in the little menu that comes up, click on Advanced Search:

Here’s the fun part! You’re going to see a whole lot of options to filter or narrow down your search results:

The top section is where you specify filters for your actual search word or phrase.

The bottom section is to narrow down your search results to a specific language, geographical region, last update date and more. When you have the filters you want, click the Advanced Search button at the bottom and see what comes up.

For Yahoo, it doesn’t seem quite as easy or as thorough as that, but you can still narrow down your searches.

You need to go to search.Yahoo.com and just do a regular search. In this example I did a search on computer repair in Safety Harbor, Florida.

When you see the search results come up, look just under the search field and you’ll see that you can narrow down the results based on how recent they are:

This of course isn’t nearly as specific as you can be with Google, but it may be sufficient if you like using Yahoo for web searching (most people don’t).

And finally, DuckDuckGo. For anyone concerned about online privacy, DuckDuckGo.com is a great option because the searches are not tracked and your personal information is not stored anywhere.

This one is also not nearly as customizable as Google, but there are some options. At the main home page, look in the top right corner for the 3 horizontal lines. Click on that and choose “Settings” and you’ll see what your choices are:

These filters are more general and are mainly designed to apply to ALL searches, not specifically to a particular search.

I’m guessing there is probably some way for Yahoo and DuckDuckGo search results to be filtered more specifically than what I showed above, but if there is, they don’t make it very obvious.

So, if you really want to be exact in your search results, Google is your best choice. That could be why they currently have about 76% market share for searches, and the other search engines are just scrambling for the leftovers.

One of the most commonly-used processes on my computer is the ability to create a shortcut icon on the desktop. Just right-click on a a file and choose “Send to” and then “Desktop-create shortcut”. But sometimes that little “create shortcut” item can disappear from your “Send to” menu. Here’s how to get it back.

If there’s a particular program or file that you need access to all the time, the easiest and quickest way to get to it is if you have an icon for it on your desktop. But that icon should not be the actual file or folder – it should just be a shortcut to the file or folder.

So you just do a right click on the file name, then you put your mouse over “Send to” and in the menu that appears, you click on “Desktop – create shortcut”. And like magic, there is now an icon on your desktop for quick access to that program or file. This is something I do all the time, either for my own for computer or for a client, and it’s really handy.

But at some point when you try to do this, your computer might throw you a little curveball.

You put your mouse over “Send to” – but in the Send To menu, there is no option to create a shortcut on the desktop. It has just disappeared. The other items are listed there, but not that one.

What’s going on? Why is it gone? Where did it go? I wish I could tell you. I don’t see this happen all that often, and I don’t know what causes it to disappear. But I do know how to get it back.

If this happens to you, here’s how to add “desktop shortcut” back to your “Send to” menu:

1. Hold down the Windows key on your keyboard, and tap the letter R to bring up the RUN dialog box.

2. In that box, type shell:sendto and hit Enter. This opens the “Send To” folder. In the computer’s file structure, that Send To menu is just that, a folder. Which means you can put things in it.

3. Somewhere in the blank area of that folder, do a RIGHT click and select New – Text document.

Now you’ll have a new text file there with the name New Text Document.txt.

4. Final step is to right click on that new text document, and choose Rename. Then you rename it to Desktop (create shortcut).DeskLink

Note: on that rename process, you have to make sure you rename the entire file AND the “.txt” extension. You will probably get a warning that changing the extension of a file might make it work differently, etc. but that’s fine. So when you’re done, this file won’t end with “.txt” any more – it will just be “Desktop (create shortcut).DeskLink”.

And that’s it. Try it out by creating a desktop shortcut to a program or file, and you’ll see that you have that great feature back again and available to be used.

Want to check your hard drive for problems and have your computer fix them? Today I’ll show you how to do this using a method that’s usually only used by technicians, because the typical computer user is not aware of it. Maybe you are a geek after all!

At my computer repair office here in Safety Harbor, Florida, I regularly have people that bring me their computer because it won’t boot up. Or it suddenly started running very slowly. Or it has lately been doing some very odd, random things. These things are often evidence of a hard drive that is failing (or has crashed completely).

If I test the drive and find that it is indeed failing, the repair for that situation is to just replace the hard drive. Hopefully the computer’s owner has a recent system image backup (a backup that saves EVERYTHING on the hard drive) so we can put all of the important documents, pictures, etc. on the replacement drive.

BUT – did you know that you can actually do regular maintenance on your computer’s hard drive, to help it last longer? It’s true. When you run this process, you are going to feel like a True Geek! And it’s surprisingly easy!

The process is known as CHKDSK, an abbreviated form of “Check Disk”, because that’s what it does – it checks your hard disk for problems, and fixes them.

Here’s how you use it (and this applies for Windows 7, 8 or 10):

First, click the Start button (the MS logo in the bottom left corner). For Windows 10, just click in the “Search” box in the bottom left. Then type these 3 letters: cmd

You’ll see the “Command Prompt” option come up at the top of the Start Menu:

Now do a RIGHT click on that Command Prompt menu item, and choose “Run as Administrator”:

You’ll need to click to approve that it should run as administrator, then you’ll see the Command Prompt window:

You can see that the cursor is flashing at the end of the line so you can just start typing. Here is what you need to type:

chkdsk c: /r

To clarify, that’s “chkdsk”, then a space, then “c:”, then another space, then “/r” (of course without the quotation marks).

This tells the computer to run the chkdsk, and the drive to run it on is drive C, and if it finds any errors, to repair them.

When you type that line and hit Enter, you’ll get a message that CHKDSK cannot run right now, but you can request that it runs the next time you restart the computer. Click Y for Yes, and hit enter.

Final step is to restart the computer, so do that now.

This will not be a normal computer restart. When the computer comes back up, before going into Windows, it will tell you that disk checking will run in X seconds unless you hit a key (any key) on your keyboard. If you do that, of course, it will skip the disk check and just boot into Windows. So in order to have the CHKDSK process run, just let it run.

If your computer’s drive does not have any errors, disk checking will be done pretty quickly (a few minutes or less). I’ve had some computers with lots of hard drive errors take several hours to run. If that happens, don’t be surprised if the percentage showing seems to be stuck at a certain level for quite some time. It’s just finding problems in a certain spot on the hard drive and fixing them, so it has to spend some time there. When it’s done, the computer will just continue and boot into Windows.

If you find that your computer does take a long time to run CHKDSK because it is fixing lots of problems, it might be an early sign that the hard drive is failing. That means you better make sure you have a good backup NOW. You should have a good backup anyway, but when your hard drive is trying to tell you it’s having problems, it’s that much more important to make sure your critical files and folders are safely stored somewhere else so you don’t lose anything.

Millions of people use the service called “Web of Trust”. It’s a crowdsourced process that is supposed to tell you if a website you’re about to click on is trustworthy or malicious, based on the input of the other Web of Trust users. Recently, information has been uncovered about Web of Trust that indicates this service itself is not to be trusted.

I tried Web of Trust a while ago but stopped using it after a short time. However, I know a lot of people do use it.

The theory behind it is good. It’s based on a large group of people, pooling their information. If you visit a website and find that it pops up a fake virus alert, or tries to sneak software on to your computer, you can give it a negative rating in the Web of Trust browser extension database. Presumably, lots of other people are doing the same thing with websites they visit.

So when you do a Google search and you see all the search results listed there waiting for you to click on them, each one of them has the little Web of Trust indicator right next to it, telling you if other users have determined it’s safe to click through, or a site that should be avoided.

As I mentioned, this is a great idea in theory. The problem comes up when there are humans involved, and they get tempted by cash. It appears that this is what has happened with WOT.

Web of Trust claims that their browser extension has been downloaded by over 140 million users:

When a database is that large, it is very attractive to companies that want to target those users with advertising. Web of Trust was clear up front that some information about users was collected, but that it was collected anonymously. That information included geographic location, websites visited, computer operating system, IP address and other details.

But it turns out that linking that data to individual users of the WOT service was very simple to do. This means Web of Trust users could have a lot of private information divulged about them, including:

Not good! Think about how valuable it would be to have that kind of specific information for 140 million people. From what we can tell, WOT could not just keep it to themselves. They sold this information (which could then be connected to specific individuals) to third parties.

When confronted with this, Web of Trust responded with a statement that really didn’t do much. The statement said they are taking the following steps:

That’s fine, but it’s probably too late for that. Trust is earned, and it’s not easy to recover once it’s lost. I recommend that you uninstall the Web of Trust browser extension.

Outlook has so many great features, and a lot of Outlook users are not aware of many things that Outlook can do. One of the greatest time-savers is the ability to delete large amounts of email in a very short time.

If you use Outlook for your email, and your inbox or some other folder has gotten out of control with too many emails, today’s tip is for you.

Sometimes email can get a little out of control. Or maybe a LOT out of control. And suddenly you see your inbox or one of your email folders have hundreds of emails that you don’t need or want. And at that point it might appear to be such an overwhelming project, it’s easier to ignore the growing mess and vow to deal with it another day. But it only gets worse because the emails just keep coming.

But guess what – it’s not as bad as it seems!

When I’m dealing with a client who has this problem, and they show me the only way they know to solve it, I can understand why they would feel so discouraged. That’s because they think they need to click once to highlight one email in the list, then click Delete. Then when the pop-up asks “Do you really want to delete this email?” they click “Yes”. There it goes, one email gone. 857 emails to go.

Hey, if that was the only way to do this, I would feel discouraged too! But there’s a faster way – much faster.

Here’s an image of an old folder of emails in my Outlook. These are 27 emails that I no longer need, but what I’m going to show you could just as easily apply to 270 emails or 2700 emails.

Yes, I could delete them one by one. But instead, I can:

See what that does? Every email in between the first one and the last one is now highlighted.

(Hint: you can achieve the same effect by holding down the CTRL key and tapping the letter “a”.)

Now, since they are all highlighted, whatever action I take will apply to all of them instead of just a single one. If I hit the Delete key, they will all be deleted. MUCH faster than doing it one at a time.

One word of caution – if you have a folder with a HUGE quantity of emails, like more than 10,000, you might not want to do all 10k at the same time. Maybe do 3,000 or 5,000 at a time. The number of simultaneous deletions your computer can handle depends on your computer (memory, processor speed, etc.) so if you try to do too many at once, your PC may not be able to handle it and might freeze up. Or it might take so long to do all those emails at one time, you might THINK it has frozen even though it’s still working.

Time for another set of cool websites! I like to do this every once in a while, just to tell you about some websites I’ve run across that I think you might find interesting, informative or entertaining.

1. Online solitaire for free

2. All PDF tools online

And that’s not even all the options! All kinds of stuff you can do with PDFs at this site.

3. Old cereal boxes

4. Dumb laws

5. Convert YouTube videos

6. Iditarod film

7. Test your internet speed

8. Making things fun

Do you know of a really cool website? Let me know about it and I might include it in my next list.

Last week we talked about all the nonsense things that are thought to be the “magic pill” to speed up your Windows computer (clean the registry, defrag, etc). Today we’ll talk about what actually DOES speed up your Windows computer.

1. Stop programs from running in the background

In Windows 7, click the Start button and type MSCONFIG and click that when it shows up in the menu. Click the Startup tab, and uncheck anything that doesn’t always need to run.

In Windows 8.1 or 10, hold down Ctrl + Shift and tap Escape. If necessary, click “More details”. Click the Startup tab, then right-click and disable anything that doesn’t always need to run.

Now the big question – which programs need to run all the time and which ones don’t? I can’t really answer that specifically for you, since your list is specific to your computer. Of course you want to always have your antivirus program running, and probably your automated backup software, and programs that are related to the actual functioning of your computer (such as the audio, the touchpad, etc.). If you’re not sure about something, better just leave it there. I can take care of this remotely if you want.

2. Remove viruses – malware – browser junk

There are lots of programs that are designed to remove viruses and malware from your computer. But most of them are created with the idea that it will probably be a technician using them. If you don’t know how to do this, there is the possibility that you could mess things up. This is a process that I can handle for you remotely if you aren’t familiar with how to do it.

3. Add more memory

Most computers being sold today have at least 4 gb of memory. In general, the more memory your computer has, the faster it will run. Most machines will run okay on 4 gb, but if it’s in the budget and you can get 8 gb, that’s even better. Doubling the memory will usually create a noticeable increase in speed.

Memory isn’t something you can download. It’s a physical thing that goes inside the computer. It looks like this:

And you will probably be surprised at how easy it is to install. You can go to YouTube and look up videos on how to install memory in laptop or desktop computers and you’ll see the process is not difficult at all and only takes a few minutes. Definitely worth the effort.

4. Upgrade your hard drive to a solid state drive

Your current desktop computer’s hard drive is basically a metal box, about the size of a paperback book, with some spinning platters on the inside. That’s where your data is stored. If you use a laptop, the drive is smaller but the same mechanical principle applies. With those moving parts, the computer takes longer to boot up and longer to open programs and access your data.

A solid state drive has no moving parts. The data is stored in flash memory, kind of like the storage that’s on your thumb drive. They’re still more expensive than a regular disk drive, but those prices continue to come down and a lot of people are making the switch.

So how much faster is it? Well, think about when you turn on your computer – how long does it take from the time you hit the power button, until the computer is completely booted up, everything is displayed, all of the programs that are supposed to be running (such as your antivirus) are running, and you’re connected to the internet? Some people hit the power button and then go make a cup of coffee and come back rather than sit there and watch it.

With a solid state drive, that process can take as little as 20 seconds. Total. I’ve done several recently that were that fast after the upgrade. In addition to a fast boot time, you’ll also find that individual programs open more quickly, and they also process information more quickly when they’re running. It’s pretty amazing.

Upgrading to a solid state drive is not a project that the average person would want to take on. In addition to physically taking out the current drive and installing and connecting the new drive in the computer, you have to consider the fact that the new drive is blank. All of your software and files and folders need to be brought over. In most cases, I can do that in such a way that everything on your computer looks just like it does now. It will just be a lot faster. If this is of interest, get in touch with me. I just need to get a bit of information from you and then I can let you know what it would cost.

One final thought – even though doing one or all four of these things will speed up your computer, none of them will speed up your internet connection. That’s a separate issue and is directly related to your internet provider and the speed they are able to give you from the modem or router.

For a long time, there have been programs advertised on the internet that promise to speed up your computer. They usually go by names like “PC Optimizer”, “Perfect Speed”, “Ultimate Optimizer” or other similar sounding names, and they want you to think that if you just buy this program, your computer will be SOOO much faster. Sorry, not true.

Here are 5 common things these junk programs offer to do:

So when you see these junkware programs telling you to do all these things, just ignore them. If you do want to do these things anyway, you could do it yourself from within Windows.

Or, if you are dead-set on having software to do it for you, you can do it with CCleaner – which is free here. But be careful installing it, because it will try to put other stuff on your computer. And when you’re done with it, uninstall it or it will want to run in the background all the time. It will clean your registry, and remove temp files, and delete your history, but since none of that has any real effect, why bother?

A lot of major corporations these days are doing some pretty sketchy things. Recently HP confirmed that they are definitely on the list of companies who don’t mind doing sneaky/slimy things to their customers just to make more money.

I’ve been wary of HP for a long time, mainly because of what I see when I install an HP printer. They use the same subversive methods as a lot of other companies do, in trying to sneak software on to your computer. If you just go through the “default” installation process, you’ll end up with the “Shop for HP Supplies” icon on the desktop, the Yahoo toolbar in your web browsers, and a few other things that most people would decline if they were aware of the option to decline. To avoid those things you have to find the “customize” link during the installation and UNcheck all those things you don’t want. It’s the same slimy method used by the people that put malware and adware on the computers of unsuspecting people.

But a few weeks ago, HP really let their true colors shine through.

A little background first. Do you know why inkjet printers are so cheap these days? It’s because all the profit is made through the ink cartridge sales. HP doesn’t really care if they practically give away the printers, since they are planning on making such a huge profit on that darn ink.

To put this in perspective…

Human blood costs about USD $1500 per gallon. Not that it’s expensive to acquire, but the processing after the acquisition is what comprises a lot of that cost. That makes paying $3 for a gallon of gasoline seem really cheap. But regular black ink – the kind you purchase by the ounce wherever you buy your inkjet cartridges – comes in at a whopping $2700 per gallon. No wonder HP wants to sell a lot of that ink! And of course they want you to keep buying it regularly.

What HP really hates is when those high profit margins are cut into by the non-HP ink cartridges. You know, those third-party cartridges that are much less expensive but in many cases produce just as good a result as the high-priced “genuine” HP ink cartridges.

So, HP came up with this scheme to make their printers actually NOT WORK when a non-HP ink cartridge is used. And they even took it a step further by implementing a time-delay feature. They sent out what they called a “security update” this past March, which had the “printer time bomb” in it, but didn’t activate it until just last month (September). When this was activated, users who had third-party ink cartridges in their HP printers found themselves with a printer that would only display error messages. HP effectively broke their printer.

Obviously this resulted in a LOT of very angry and frustrated customers. And rightly so.

The good guys in this situation is a group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (you can learn more about this great organization at www.eff.org). EFF wrote an open letter to HP very quickly, pointing out the problems with what HP had done. The major points of the letter are:

In response to all the backlash to this stupid move, HP has been forced to announce that they will offer another firmware update (optional of course) that would reverse the one that broke a lot of printers last month. But in true “corporate” fashion, they defended this dumb move by saying they only wanted the “best printing experience” for their customers, and they were trying to protect consumers from “potential security risks”. Yeah right.

What should you do? I can only tell you what I’ve done and what I recommend: