The Computer Tutor

All over the globe, there are live cameras set up and streaming the content of whatever happens to be in their view. Here are some of the ones that I think are pretty interesting.

The Sea Otter Cam

The Garden Bubble Cam

Decorah Bald Eagles

Watching Grass Grow

Jackson Hole Wyoming Town Square

San Diego Zoo Ape Cam

Senior Dog Gathering Room

Animal Planet L!VE Kittens

The Africam

Giant Panda Cam

The Temple Bar

West Texas Hummingbirds

About a year ago I did a blog post and podcast about the absolute best way to protect the valuable personal identity information that’s stored in your credit files. Today I’ll let you know about an update to that, which makes it much easier to take action on this.

You can read my last blog post here. But the basic idea of it was this: You should freeze your credit file with each of the 3 main credit bureaus: TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. There are a variety of benefits to this, but the main one is that a scammer couldn’t use your credit report to create new accounts and steal your good rating.

The cost for this was just $10 to freeze your file at each of the bureaus, so $30 total. And that’s $30 per person, so a couple would be $60. And since children have a social security number and other personal information that could be stolen, it would be $30 for each of your kids.

Then, if you do apply for a loan or need to have your credit checked for a specific purpose, you could just go in an UNfreeze it temporarily to get that done. But to unfreeze it, the same fees would be paid again. So some consumers just didn’t bother with any of it simply because of the cost.

Well, the cost is no longer a factor. You can now freeze your credit file and that of your dependents, in any state in the US, at no cost. No more $10 charge per bureau, per person, to freeze or lift a freeze from your file.

This change came about as part of a new law called the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which went into effect on May 24 of this year. If you want to be put to sleep by the actual full text of this law, you can read it here.

In addition to eliminating the fees mentioned above, the new law also requires the three bureaus to offer credit monitoring services for free to all active duty military personnel.

You can freeze your credit file by phone or by mail, but really the easiest way to do it is online. Just follow the instructions in my last post about this (linked above) but just skip the part about making a payment.

I’ve been doing my Computer Tutor podcast for over 6 years now. My new podcast, What Was That Like, has been live for just a couple of months and has a steadily growing audience. So I’ve been asked by some of my friends and clients, “How do you start a podcast?”. For that answer, I went to the podcast expert: Dave Jackson.

Dave Jackson has been podcasting since 2005 – that’s back when podcasting had barely begun to even exist. Since then, he’s created many shows of his own and they’ve been downloaded more than a million times (maybe close to two million by now).

He still does several shows regularly. The 3 that I listen to – every episode – are:

School of Podcasting – this is a podcast about podcasting, every Monday. It’s great information for anyone who is just starting to think about doing a podcast, or anyone who already has a podcast. Usually 45-60 minutes.

Podcast Rodeo Show – Dave picks a show, listens to it for a short time, then gives his honest opinion about what’s good and what could be improved. Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Usually around 10 minutes.

Building a Better Dave – this is Dave’s personal podcast where he gets really transparent and talks about stuff he’s observed, what’s going on in his life, or whatever he wants to talk about. No set schedule. Usually 15-20 minutes.

The thing about Dave is that in addition to being very knowledgeable about almost any aspect of podcasting, he’s also just a really nice guy. He’s someone you’d look forward to just hanging out with.

And recently, he was inducted into the Podcasting Hall of Fame. It’s safe to say he’s a great source of information about podcasting.

So for this week’s Computer Tutor blog and podcast, I actually invited Dave in and I asked him a bunch of questions about starting a podcast:

And then I wanted to ask him a few non-podcast-related questions just to keep things interesting:

You’ll know when you listen to this that we had a lot of fun talking about podcasting and a variety of other things. To listen to our conversation right here on this page, just look at the podcast player that’s at the top of this blog post, make sure your speakers are on, and hit the Play button. Or you can listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Google Podcasts, or whatever app you use to listen to podcasts.

And let me know what you think in the comments below!

In the world of computers and security, there are some companies that once had a decent reputation but went downhill and now cannot be recommended or trusted. I would now put CCleaner in that category. Here’s the story.

CCleaner was actually introduced in 2003 – 15 years ago. But it wasn’t rolled out under that name initially. Its original name was Crap Cleaner. This was because it was supposed to get rid of a lot of the things that might be clogging up your computer, such as registry errors and temp files. After a while, I guess the software developers decided that the word “crap” was offensive to some people so they just changed it to CCleaner.

Even back then, CCleaner was one of those programs that it SOUNDS like you might need for your computer. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to clear out those files and things to keep your computer running nice and fast? But in reality, it’s not something you ever needed. Cleaning out temp files and fixing registry errors (even though that initial scan might show hundreds or thousands of registry issues) just won’t make any noticeable difference in how your computer runs.

But it was free, so no harm done at that point, right?

Then a few years ago, it started to get obnoxious. I noticed when I saw it on a computer, there would be the CCleaner icon in the lower right corner – meaning that it was running all the time in the background. Apparently it was now “monitoring” the computer for problems. Well, that was not acceptable. The more programs you have running at the same time, the slower they all run. And since CCleaner does not provide any needed service anyway, I certainly didn’t want it to be slowing down the computer.

But since then, CCleaner has taken another step in the wrong direction.

Brief backstory – you may have read here or heard me on the podcast talking about AVG. A long time ago, it was a decent free antivirus program. For the past few years, however, it has been more of a distributor of malware rather than a preventer of it (I wrote about that here). It’s a bad thing to have on your computer. Well, AVG is owned by Avast (another bad antivirus). And as of about a year ago, CCleaner is also owned by Avast. So they are moving the same direction, and it’s not a good one.

Consider these observations:

When you consider all of those factors, on top of the fact that CCleaner’s functions aren’t even needed in the first place, it’s a no-brainer – get rid of it.

Fortunately, removal is easy – just go to Control Panel or Settings, find it in the list and Uninstall.

If you’re working on files in a certain folder and you have to do a restart, would you like to have that same folder open up automatically for you after that restart? It’s possible, and it’s really simple to do.

Sometimes I find myself in a predicament. I know it’s been a while since my computer was restarted, so I know I really need to do it. But…I’m working on my blog, or my podcast (or my new podcast) and I have these particular folders open. I know if I restart I’ll have to go back and open all these same folders again, and that just makes me think, “I’ll restart later”.

But with this Windows setting that I’m talking about today, I could do a restart, and all of those folders that I have open before the restart will automatically be open right there on my screen, after the restart!

And really, you probably know already that there are times when Windows decides to do some updates, and your computer is going to go ahead and restart whether you like it or not. Same benefit – after the restart, you can just start right up where you were working previously.

Here’s how you do this:

First, open the search function in the lower left corner of your Windows 10 screen, and type “file explorer options” – then click on File Explorer Options in the menu that comes up:

In the new window that opens, click the View tab, then look all the way to the right for the “Options” button. Click the drop-down and choose “Change folder and search options”:

Now you see the “Folder options” window. Click the “View” tab, then scroll down a little and check the box that says “Restore previous folder windows at logon”.

Then click OK, and you’re done.

Now you can test it. Open a few windows, then restart your computer. When it boots up again, there are your chosen windows, open and ready for you to use.

And this works for more than just File Explorer windows. You can do it with your Outlook email window, or your web browser. I have done it with Chrome, and it opens back up with the same tabs as before the restart. Pretty handy!

In a recent blog/podcast, I talked about the importance of restarting your computer in order to refresh the memory and speed it up. But some people actually powered down their computers and powered up again, and the “Up time” counter did not reset. That’s because of the Windows 10 “Fast Startup” option so we’ll talk about that today.

Thanks to my friend Larry for reminding me about this feature!

If you’re running Windows 10, there’s a built-in feature called Fast Startup. Guess what it does. That’s right, it helps your computer start up faster!

But you might not want it to do that.

Think of it like this. If you wanted to be dressed and ready to go in the morning as fast as possible, one way to achieve that would be to just not take off your clothes from the day before. Just sleep in them. So when you wake up and get out of bed, BOOM – you’re already dressed! So you’ve achieved the goal of being dressed quickly, but there’s a cost – your clothes are all wrinkled, and not really clean because you wore them the day before.

That’s kind of what this Fast Startup option does with Windows. You hit the power button and choose the Shut Down option, to turn off your computer. But what Windows 10 does is, it takes a “picture” of your computer’s state, and then puts it into a hybrid state between powered off and powered on.

The thing is, your computer DOES need to completely power down sometimes (as discussed in this blog back on July 9). So it might be a good idea if you disabled the Fast Startup option (though there is an exception, which I’ll cover in a minute). And in reality, you might not even see a noticeable difference in the bootup time when Fast Startup is turned off – especially if your computer has a solid state drive, which means it’s already really fast.

Here’s how you check the Fast Startup option and disable it if you want to:

Do a RIGHT click on the Start button, and choose Power Options.

In the new window that opens, click on “Additional power settings”:

In the next window, click on “Choose what the power buttons do”:

In the new window, look in the section called “Shutdown settings”. There will be a few options there, and one of them is “Turn on fast startup”. It’s probably already checked. If you can just uncheck it, go ahead.

If you can’t uncheck it, you might need to find “Change settings that are currently unavailable” in the top part of that window and click that first, THEN uncheck the Fast Startup box.

After that, just click “Save changes” and you’re all done.

Now, when you click “Shut down”, your computer will actually shut completely down.

NOTE: Here’s the exception. If you choose the “Restart” option, that actually DOES fully turn off your computer and turn it back on again. For some people, this may be sufficient. Since I do a restart pretty regularly, the Fast Startup option is not a critical thing.

Back in Windows 7, it was easy to get a “Preview” of an image file that was stored on your computer. Just right click on the file, and choose Preview. That went away in Windows 10. But you can get back the preview option again – and not just for picture files.

Honestly I can’t figure out why Microsoft would do away with the ability to “Preview” an image file on your computer. It was so handy. When I started using Windows 10, I couldn’t believe it. If there was a picture file on my computer, and I wanted to see what it was, I would have to actually double click and OPEN it in a program. For me, that program is Photoshop. So if I wanted to see a picture, I had to wait for Photoshop to open and display it.

Yes, before people start emailing me – I know I could have just changed the display to the largest icons, but those thumbnail images aren’t the same as actually previewing the image in a larger window. So that wasn’t a solution.

So once again, Microsoft had something that was a great feature and very handy to use, and they eliminated it. So many things they do just defy logic.

AND, once again, some brilliant coder has come up with a way to not only bring back that feature that Microsoft took away, but make it so much better.

What I’m talking about is a little program called QuickLook.

It’s available for free download from the Windows Store (here). Just click the button that says “Get” and let it download and install.

I think it’s set by default to run each time you boot up your computer. That’s not something you want to set for every program without thinking about it, but for this program I’ve found that I use it so often it might as well just be running in the background all the time. I don’t notice that it slows down the computer. The icon looks like this in the lower right corner of your screen:

Here’s how it works.

Let’s say you have a folder with some pictures and you want to preview one of them. Like this one, where the first 4 files don’t have a meaningful file name:

All you have to do is click once on a file name to highlight it (like I’ve done in that picture above). Then hit the Space bar.

A new window opens immediately, showing a preview of that picture:

Now I am able to see a larger preview of that picture so I know what it is. And that’s not all! There are buttons across the top of the preview window.

Going from left to right, these buttons allow me to:

That’s a LOT more than you used to be able to do with the traditional Windows Preview function. And that’s just with an image preview.

If you have an audio file, such as an mp3, you can preview and actually listen to it from the preview window.

If you have a video file, such as an mp4, you can watch it from the preview window.

You can also preview documents, such as Word or PDF files, or even Excel spreadsheets.

So you can probably see why I think this little app is pretty handy to have available. Try it out and let me know what you think of it.

Windows has its own search function built in. You just click in the Search field, type a file name or a program name, and hit Enter. The problem is, a search can take a long time – especially if you have a lot of data stored on your computer. But there’s a new way to search your computer now – and it’s a LOT faster than the one that comes with Windows.

Thanks to my friend Roger for tipping me off to this great tool, called “Everything”. You can get it (free of course) at voidtools.com.

When you get to that site, you’ll have a few options about which version to download. Unless your computer is pretty old, you’ll want the 64-bit version (if you have problems with that one, go back and try the plain “Download Installer” option).

Once downloaded, click to run the installer. It’s pretty straightforward and it doesn’t try to sneak anything bad into your computer.

These are the default options for installation, but you can choose based on your preferences.

Using Everything couldn’t really be any easier. When you first run it, you’ll see a window that lists a bunch of folder names and file names, like this:

Don’t worry about none of those names looking familiar. Doesn’t matter. My auto mechanic could dig into my car’s engine and pull out a part and I would have no idea what it is or what it does – but it doesn’t matter because I don’t need to know. Same thing with your computer – there’s a lot going on in the background that you really don’t need to know about.

To try out this program, just type in the name of a file on your computer (or just part of the file name) in the search bar at the top, and hit Enter on your keyboard. You’ll see, anything that matches that search comes up almost immediately. It’s pretty awesome how fast this thing is!

When I ran it, I did a little test to see how quickly it could find something – a file that I really had no idea where it was stored on my computer. Years ago when I lived in Maine, I did some advertising in a local newspaper called the Lincoln County News. So I knew, “somewhere” in my computer was a copy of those old ads.

All I did was type the word “Lincoln” and immediately there were about a dozen different files, all of my ads from back in 2003 and 2004. This is what they looked like back then:

That was even before I had my current website, and I didn’t even need to include the area code in my phone number (since the whole state of Maine has just one area code).

The point is, I didn’t know where to go looking for those files, but the Everything program found them and displayed them for me in less than one second. Incredible!

And whatever you see displayed in the search results, you can double click to open it right from there.

Here’s the warning: this program searches your entire hard drive. So it might show you some search results that you have no idea what they are. Leave them alone. I’ve had some people see something on their computer and think, “Hmm, I have no idea what that is – better just delete it.” That’s a bad idea! You might be deleting a file that Windows or some other program needs in order to run properly.

So go ahead and try out this great little program and see if you’re as impressed with it as I am. The real question is, if a free program can search your whole computer and show results almost instantaneously, why can’t Microsoft just build that same function into Windows to start with?

Do you know how long it’s been since you restarted your Windows computer? There’s an easy way to check.

You probably already know that restarting your computer will often resolve a problem or error that has come up. I’ve often referred to restarting as a “magic pill” for computer repair since it fixes so many issues.

And along the same lines, restarting the computer on a regular basis is a good idea to proactively avoid some computer problems that can come up. I recommend restarting the computer every 1-2 days as a good practice.

When you restart your PC:

But here’s the big question – do you know when you last restarted your computer? In other words, how long has your computer been running continuously?

This is kind of a fun little quiz. Before you check this, take a guess as to how long ago you restarted the computer. 8 hours? 2 days? I’ve found that most people underestimate this. Once I asked a client how long ago the last restart was and she said she didn’t really know. When we checked, it was 45 days! Not a big surprised that her computer was acting funny.

Here’s how you find out when the last restart was (works the same on Windows 7 or Windows 10):

The taskbar is the bar that runs across the bottom of your screen:

Just do a RIGHT click on a blank part of the taskbar, and in the menu that comes up, click to run Task Manager:

When Task Manager opens, click on the “Performance” tab and look for the number indicating “Up time”:

The “Up time” number is configured as Days:Hours:Minutes:Seconds. So in the above screenshot from my own computer, it’s been 8 hours and 24 minutes since my PC was last booted up.

And remember – a restart is not just turning the computer off, then hitting the Power button to turn it back on. You have to actually click  the “Restart” option.

Did you check your “Up time”? Let us know what it was in the comments!

Everyone wants to find a good deal on Craigslist or one of the other online classified listing sites. But most people just go about it “hit or miss” and hope to be lucky and come across an amazing bargain. For me, I want to make this process as easy as possible, and also increase my chances for getting a deal before someone else does. Here’s how I do that.

(Note: if you want to use this system yourself but would rather have me set it up for you, I can do that remotely. Just email me at [email protected].)

To show you how I do this, the example I’ll use is the process I implement every day: my search for bikes.

My wife and I work with an organization called Blanket Tampa Bay, which provides clothing, toiletries and other necessities for people here in this area that are experiencing homelessness. Every Monday night we see 100-150 people and provide them with a hot meal, clothes, personal items, etc. A few months ago, I thought it would be a great idea to work on getting some bikes for these people. So many of them just walk everywhere, so a bike is a huge help. Just having some form of transportation opens up more job opportunities as well.

So I have gotten several bikes donated from local people by posting on Facebook, etc. But to continue getting more, I have to go online and look at the online ad sites where people are selling bikes. I have found that if someone is selling an adult bike in decent shape for $30 or less, there’s a fair chance that they’d be willing to donate it to a good cause. So far I’ve been able to bring 3 bikes each Monday for the last several weeks.

BUT – that means if there’s a good bike for sale at a low price, I need to be the first one to contact the owner, before someone else just goes there and buys it. For that, I’ve developed a pretty efficient system. And you can adapt this same system for whatever YOU want to buy – whether it’s a bike, a car, a computer, or anything else that’s for sale from a local person.

For this process, I use 4 online classified ad sites:

Facebook Marketplace (facebook.com/marketplace) –

OfferUp (offerup.com)

Craigslist (craigslist.org)

LetGo (letgo.com)

And to view all these sites the way I want to view them, I use the Chrome web browser.

So far, no big secret really. LOTS of people use these sites to find things for sale. The difference is HOW these sites get used.

For me, I have very specific search criteria. I want to see bikes for sale that are $30 or less, and are within 20 miles of my location. So anyone can go on a site, do a search for the word “bike” and then set the search filters for price and location. For most people, they do that manually. Which means sometimes they don’t do it – they just type in “bike” and hope to get lucky. That means they’re going to miss some of the ads, which is good for me. The ads that they miss, I want to definitely see.

So here’s how we set this up.

Open Chrome, and make sure the Bookmarks bar is being shown (you can do this in Settings). On the bookmarks bar, do a right click and choose “Add folder”. We’ll call this folder “Bikes <30” since it will only show us bikes that are under $30.

Now, we go to Facebook Marketplace. I type my search term “bike” and see all the bikes displayed.  Then I go over on the left column and set my location to Safety Harbor, Florida. I also set my maximum price at $30, and the distance to within 20 miles.

So now my search results are much more specific. If I wanted to, I could also put in a “minimum” price of maybe $5. That’s because in this search, I’m also going to see things like bike air pumps, bike seats, etc. which of course I don’t want to see. But that’s optional.

Now that you have the search set up the way you want, you just need to drag that website address into the “Bikes <30” folder. Look up in the address bar where you see the padlock or the word “Secure”. You can click and drag that to the folder and drop it there. Now that specific search on Facebook Marketplace is in that folder – you just need to go there and open it (but there’s a specific way to do that also, which we’ll cover in a minute).

Next up is OfferUp. We’re going to do the same thing here – set the search, set the filters, and once that’s all in place we drag that site to the same folder. For some reason, I set my distance in OfferUp to 10 miles. I really can’t remember if I had a reason for that or not, but that’s what it is.

Then we do the same thing with LetGo. I really don’t like LetGo, mainly because you have to actually click on the ad in order to see the price. And, you can’t filter for maximum price. So the search results are just a big list of bikes, most of which don’t fall into my criteria. But sometimes I do come across a bargain on there, so I include it.

And finally we have Craigslist. We will add the Craigslist search to the folder as well, but with this one we’ll be able to be a lot more specific in our search results.

For the other sites, since I’m searching for low-priced bikes, a lot of the ads that come up in the search results are kids bikes. So I have to just scroll past all those ads and just look for pictures of adult bikes. But with Craigslist, we can do a more specific search.

Here’s how I set up my Craigslist search. Go to Craigslist for my area (the Tampa Bay area of Florida) and click on the “Bikes” category. Add maximum price and distance from my zip code, and click “Update Search”. And now, I can enter the filtering words in the search field. You do that just by typing the “minus” sign followed by the search word (no space in between).

For example, I don’t want to see any ads with the word “girls” in it (because most bikes advertised as a “girls bike” is a bike for a kid). So I type: -girls

Same thing for the search words boys, girl’s, boy’s, childs, child’s, kids, kid’s and whatever else might eliminate some of the ads that don’t meet your criteria. I’ve found that this set of search filters narrows it down pretty nicely for me:

And Craigslist has another feature that is really handy. Most people don’t use it but it can give you a HUGE advantage in finding deals faster than other people. You have the ability to save your search in your Craigslist account, and then tell Craigslist to EMAIL you whenever a new ad is created that matches your search!

At the end of your search field, click on “Save Search”:

In the next window, make sure the “Alert” box for that search is checked:

There have been cases where an ad is posted, I get an email within minutes, and I contact the seller and immediately go and look at the item being sold. So I’ve purchased the item before most other people have even seen the ad!

And now the final step: making this super easy in Chrome.

You have your folder on the Chrome bookmarks bar, with all 4 of your filtered search stored there. So whenever you want to do a quick search, you RIGHT click on the folder name, and choose “Open all 4 in a new window”:

When you do that, a new Chrome window will open, and that window has 4 tabs already created – and each one is one of your special searches:

All your filtered searches, right there for a quick check whenever you have a spare minute. And since all of these are open in a new window, it has no effect on your original Chrome window. When you’re done checking for bargains, just close this window and you’re back to whatever you were working on.

That folder is always there on your Chrome bookmarks bar, so it’s convenient to do a quick check at any time, and in a lot of cases you’ll see a new listing before a lot of other people see it. Anything you can do to get an edge like that over  your “competition” will help to ensure you’re getting bargains more often!

And check this out – just now I clicked to take a look at my “Bikes” folder, and this came up –

Just listed 2 minutes ago! Pretty sure I’m one of the first, if not THE first to see it – which means I already have a better chance of grabbing that deal.

Do you have any tips on shopping the online classified ad sites? Share them in the comments below!