The Computer Tutor

After last week’s post about a big reason WHY you should use an ad blocker when you visit websites, I got several inquiries asking, “What ad blocker should I use? Where do I find it? How do I get it on my computer?”. So this week we’ll talk about a couple of the popular ones, including the one I use on my own primary computer.

For either of these ad blockers, you’ll need to install them as an extension to your web browser(s). That just means it will run as sort of an “add-on” feature of Chrome or Firefox. So you can either get the ad blocker from within Chrome or Firefox, using this basic procedure:

In Firefox:

In Chrome:

(If you use Internet Explorer, the first step is to quit using Internet Explorer. But if you do want to keep using it as your web browser, you can go straight to the AdBlock Plus website and click on the green button that says “Install for Internet Explorer”. I don’t think uBlock Origin is compatible with Internet Explorer.)

uBlock Origin

uBlock Origin is the one I have been using for quite some time. It does a great job keeping the ads from popping up on the various websites I visit.

It also knows to alert me when I click on something in Google search results that is actually an ad. Like if I search for “Altra Instinct 2.0” (the running shoe that I use), Google displays these offers from various vendors because it knows I’m probably shopping for shoes:

But when I click on one of them, uBlock alerts me that I just clicked on an advertisement and shows the following options. I usually just click on “Temporarily” so I can go through and see the website. But if I wanted to just always allow ads from Google searches such as this, I could click on “Permanently” and the ads would take me straight to the website. Or I can just click “Go back”.

AdBlock Plus

AdBlock Plus is an ad blocking program that has been around for a long time. In fact, it may have been the first ad blocker available. It also works well. One thing to keep in mind with this one though – you might notice that the tag line does not say “surf the web without ads”. No, instead it says “Surf the web without annoying ads”. This might seem like an insignificant distinction, but it does have meaning. AdBlock Plus, by default, lets SOME ads be displayed – the “nice” ones. If an ad has obnoxious blinking text or it’s jumping around on the page or it’s otherwise too distracting, it will be blocked. So you will see a few ads still, unless you go into the configuration and tell it, “No, I don’t want to see ANY ads”. At least they do give you that option.

The one  you end up using would just be a personal preference. You might want to try one of them for a week, then remove it and put the other one on for a week. No matter which one you use, your web experience will be much more enjoyable (and safe) with most or all of the ads not displaying.

Here’s a video talking about these two ad blocking extensions:

I’ve used ad blockers for years. If you’re not familiar with that, what this means is that when I visit a website that has advertising, I don’t see the ads. I just see the website content.

As you might know, ad blocking software has generated a controversy. Website visitors like the blockers because websites are so much more pleasant without all the obnoxious ads in your face all the time (sometimes even obscuring the content). Website owners dislike them because ad-viewing is what brings revenue to their website.

One large newspaper site (you may have heard of it – The New York Times) has gone so far as to say this:

“No one who refuses to contribute to the creation of

That’s a quote direct from the President and CEO of The New York Times Company, Mark Thompson. You can read his full content here.

I’m not writing this piece to weigh in on the traditional pros and cons of blocking ads. There are good arguments to be made on both sides. What I want to make known, however, is that there is another very good and valid reason to block ads, aside from the fact that you just don’t want to see them.

Ads can deliver malware –

If you click the link above and read the full statement by Mark Thompson, he fully addresses the need for users to view ads in order to help cover the cost of the website and the creation of good journalism. But he fails to mention the fact that many visitors to the New York Times website earlier this year were infected with ransomware, which was delivered directly from ads on the site.

Here’s the basic process:

I can’t let this opportunity go by without saying – if you had a backup before you got infected, you could get all your stuff back (including all of your programs) without having to pay the crooks anything. You do have a backup, right? In fact, to be fully protected, you should have TWO backups (and they are mostly automated, and I can set it up for you, so no excuses).

And, if your other software (Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash, Firefox, Chrome, Windows Updates, etc. etc.) were all up to date, you would have been much less likely to get infected. This can be automated too, through the Managed Service Plan.

But do you know how ELSE you could have avoided this mess? By using an ad blocker, and not allowing those infected ads to be displayed in the first place. To be fair, the New York Times was not the only high-traffic website that got hit with this problem a few months ago. Also included were the BBC, the NFL, and good old AOL.

By the way, here’s what AOL looks like if you block all the ads:

(Sorry, couldn’t resist that one.)

So, even though the debate will continue to rage about how annoying the advertisements are, but how website users should recognize their social responsibility to not block the ads, this fact remains. Website owners that depend on ad revenue cannot expect their users to just blindly “hope” that the ads are safe. There need to be much more serious safety measures in place to prevent these infections.

It’s kind of like when you go out to eat. The owner of the restaurant can give you free samples, but if you go there for a full meal he expects you to pay the regular price for it. In return, you expect the food to be safe to eat and not give you food poisoning.

What do you think? Leave a comment below.

Mostly, Word works well. I’ve used it for many years and been pretty happy with it. But ever since I first started using it, there has been this one thing that has driven me nuts until I learned how to fix it.

What happens is this. I’ll be typing along in MS Word, everything seems to be working fine, no problem. Then I decide I need to have some kind of small divider in between a couple of paragraphs. Nothing big, just a few dashes to separate those paragraphs.

So I hit Enter to go to a new line, and I hit the old “hyphen” key 3 or 4 times, and I hit Enter again to start the next paragraph.

But when I look up and see what’s on the screen, what is there is definitely NOT what I typed. Instead of the 4 “dashes” to separate those two paragraphs, there’s a solid line all the way across the document – from the left margin to the right margin. How in the world did that happen?? I know for sure I didn’t type it that way (you don’t plan to type the hyphen key 3 or 4 times and “accidentally” hit it 50 times!).

Here’s what has happened: Microsoft Word is trying to give you what it THINKS you want (a solid line). Why it would think that, I can’t really tell you. But the odd thing is, that thing that looks like just a regular line is not really a line at all. Or I should say, Word doesn’t picture it as a standard “line”. To verify this, go up to that line and try to highlight it so you can delete it. Or try putting your cursor at the end of the line, so you can backspace and delete it. You can’t. Although, if you hit backspace immediately after that line appears on the page, you can get rid of it – but that doesn’t keep it from happening again in the future

In order to understand how to get rid of that thing, you have to know what Word thinks it is: a border.

Huh?

I know, it doesn’t really make any sense. But that’s the way it is. We just have to work around it.

So when you find yourself with that long, silly line in the middle of the page that you don’t want, put your cursor on the line ABOVE that long line, then find the Paragraph section in the ribbon above and click the drop-down menu in the “Borders” icon:

When you choose “No borders” that line disappears. So your problem is solved – but only for this specific Word document. Next time you type those 3 dashes on a line again, the same thing is going to happen. Chances are you don’t really want to have this happening all the time.

Fortunately, you can change your preferences in Word so that this doesn’t happen again. To do that, click File – Options – Proofing and click on the button called “AutoCorrect Options”. In the new window, click the tab called “AutoFormat as you type” and UN-check the box next to “Border lines”, then click Ok:

The steps I just listed above are based on Word 2016. If you have a previous version, your steps might be somewhat different, but if you can at least get to the “AutoCorrect” options you should be able to figure it out from there.

What’s kind of ironic is that Word sets it up to do that document-wide line by default, and has done it that way for years. The idea is that it’s trying to predict what you want and be helpful by providing it immediately and saving you time. The irony is that this “time saver” that’s built into Word has been an annoyance for a very long time for lots of people, and you end up wasting time just trying to figure out how to fix it. Now you know how!

I use Google Chrome as my primary web browser, and not long ago I came across something I could do with Chrome that I thought was pretty cool. And sometimes even useful.

A little background first.

Practically since the beginning of time, computer users have known about the keyboard combination CTRL + ALT + Delete. If your computer has a problem, or a window freezes, or just about anything, that’s what you try (or used to try anyway). That 3-key combination had the nickname – it was called the “3 Finger Salute”. Usually, when you click CTRL + ALT + Delete, you then clicked on “Start Task Manager” to show a list of the processes running on the computer. You could find the one that froze up in that list, then click on it to close it so that you could use your computer again. It was just quicker than doing a full power down and starting up again (especially in the old days when computers would take forever to finish booting up).

What a lot of people don’t know is that you can get directly to the Windows Task Manager without doing the CTRL + ALT + Delete key combination. All you have to do is hit CTRL + Shift + Escape. And there it is, Windows Task Manager right in front of you immediately. Look at that, I just saved you that extra click and added years of productivity to your life.

Now, back to Google Chrome.

What most people don’t know is that Chrome has it’s OWN Task Manager. Try this out. Open Google Chrome, and open a few tabs to various websites. Now, hit Shift + Escape. You’ll see something like this:

It actually looks almost identical to the Windows Task Manager, but this one ONLY shows the various tabs, extensions and processes that are active inside of Chrome at the moment.

So if one particular tab is not working right (like when a web page freezes up) and you can’t close it, you can close it from this window. Or if you want to temporarily disable an extension, you can do that from here as well.  Just highlight the tab or extension, and click “End Process” – just like you would in Windows Task Manager.

And for those of you that really like to get geeky, you can choose any of those items in the list with a RIGHT click, and select other categories of more in-depth information about that particular tab or extension:

Chances are most users are not going to have a need to dig that deep into the recesses of Chrome to find out what the CSS cache is for a particular running extension. But should you ever have a need for that, it’s there, ready and waiting for you!

At one point in time, I was an avid newspaper reader. I enjoyed being informed about what was going on locally and around the world, and the newspaper had it all right there in one place, every day. This was back when I was working in an office. I would get to the office about 30 minutes before work started so I would have time to read the paper and feel like I was up to date on current events.

Of course, that was before the age of the internet and the 24 hour news cycle. I haven’t subscribed to a newspaper in years. And that’s the overall trend for print journalism, which is why newspaper are gradually declining and going out of business. When all the news is available and up to the minute right on your computer or phone, why would you buy a piece of paper that was printed yesterday? I do have some friends who continue to hold out hope that printed newspapers are going to make a comeback, but I really don’t see that happening.

Still, the newspaper was the public’s best source for news for the past roughly 400 years. That means that the last few centuries of our world is actually documented in those newspapers – from major world events all the way down to tiny local stories. Wouldn’t it be great if most of that information could be seen in one centralized location?

Yep – and the Google News Archive has done just that. You can see it here: https://news.google.com/newspapers

If you’re a history buff, this is a gold mine. There are newspapers here from all over the world. Major cities to small towns and everything in between. For example, if you live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania you can read over 28,000 issues of the Pittsburgh Press – from July 1819 to July of 1992. Not to mention the Pittsburgh Commercial, the Pittsburgh Gazette, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Sun-Telegraph. That’s a lot of news about Pittsburgh!

Here’s the Cambridge Times (Cambridge, Ohio) edition from June 5, 1908:

If you lived in Montreal in October of 1909, you would have had to cough up 5 cents to read The Canadian Times. Now you can read it for free!

The archives are laid out in such a way that they are easy to navigate. The basic structure is alphabetical by the name of the newspaper. But you can also search within the archive in order to get more specific information. Once you click on the name of the newspaper, you’re taken to a page that is laid out so you can scroll through to the decade/year/month you want to see. Here’s part of the page that’s displayed when I click on the Akron Hometowner (Akron, Ohio):

From there, you can use a drop-down menu to choose a more specific time period (such as the month), the size you want to have the thumbnail images appear on this page, or even a specific date.

It’s funny how we kind of take for granted that Google takes on projects like this that are overwhelmingly huge. Can you imagine the meeting in Google’s headquarters that day? “Hey guys, why don’t we just get all the old issues of all the newspapers and make them viewable and searchable on the website?”. I mean, where do you even start with a project like that? Then again, this is the company that has pioneered the idea of cars with no human driver, and has given us a street-view map of just about the whole world. Archiving old newspapers is a walk in the park.

Pretty amazing resource.

As the free period for upgrading from Windows 7 or 8 to Windows 10 comes closer to ending (July 29), Microsoft is getting more desperate. They want to push Windows 10 into as many computers as possible, whether the owner of the computer wants it or not. I’m still getting calls and emails all the time from people that are surprised to wake up one morning and find that their computer has been “upgraded” against their wishes.

As I have written here previously (here), Windows 10 has a built-in function that allows you to revert back to your previous version of Windows, if you do the rollback within 30 days. That rollback function usually works, but not always.

Consider these scenarios:

And these headaches may all be happening to you, in spite of the fact that you didn’t even want Windows 10 in the first place!

I just came across a way that could resolve all of those issues. Neosmart Technologies has come up with a little piece of software called Windows 10 Rollback Utility (pretty clever name, right?). You can get it at https://neosmart.net/Win10Rollback/.

Disclaimer: I only recently discovered this program, and I’ve only tried it on one computer so far. On that computer it worked fine. Normally I try to use a program extensively before I blog about it or recommend it, but in this situation there are so many people getting scammed into the Windows 10 upgrade I felt that I should go ahead and tell you about it now. There are no indicators so far that it won’t work properly, just keep in mind that I have not tested it exhaustively.

When you visit that website, you can watch the brief demo video that gives you an overview of what is involved. This is what it shows:

Basically there are a couple of different ways you can use this program:

One thing to remember: any work that you have done (documents created, pictures, etc.) from the time of the upgrade until now will be wiped out when you revert back to the previous version of Windows. So make sure you back up everything important BEFORE you do the rollback.

You know I am always preaching about doing backups. And even people that don’t have a backup process in place know that they SHOULD, but until that unexpected problem comes up and they lose their important documents or irreplaceable pictures, they just say that they’ll do that “someday”. Today I’m not going to tell you about all the files you SHOULD be backing up – instead I’ll tell you about a particular type of file that you should NOT back up.

Question: What’s worse than having your computer crash when you have no backup?

Answer: A computer crash when you THINK you have a backup, but you don’t.

The scenario:

I’ve seen this happen a few times and it’s not good. Client calls me and says the computer won’t boot up, or it’s giving an error message like “Operating system not found” or “Boot device not found” or something similar. That almost always means a hard drive crash.

Client: “But the good news is, I was just working on my novel yesterday – you know, the one I’ve been working on for the last couple of years – and when I was done working, I backed it up to my thumb drive. So glad I did that! Sure wouldn’t want to lose two years of work!”

So I go over and check the computer, and yep, it’s a hard drive crash. We replace the hard drive and get Windows and Office reinstalled, then it’s time to restore the recently-backed-up novel from the flash drive back to the computer.

So I plug in the flash drive and I see this:

That’s when my heart sinks. Because I’m going to have to tell the client that this backup is not a backup.

Do you see the telltale clue in that image? It’s the little arrow in the bottom left corner of the icon. That little arrow means what we’re looking at is not the actual Word file. Rather, it’s a shortcut to the main file. It just points to the main file. It’s really nothing more than an icon. It’s not the Word document.

Really, it’s a pretty easy mistake to make. You have the actual important document saved in the Documents folder, where it should be. But you want quick, one-click access to it, so you make a shortcut to it on the desktop. The only file you ever click on to open it is that desktop shortcut. So it kind of follows logically that if you want to make sure you have that file backed up, you backup the file that’s on the desktop – the one you see all the time, and click on all the time. WRONG.

You have to back up the actual file – the actual document. How do you make sure you back up the right thing? There are a few ways:

I’ve been really trying to filter out all the stuff that shows up on my Facebook news feed. Facebook does have some positive benefits, but wow – there is so much stuff on there that I don’t care about. Not that it’s necessarily bad stuff (although some of it is really terrible) – it’s just content that I decide I don’t want to waste my time or thought processes on. For me, one of those things is the constant reminders of my “memories” – the stuff that was on Facebook a year ago or 5 years ago, or longer. Fortunately, there’s a way to stop it from displaying for a while.

Sometimes it shows up and looks like this too:

I know for some people it’s great to take a trip down memory lane right there on Facebook. It’s just not for me. If you feel the same way, here’s how to keep that from showing up in your news feed:

– Go to https://www.facebook.com/onthisday and click on “Preferences” in the top right corner

– Click to edit the Dates:

– Enter a start date from a looooong time ago, and make the end date whatever today’s date is, then click Save:

This tells Facebook that you don’t want to see any “nostalgia” or “memories” that happened to take place between those two dates.

It would be must better if Facebook just offered a switch to disable the nostalgia stuff from appearing, regardless of what the date was. By entering the date range as we did in the example above, it just means that a year from day you might start seeing those silly things again. Maybe by that time there will be a way to just turn it off completely.

One of the most dangerous things you can do with your computer is to click on a link when you don’t know where that link will take you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Facebook link from someone you barely know, or a loving email from your dear sweet mother – don’t click on a link without knowing where it goes!

This is wonderfully illustrated this past week in an email I got from my friend and long-time client Marge. She got an email that was supposedly from Paypal Customer Service, asking her to verify her account using a link that just said “CLICK HERE”. She wisely did not click on it and just forwarded it to me to verify that it was a scam.

Here’s the email:

With a lot of scams, the email sender will at least spoof the “From” address so that it looks like it came from Paypal. In this case, the scammer was just too lazy I guess. Obviously that is not an email address for Paypal Support.

But more importantly, the message in the email asked her to click on a link to “verify” her account (this was another red flag, since Marge does not have a Paypal account). And even if she did have a Paypal account, Paypal would never ask  you to do this. They know that any security-conscious user would not click that link. Here’s why.

There are two components to any link: the link text and the link address.

The link text are the words you can actually see; the text that you are supposed to click on. In this case, the link text is “CLICK HERE”. That text can be anything the writer wants it to be. It doesn’t have to be anything related to where the link address goes.

The link address is the actual website where you’ll be sent when you click on the link text. In a lot of cases you can’t see the link address; you can only see the link text. That’s what makes this a little tricky.

In fact, the link text could even be a website address, and you could click on it thinking that was also the link address, but the link address could be completely different. For example, the link below says it’s supposed to be for the Ford automobile website, right? But if you actually click on it (it’s safe if you want to try it), it will instead take you to the Chevrolet website. That’s because the text says Ford, but the address is for Chevy.

http://www.Ford.com

In the case of the email shown above, all we see is the link text. How do we find out what the actual address is? Well, the WORST way to find out is to just click the link and see where it takes you – don’t do that, no matter how tempting it might be!

What you should do instead is RIGHT click on the link text, and choose “Copy Hyperlink” or “Copy link address” or something similar:

Then, open up a plain text editing program on your computer. In Windows, Notepad is perfect for this. When you have that open you can click Edit – Paste, or just right-click in the white area and choose Paste from the menu that pops up. In this case, here is what was shown as the link address:

Well, isn’t that interesting! Sure doesn’t look like a Paypal website address, does it?

Bitly is actually what’s called a link-shortening service. If you want to send a link to someone but it’s one of those really long ones, you can paste it in at the Bitly website (www.Bit.ly) and they’ll create a much shorter link for you, which will actually redirect to your longer link address. It’s a legitimate and useful service, but unfortunately it gets used by scammers in order to hide the REAL website address where they want to send you.

So we have the Bit.ly address – how do we know where that’s going to lead? There’s a little trick to that. When you copy and paste a Bitly address into your web browser (such as Firefox or Chrome), add a “+” (a plus sign) after it and hit Enter. Instead of taking you directly to the end website address, Bitly will instead give you a preview of where it leads, and THEN you can decide if you want to go there or not. It’s a handy security feature built into Bitly, which you should definitely take advantage of. So we put this into the web browser:

and here’s the preview that Bitly provides for us:

It doesn’t take much of a security expert to determine that “huytv.ml.silentroom.cf” is not a website address for Paypal Customer Support.

I was curious about the “.CF” that came at the end of that address though. It was not one that I was familiar with. The more common ones are easy to identify – .CA means it’s based in Canada, .gov means it’s either the federal or state government here in the US, etc. When I checked on what the “.CF” originated, here’s what I found:

Unfortunately, it’s not a big surprise to see that it came from Africa – that’s where a lot of internet scams originate. Probably the biggest majority are in Nigeria though. So this email could have come from an organized spammer/scammer group that’s raking in a lot of money from this activity, or it could be some teenager sitting in an internet cafe, sending out emails and hoping to get lucky when someone clicks on one of them. Stay alert and suspicious so that you’re not a victim!

I still don’t recommend Windows 10. I’ll be staying with Windows 7 for as long as possible (at least until January of 2020, when Microsoft will no longer offer security updates for it). But I know there are some people that are concerned that someday they might HAVE to upgrade, and the deadline for getting the FREE upgrade to Windows 10 is July 29 – just a couple of months away. It would be silly to pay for Windows 10 (which will probably be $119) if you could have gotten it for free, right?

Here’s the timeline:

Windows 10 was first introduced at the end of July, 2015.

For anyone that has Windows 7, Windows 8, or Windows 8.1, the upgrade to Windows 10 is free if you do it by July 29, 2016.

After July 29, if you want to upgrade to Windows 10, it will cost you $119. But there’s a way around that, if you’re concerned about it.

Disclaimer: As a general rule, I don’t recommend that the “novice” computer user should do either one of these things. It’s true that if you know all the steps involved, and you’re familiar with how the system image software works, you could probably do either of these successfully. But we’re talking about your computer’s operating system here. If something goes wrong, or you’re presented with an error message or an option that you aren’t familiar with, you’re might be kind of stuck in a difficult place. I’m only presenting this today for the users that are considering doing the upgrade now specifically to avoid having to spend $119 later.

Actually there are two ways to keep using Windows 7, but get Windows 10 free even after the deadline. There are pros and cons to both.

Method #1: Upgrade and roll back

Of the two methods, this is the easier one – but it’s not 100% guaranteed. Windows 10 has a built-in process that allows you to go back to your previous version of Windows, if you decide you don’t like Windows 10 or it doesn’t work properly (both are likely scenarios). But you have to do the rollback within 30 days of the upgrade. And here’s the catch: that rollback option has been known not to work on some computers. And it can make a difference if you do it 1 day after the upgrade, or 29 days after; whatever work you’ve done during the Windows 10 period will likely be lost when you go back to Windows 7 or 8.

Here are the basic steps for this process:

Method #2: Upgrade and restore a system image

This one is the more reliable of the two methods – but not quite as simple. It’s only more reliable due to the fact that the “rollback process” built into Windows 10 just doesn’t always work properly. As you can see, the software we use for this is the same as we used in Method #1 – Macrium Reflect. It’s very reliable and I love it. Personally, I bought the paid version just to support the developers (and in case I ever need their tech support, which is not included in the free version).

Here are the basic steps for this process:

The big question: why does this work?

You might read the steps in these processes and wonder, “What does this actually accomplish?” And that’s a valid question. I mean, you’re basically just upgrading to Windows 10 and then going back to what you have now.

Here’s the key: when the upgrade to Windows 10 happens, Microsoft makes a note of it on their end. You don’t have to enter a product key or go through any manual activation process – it all happens in the background. This is called a “digital entitlement”. This just means that Microsoft knows that your specific, unique computer is eligible for Windows 10. And that status stays on Microsoft’s records  – EVEN IF you then go back to using Windows 7 or 8. By doing the upgrade, you’re kind of “reserving your place” so that if you ever want to actually upgrade and start using Windows 10 in the future, you’ll be able to do that without having to purchase it.

I’ll probably do this on my own computers, and on my wife’s computer, just to be covered for the possibility that someday we might somehow be forced to upgrade to Windows 10. But as I said earlier, Windows 7 will be supported through January 2020 – and who knows what the Windows situation will look like in 3 1/2 years.