The Computer Tutor

Everyone visits YouTube at one time or another. Some people visit it and watch videos every day. There are even people that spend HOURS each day watching those videos. But I’ll bet there are a lot of people, even those that use YouTube every day, that don’t know some of these shortcuts that work in YouTube.

For most media players, such as Windows Media Player or VLC Media Player, the standard keyboard key for pausing the video and starting it again is the space bar. That doesn’t work with YouTube. YouTube is a website. When you’re viewing a website, and you hit the space bar on your keyboard, it just makes the website you’re looking at scroll down by one page length.

For YouTube, the key to Pause/Play a video is:

I don’t know about you, but when I first discovered this, my reaction was, “Why K?” It seems like “P” might make more sense since it could stand for “play” or “pause”. Maybe because K is right there in the center of the keyboard. I mean, if you look at your overall keyboard from left to right, K is just about right in the middle. But whatever the reason is, K is what you tap if you want to pause a YouTube video or start it up playing again. Go watch a YouTube video now and try it out.

And that’s not all. If you’re watching a video and you want to go back 10 seconds and replay, hit the letter J (that one does make sense, since it is immediately to the left of K). And if the video has a boring part you want to skip over, tap L to fast forward 10 seconds (again, just to the right of K so it’s the obvious choice).

Want to rewind just 5 seconds back? Hit the left arrow key. And as you might guess, the right arrow key fast forwards 5 seconds.

And the up and down arrows are useful too – they increase or decrease the audio volume.

Most YouTube videos are much easier to watch, and more entertaining, when they take up the full screen. If you’re watching a video and it’s just the regular YouTube window, you can tap the letter F (for Full screen) and have the video fill up your screen. Tap it again to go back to the original view.

This:

is not nearly as impressive or as fun to watch as this:

Want to quickly shut off just the audio portion of a YouTube video? Hit M for Mute.

You can also turn on Closed Captions for almost any YouTube video just by hitting the letter C. Tapping it again turns captioning off.

Here’s a fun one – you can speed up or slow down a video by using the “less than” or “greater than” keys:

Of course, with those keys, you need to hold down the Shift key at the same time since the symbols are at the top of the key. Otherwise you would just be hitting the comma or the period.

And finally – quickly navigating through a video. You can do this with the number keys 1 through 9. YouTube divides every video into 10 equal parts, no matter how long the video is overall. So if you want to go immediately to the halfway point on a video, you just hit the number 5. If you want to be at the point where the video is 80% done, you hit 8. This can be really handy if you have a long video and you want to just sort of skim it for certain content but you’re not sure exactly where it is.

So here’s a summary of these shortcuts, in case you want to print it:

K = Play/Pause

Once you practice these shortcuts for a little while, you’ll probably end up using some of them all the time since it’s a lot easier and quicker than using a mouse. And now you know some cool things that your friends don’t know!

Every Windows keyboard has the same row of keys across the top – the Function keys. Those are the keys at the top of the keyboard labeled F1, F2, F3 and so on up to F12. One of the questions I get asked sometimes is, “What do the function keys actually do?” As with a lot of questions about computers, the answer is: it depends.

What it depends on primarily is what you’re doing on the computer at the time. Each one of them could have a specific task in one program, but a completely different task in a different program.

For example, if you’re using Microsoft Word, here’s what the F1 key can do:

If you just hit F1 by itself, it opens the Help window so you can search for help on a particular aspect of Word:

But – if you hold down Shift, then tap F1, Word will open the “Reveal Formatting” window off to the right side, so you can see all of the formatting information for the document that’s open:

And – if you hold down CTRL and tap F1, it will alternatively close and re-open the ribbon at the top of the window. Makes it easy to toggle that on and off if you want to do that.

There are other things you can do with F1, but you get the idea. And that’s just ONE of the function keys, and that’s JUST for Microsoft Word. All of the other Function keys do different things in Word, and ALL of the Function keys do completely different things in other programs. It would be impossible to literally list all of the things that you can do with the Function keys on all the different software.

However, several of the Function keys are kind of “known for” certain types of functions. Here are some of the more common tasks that are assigned to some of the Function keys:

F1 – in most programs (and in any version of Windows) the F1 key will usually open a “Help” window. So if you’re stuck and not sure what to do, try F1.

F2 – used to rename a file or folder – if you’re in your Documents folder or Pictures folder, highlight a folder or an individual file, and just type the name you want to use.

F3 – opens a search field in many programs. If you’re looking at a website page with lots of text and you need to find a particular word, hit F3 and type the word so search for it on that web page.

F4 – not so much this key by itself, but if you hold down ALT and tap F4, it will close the window that is “in focus” – the one that is in front of any other open windows.

F5 – this key refreshes your web browser window – like if you’re watching an eBay item that’s about to close and you want to see if the high bid amount changes, you can just keep tapping F5 to update the screen.

F6 – highlights the address bar in your web browser – so if you need to type in a new web address, you don’t need to move your cursor up to the address bar and click on it – just tap F6.

F7 – the spellchecker – F7 activates spellchecker function in most Office and email programs.

F8 – in Windows 7 and earlier, this is the key you tap when you want to boot up the computer in Safe Mode. Windows 8 and later made it a little more complicated (one more reason to stick with Windows 7).

F9 – if you use Outlook, you can use F9 to tell it to Send/Receive email, instead of using the cursor on the Send/Receive icon in the toolbar.

F10 – F10 does a few things, but not really too much that the average person would use.

F11 – one of my favorites – it puts your web browser in full screen mode. Go visit a website, and tap F11 to see what happens. You can tap it again to bring it back to normal.

F12 – this one has some functions in MS Word for opening and saving documents, but not much else that you would probably use. Don’t tap it while you’re using a web browser – unless you’re a web developer and you really want to work with computer code. Yeah, me neither.

When you get a new computer, especially if you get one of the more recent ones that are running Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, part of the set-up process is setting a Windows password. Most people don’t realize that you don’t NEED to have a Windows password on your computer, but the wording on the screen makes it sound like you are required to create one. I’ve even had some people go through this process without really thinking about it, then the next time they boot up their computer, they get prompted for the Windows password – and they don’t remember what it is.

We have ways of getting around the problem of a forgotten password. Most techs will know how to bypass a Windows password (which should tell you something about how well it secures your computer). Of course, the easiest solution is to never create the password requirement when you are first setting up the computer. When I’m setting up a new PC for a client, I always set it so there is no Windows password. The owner of the computer can always add one later on if it’s necessary.

But what if you’ve already set up your computer, and it requires you to enter a password every time you boot up Windows?

Here’s how you turn off the Windows password requirement:

Click the Start button (Microsoft logo) in the bottom left corner of the screen, and in the search field, type:

netplwiz

then hit the Enter button. This is going to bring up a window called “User Accounts” which looks like this:

At this point, you could probably figure out what to do just by looking at the contents of that window. First, look at the list of users. In my case, there are 3 entries. On your computer, it might only list a single user profile name. Either way, click once to highlight the user name for whom you want to skip the password entry requirement. Then UNcheck the box next to “Users must enter a user name and password to use this computer” and click OK at the bottom of the window.

Then you will be prompted to enter your current password, and confirm it:

After you click OK on that screen, you’re done. Next time you boot up into that user profile on Windows, you won’t have to put in a password.

A couple of things to remember about this:

I’ve used Paypal for years, and you probably have too. If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, you can set one up for free at www.Paypal.com. And with a recent change, Paypal has made it easier for people to send you money.

For my computer repair business here in Safety Harbor, Florida, I have an online accounting program that sends out invoices, which makes things really easy. Of course, I have to pay for that service. What we’re talking about here is not so much for business (although it could be used for that) – this is more designed for when individuals want to send or receive money from each other.

In the past, if you wanted to send someone money through Paypal, you had to get the person’s email address, then go to the Paypal website, log in to your account, and click on “Send money” and put in the email address and the dollar amount. Not what you might actually call “difficult” but it did involve a few steps and it required the sender to know the Paypal email address of the recipient.

Just recently, Paypal added a new  feature that made it a lot simpler. You can create your own customized Paypal address, so that people can just click a link to send you money. You can even customize that link, so that the proper dollar amount is already configured.

But you need to get your customized Paypal.me address as soon as possible, in order to get the name you want to use.

Here’s how you set it up:

1. Go to the website www.Paypal.me and click on “Get started”

2. On the next screen, you will need to choose your link name. This is the name that will come at the end of your customized Paypal payment link.

When you type in the name you want to use, Paypal will automatically check and see if someone else has already grabbed that link name. Of course, just about all of the common names have been taken (I had virtually no chance of getting “Scott” for example). For me, I choose “PCTutor” so my full link is: Paypal.me/pctutor – you can actually click that link and send me money through Paypal. I encourage you to try that out! 🙂

3. Once you have chosen your link name, and Paypal has confirmed that it’s available, you just click “Grab This Link”. After that, Paypal will prompt you to sign in to your Paypal account so that they can connect your new link name with your account. If you don’t yet have a Paypal account, you can create one at this time.

And you’re done!

Now, if you want to make it easy for someone to send you money to your Paypal account, you just send them that link. And for even MORE customization, you can pre-select the dollar amount you want the person to send. For example, if someone owes me $15, I can send this link:

http://paypal.me/pctutor/15

And it when someone clicks on that link, it takes them directly to the Paypal site to send that amount to me:

It doesn’t get much easier than that!

You should also know that even though all you need in order to send someone money via Paypal is their email address, they do need to create a Paypal account in order to claim that money. But most people have a Paypal account anyway.

I use the Google calendar to keep track of all of my activities, both business and personal. It’s super convenient because it automatically syncs between my computer, my phone and my iPad. And since I also use Gmail (another Google product) I can set the calendar to easily send me email reminders for anything.

But recently I came across a really annoying problem with the Google calendar – it was tagging each day with names of people having a birthday on that day. Some of the people I knew. But some I didn’t know – they weren’t computer repair clients, they weren’t fellow Safety Harbor residents. But there they were, in my calendar that I use each day – even though I didn’t ask for them to be there.

It would be nice if you could just do a right-click on a particular birthday and choose an option like “Remove all birthdays from my Google calendar” but they don’t offer that as a solution. In fact, for a while there actually was no solution – you were just stuck with having them there, cluttering up your calendar.

But now there is a way to do it. Here’s how to get those stupid birthdays off your Google calendar:

2. On the Settings page, click the Calendars link:

3. Then, find the “Birthdays” calendar and uncheck that box:

And that solves the problem. No more birthday reminders for people you don’t (or barely) know.

Yes, today’s tip is a little different than our typical “computer” tip. But by using the information I’ll give you today, you can go online and get $25 in cash, or $50 in Starkist tuna – if you meet the requirements.

Here’s what happened:

A few years ago, Starkist Tuna faced a class action lawsuit. The lawsuit accused Starkist of “under-filling” each of their cans of tuna, by just a few tenths of an ounce each. Who cares, right? Well, apparently someone cared enough to go all the way with a lawsuit to get their “justice”. And when you think about the millions of cans of tuna fish that Starkist puts out each year, that minor amount of shortage in each can really could add up to a lot.

So even though Starkist has not admitted that they did this, they have agreed to settle the lawsuit by offering their customers some compensation.

What you can receive:

How you qualify:

In order to be eligible for one of the above, you have to have purchased at least one 5-ounce can of Starkist tuna between the dates of February 19, 2009 and October 31, 2014. You don’t need to show a receipt or any proof of purchase, but you will be required to state (under penalty of perjury) that you did indeed make the required purchase within that period of time.

How to file a claim:

Go to the website www.TunaLawsuit.com and click on “File a claim” in the menu on the left side. Then just follow the instructions on the screen. You will need to provide your contact information, and whether you want the cash or the vouchers. Make sure you complete it all the way to the end. After the claim form is submitted online, you will have the opportunity to print the final page as your receipt, which includes your claim number. It looks like this:

See, I told you this week would be a little different than what I usually do. But hey, if you qualify and you can get $25 cash or $50 in tuna, you should know about it, right? So if you’re eligible, go get it!

And if your computer has a problem, you know where to find me for computer repair – right here in Safety Harbor (of course, I can fix most computers remotely so it doesn’t matter where you are).

If you have a Dell laptop, it might have a built-in “feature” called Ambient Light Sensor (I put “feature” in quotation marks intentionally). This is not really a widely advertised function so a lot of people don’t know about it. In fact, I personally was not aware of it until my friend Bob did some research and discovered it. Love it when the client comes up with the solution, then tells me about it. Thanks Bob!

What is the Ambient Light Sensor?

The ALS is something that Dell has built in to some of their laptops (I’m not sure all Dells have this). Basically, it’s a way for the laptop’s screen brightness to adjust based on how much light is in the room. So if the laptop is powered on, and you turn the lights up or down in the room, you will probably see the laptop’s screen get darker or brighter.

I guess some people might like it, but for most people, it’s annoying to have the screen brightness always changing even though you are not actually trying to adjust the brightness level. And for those that don’t know about this special “feature” it might even appear that the screen is defective. Nope, it’s just a computer manufacturer thinking they would offer something new and clever, but in reality it’s just something most people would prefer to turn off.

Here’s how you turn off the Ambient Light Sensor:

1. Find the “Function” key on the keyboard. It will be somewhere in the lower left area, usually between Ctrl and the Windows key:

2. Hold down the “Function” key and tap the left arrow key.

Pretty easy, right? Just a matter of knowing what keys to use, then the problem is solved.

Turns out there are a few other things you can do on your Dell laptop with that handy little Function key. In the list below, the Function key is abbreviated “Fn”. And remember, these might not work on all Dell laptops.

Fn + F1 puts your computer to sleep

Fn + F2 toggles the battery charging process on and off

Fn + F3 shows status of the battery

Fn + F8 toggles between screens if you have an external monitor connected

Fn + F11 copies a screenshot to the clipboard

Fn + Up Arrow key increases screen brightness

Fn + Down Arrow key decreases screen brightness

Fn + Right Arrow key adjusts brightness of the backlit keyboard (optional)

Fn + Left Arrow key toggles Ambient Light Sensor on and off (as described above)

Everyone at some point gets really angry at their computer. Either it’s too slow, or it doesn’t do what you expect it to do, or some other thing – and you get really frustrated with it. Want to get even with your computer? Here are some ways to really mess it up!

Okay… I hope you know that all of the above was sarcasm. If you really do want to mess up your computer, those are ways that I see happening all the time. But you should do the opposite of those things if you want your computer to run smoothly and do what it’s supposed to do.

You read this blog. You also probably listen to my podcast. You most likely know that I do computer repair here in Safety Harbor, Florida (and remotely all around the country). So you know that I’ve been telling people, “Don’t upgrade to Windows 10 yet”. It’s too early, and there are bugs (as we knew there would be). I’ve had a few clients just this past week who went ahead and upgraded to Windows 10 anyway, and now their printer isn’t recognized. Or they can’t go online because the wifi doesn’t work. I even had one newly-upgraded Windows 10 desktop computer that didn’t recognize ANY keyboard or mouse – wireless, USB or even the old-fashioned PS2 style.

NOTE: for those of you that have upgraded to Windows 10 and your computer is working fine, that’s great. I know a lot of people already have done this and so far seemingly have had no problems. This particular blog post is for the other group – for whom Windows 10 is not working as it is supposed to.

If you planned ahead properly, going back to Windows 7 or 8 is easy. You just restore from a system image backup. The catch is that you have to already have a Windows 7 system image backup created – BEFORE you do the Windows 10 upgrade.

So if you haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 10, but you’re about to go ahead and do it (not recommended), you need to create that system image backup first. To do that, I use a free program called Macrium Reflect. I’ve set up this backup process on lots of client computers, and I use it on my own computer every day. (It’s actually one of the FOUR separate backups I do daily on my main computer. Yes, perhaps I’m overdoing it on the side of caution – you don’t really need to do 4 types of backups each day.)

I’m not going to go into the full details of how to set up a system image backup with Macrium Reflect. If you want, I can help you get that in place, and I can do it remotely. You will need to have an external/portable drive just for that backup – you can get a 1 TB portable drive now for about $60. When this is created, Macrium Reflect takes a “picture” of your entire hard drive and puts it on that external drive. That’s why you want to do this BEFORE you upgrade to Windows 10, so the external drive will have that snapshot of your entire computer while it’s still running Windows 7 or 8.

Then, if you upgrade to Windows 10 and something doesn’t work, or several things don’t work, or you just don’t like it, you can just restore that Windows 7 or 8 system image and you’re back to the previous version of Windows just like nothing happened.

Important note: any work that you do while you’re in Windows 10 mode will not be carried back to the Windows 7 or 8 restore. So if you create anything important, or edit any critical documents, or make any other important changes, be sure to save them somewhere else BEFORE you run that system restore.

What if you upgraded to Windows 10 and you don’t have a system image backup?

Unfortunately, that’s the situation in which some people are finding themselves. If that’s you, you’re not completely out of luck. If you did the Windows 10 upgrade within the last 30 days, you should be able to use the “Go back to Windows 7” function that’s built in to Windows 10.

To do that, use the search function in Windows 10 and do this search (exactly):

Go back to Windows 7

or if that search does not work, try doing a search on just this one word:

recovery

In either case, what you are looking for in the search results is the option to go back to your previous installation of Windows 7. If you see that option listed, click on the “Get Started” link right under that phrase and follow the directions on the screen. It’s important that you have anything critical backed up before you start this process, and you also must know your Windows 7 login password (if you had one) – otherwise you won’t be able to log in to Windows after this is completed. It will take a few restarts and a good chunk of time, but if it is successful, you’ll be back to your previous Windows installation.

What if you don’t have a system image backup, and the “Go back” function is not an option?

If these first two processes aren’t available or don’t work, then you’re really looking at just a regular reinstallation of Windows 7 or 8. As you might suspect, this process could mean that any data that’s currently on the computer will be lost. In fact, you should assume that everything on the computer will be wiped out so you should copy anything important to an external drive or some type of backup.

The important thing to know is this – you can avoid all of this hassle just by choosing NOT to upgrade to Windows 10 yet. As I have been saying for a while, there is no advantage to upgrading right away. If you’re running Windows 7 or 8, the upgrade to Windows 10 is going to be free for a whole year. So just be patient and wait for all the impatient early upgraders (AKA guinea pigs) to find the bugs so that Microsoft can fix the bugs (the big ones anyway). You can always upgrade later. Or, you might skip Windows 10 completely, since Windows 7 will be supported up to January 2020.

Today’s tip won’t take long to explain, but I can tell you that whenever I show someone how to do this, it is almost always a huge relief. People get very frustrated by MS Word because their top toolbar keeps disappearing and they don’t know how to make it stay there for good.

First off, even though many users call it a toolbar, that’s not the actual name for it. It’s called the “ribbon”. At least that’s how it’s referred to within MS Word, so that’s the term I’m going to use here.

What I’m talking about is that row of icons and command options that is usually at the top of any window when you have Word open. It looks like this:

This is the nice collection of editing tools that allows you to make your Word documents look the way you want them to look. And for most people, these icons and menus are accessed all the time – so you probably want that ribbon to always be there. But sometimes it disappears, and the top of your Word document looks like this:

That’s usually when you want to scream at your computer or throw it out the window. Don’t give in to the temptation to take a hammer to it! Getting that ribbon back is easy.

Here’s how you get the MS Word ribbon back:

Hold down the Ctrl key, and tap the F1 key

That’s it! I told you it was easy! That’s how I do it anyway, because I am much quicker using a keyboard shortcut than using the mouse to click on something. If you would prefer to click on something with your mouse, look in the top right corner of your Word document window. You’ll see a tiny icon that looks like it’s pointing up or down.

When it’s pointing upward, that means the Word ribbon is currently on display. So if you click that little icon, it makes the Word ribbon disappear, and the icon is then pointing downward. So you know if your ribbon is gone, you can click on the down-pointing icon to make the ribbon come back on display. If that sounds confusing, just do like I do and use Ctrl + F1 to make it simple to toggle back and forth.

The example I used here was with MS Word, but the same thing applies to the other Office programs such as Excel, Outlook, etc. In fact, if you want to play a little joke on someone, wait until they are away from their computer, then go over and make their ribbon disappear. Eventually you’ll hear them getting frustrated (especially if it’s a co-worker that sits near your desk). Then you can be the “hero” and go over and fix it for them. A little harmless fun in the office!