MOMETEK's Guide: Windows

Showing posts with label Windows. Show all posts

Monday, August 17, 2015

Windows 10 - Installation

By Microsoft Corporation [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

So, I'm back, and what better way to start off again, than to do a few posts on Windows 10. There's a lot to cover, so there will be several posts, including installation.

About a month ago, I reserved my free copy of Windows 10. Since I already had Windows 8.1, I figured there was no harm, well other than a few bugs here and there.

I'm normally not an "early adopter". Somewhere between Windows 95 and XP I had decided to just get the latest when I purchase a new computer. Since I had kids, I found that I was more inclined to spend money on food for them, rather than on software to replace what already worked just fine.

Not to mention the time involved on devising work-a-rounds for the inevitable bugs that happen with new software.

It was just easier to wait a year when all of the early adopters have called attention to the bugs, where Microsoft would then finally send a service pack or update that took care of the problems.

Granted, I would get the new computer pre-slowed with the new patches, but at least it was stable.

So getting the upgrade so soon, for all intents and purposes, is something new to me. I figured that since I already have Windows 8.1 pre-installed, why not?

It was easy... Maybe a little too easy.

If you've seen me complain on Facebook, it is usually about the flaky internet, which is why I was attempting to schedule the update for a time that I can be at the Library. The library's internet was a bit slower, but much more stable. I hadn't backed up my files and I knew that if the internet flaked out, I would be in serious trouble.

So, while I was waiting on clothes to dry at the Laundry room by the clubhouse, I went through the scheduling steps. So far, so good, and self-explanatory.

As soon as I was ready to click on schedule, which was right next to the "update now" button, Michala walked in to ask me for something. I don't recall what happened but as I turned, I must have bumped the wireless mouse as I clicked on the laptop mouse to continue.

No ~~idiot~~ confirmation dialogue box.

Let's face it, we've all (at least once) installed or deleted something that we shouldn't have. We all have had our idiot moments, and I had mine when I installed Windows 10.

Things started to shut down and I realized what I did. I immediately moved my laptop closer to the window to make sure it had a better connection and prayed that it would not crash.

It didn't crash fortunately and the install was pretty straightforward. Some things did have to be reinstalled, but my files were not effected.

If you choose to install Windows 10, make sure you back up your files, just in case AND make sure you have a stable internet connection. I "lucked out".

Wednesday, June 11, 2014

All the Ways to Hack Your Phone

This is pretty freaky. I knew of this bug a while ago, but I thought it had been fixed. After all, companies usually fix problems when they are publicly exposed, right? Apparently, not this one and this one is a real threat.

The only way this is avoidable is to join the ranks of the Amish and go tech free, but that's like saying that the only way to avoid a break-in, do not have a house. So, using this information, I've come up with a few suggestions to keep your phone from being hacked.

Be aware. Be very aware.
Watching videos like these might freak you out, but at the same time, you know some of the tactics. Keep up with the latest tech and tech security news. By doing this you can take measures to limit the possibility of being hacked.
"Forget" your hotspot connections
When you get home, tell your phone to forget all of the hotspots you logged in to that day. You probably can keep your own router. I suspect most hackers who use this tech will be out in the most populated areas.
Turn your Data and Wi-Fi off.
Note: Turning of your Data will not stop you from making calls, in case you didn't know that.
If you aren't using your phone apps, then turn both the data and Wi-Fi off. You phone is in constant communication with the networks even when idle. Every app is constantly checking for updates, and everytime it pings the servers, it transmits private data like passwords.
Understand that your phone is potentially unsafe.
If you have to, do your banking and personal business on a secured PC. Make sure that all of your accounts have a different password, in case someone does get a hold of one.

No, this will not protect you 100% (this security bug is that bad), but unless someone is actively seeking you out, this will probably keep you safe. Criminals in general will pick the easiest targets. This goes for homes, cars, stores, banks, as well as phones and computers.

Saturday, January 25, 2014

Blog Promotion with Zemanta

Image via CrunchBase

My experience with Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ had been awful when it comes to getting shares or even hits. I think it’s partly luck as my post gets pushed down by a wave of cute kitten memes, political rants, and timewasting, but very interesting videos. It’s also partly because I don’t feel comfortable spamming people with links to my blog.

I had better luck with a plugin called “Zemanta”. It inserts a sidebar that allows you to quickly find images for your blog as well as articles that are related. When you click on the articles, sometimes, you get clicked-back. Almost all of my comments came from these links.

I had stopped using Zemanta as it is a bit flakey with Windows Live Writer (WLW). WLW is something I use when I want to blog offline. I can’t get to blogger when I’m in the car and there’s no free wi-fi around. When I get home, I usually would connect to the internet, allow Zemanta to load, add all of the extras, then publish it to my blog.

At one point, WLW started to crash before I could type anything, so I finally just turned off the plugin. Sure enough, my legitimate hits went down.

A couple of days ago, I tried Zemanta again on live writer and found that it worked – somewhat. It seems that when WLW cannot connect to the internet, which happens frequently, it crashes.

That said, I manage to get a few more posts up using Zemanta (mostly on my newer blog) and sure enough, my legitimate clicks went up again.

Even if I have to edit my blog later in blogger online to include Zemanta content, I will continue using it.

Friday, February 1, 2013

Amazon Kindle for PC Issues

Kindle App (Photo credit: PiAir (Old Skool))

There are a lot of people who are having problems with the Kindle for PC app, in particularly that the Kindle app for PC will not start. For a while, I did too and was stuck using the cloud server with the browser. The problem is that I don't always want to load my browser, as I have a few tabs "pinned". So every time I load my browser, it tries to call up those pages - even when I'm offline.

This can be a problem when I’ve already have several other programs open as I use kindle books mostly for reference. The browser starts to stall as it tries to load plugins that aren’t there with limited resources.

I have had an idea for a website percolating for a little while and I finally seem to have some time to get it started. So I figured I would use some of that time to get the Kindle app up and running again.

Unfortunately, it was harder than I thought. I started a few days ago, and I did my best to be good Christian, and made sure that I didn't break any laws – including Murphy’s.

We do have a Western Digital 1 TB book drive, so I was able to back up all of my files before creating another admin account and deleting the old one. This is as close to a reinstall as you can get. Yeah, I did that much damage.

While all of the other problems were solved in doing this, Kindle still wouldn’t load. In the task manager, it would show up, and then disappear. Sometimes, it would show up, and stall. I couldn’t “stop process” through the task manager or “Kill process” in the Process explorer (sysinternalssuite). The only way I could have stop it was to log off, then log back on.

I did a lot of research online. Some suggestions were reinstall (didn’t work), install an older version (didn’t work), something that has to do with DEP (windows *yelled* at me with error messages, probably when my other problems started), and cleaning the registry with ccleaner (also may have triggered some problems).

Seeing several threads on Kindle and possible firewall conflicts, I had stopped ZoneAlarm and found that was ineffective, but for some reason, I felt like I was headed in the right direction. I tried to uninstall Kindle, only for the uninstaller to also not work.

This was the point where I started to notice other problems. It was enough problems to consider doing a recovery, but thought that I would try something different. After backing up my user files, I created another admin account and deleted my old one.

While this solved the other problems, kindle still wouldn’t start. On a whim, I finally decided to uninstall Avast. Lo and behold, Kindle loaded. Before I could break out the Champaign and celebrate, I reminded myself that I was pregnant and tried to register the app. Kindle would not connect to the internet.

Now what?

I used Kindle has a debug feature in its help menu and for some reason it thought that there was no internet connection – even though I was browsing the internet at the same time to find a solution to find out why I couldn’t register the app.

After a few failed attempts, it was getting late and I was falling asleep in my chair. This morning, while eating breakfast (not recommended, it’s a bad habit), I used TCPview (also sysinternals) to see what IP address pops up. I couldn’t get a “whois” via the context menu (right click on the ip, click on “whois”). TCPview gave an error stating that the server took too long to respond. So I tried pinging the IP using the command prompt. It came back with no packets loss.

For those who had no idea what I just said, I pretty much asked if the server was there and it responded with “Yes, of course I’m here and doing just fine, thank you very much”. This led me to believe that the problem was on my end: Windows Firewall.

I didn’t want to go without some sort of firewall as I already had uninstalled my antivirus. So, I tried to get windows firewall to allow Kindle, and kindle still couldn’t find a connection.

I had one last solution and I would have to give up. I restarted ZoneAlarm and shut Windows Firewall down. Then I made sure that in the “Secured Programs” list, the Kindle was listed as Trusted. Then I took a deep breath, and ran Kindle again.

Bingo! It’s now running just fine. Two days of racking my brains to try to find out what the problem was, only to be solve with a 15 minute fix. Computers… Can’t live with them, can’t smash them into thousands of tiny pieces without being fined for environmental pollution or littering.

For now, I will be using Clamwin as an antivirus until I figure out how to fix the Avast/kindle problem. Why can all programs just get along?

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Free! From... Microsoft?

Microsoft has changed. When I was growing up, getting anything free from Microsoft was as fictitious as Santa bringing in free gifts. Well, almost. One of them is real (explain that to your kids).

Recently, I had downloaded free "Live Essentials" and I was impressed by the quality of the programs. The old adage "you get what you paid for" is no longer true. I've already blogged about Windows Live Writer which I switch back and forth with Scribefire - depending on my mood. Live Writer is pretty decent as it supports many blog formats including Blogger and Wordpress, two of the most popular blogging sites. Unfortunately, (and this is the real reason why I switch), Live Writer does not support Tumbr or Posterous.

Recently, as I was hunting for a better free, web design software, I came across this gem from microsoft: Visual Web Developer It's a bit over the top for just making templates (as in templates for modx) but if you are interested in starting a whole new website from scratch, this would be an excellent product for you to try it. So far, I'm impressed. It has so many features that I haven't discovered yet. I don't think I will be using it much, yet, as it's a bit over the top for what I need.

As a matter of fact, I'll probably stick to Kompozer - which, by the way, was aquired by Mozilla. How much do you want a bet that we will finally start seeing some improvements? They've already improved their website.

Another little know WYSIWYG editor is Amaya. Amaya is made by w3.org which sets the standards for website design. If you are within their standards, then the majority of your audience can view your website the way you intend them to view it.

The problem with Amaya and Kompozer is that it's difficult to be "cutting edge" Both don't support HTML5 tags, but you can always put the tags in anyway. It just won't show up in the preview.
I have a page with some freebies for you to check out. These are all programs that I have used and like. It's here: http://mometek.blogspot.com/p/free-software.html.

Monday, December 27, 2010

Free Stuff–Task Coach

Image by john.schultz via FlickrThis has to be the Ultimate to-do list – especially for those of us who like keeping a to do list. After all, there’s nothing more satisfying then crossing an item off of the list, knowing that it’s done.

Task Coach – Your Friendly Task Manager is a program that allows you to categorize your to do list and use subcategories. Then the tasks themselves can have subtasks. You can also take your email from outlook or Thunderbird and drag it into the Task Coach manager so that if you use email a lot to talk to clients, this is a great way to organize it all.

If you don’t mind it running in the background (not good if you are using a netbook), it also has a reminder feature to remind you when the next task is due. But on slower computers, it's yet another item running in the background. I own a netbook, so I try to keep my running background programs to the minimum.

There are many more features, you can check it out here: http://taskcoach.org/features.html and you can download it for windows here: http://taskcoach.org/download_for_windows.html. Not running windows? No problem. There’s version for Mac OS X, Linux, Iphone, and Ipod touch.

Friday, November 26, 2010

Free Stuff: Windows Live Writer

I decided to try out Windows Live writer, since it does work with blogger. Perhaps I won’t have to load my browser to use Scribefire – which, by the way, is excellent for blogging, except you do have to load your browser, which means that if you have a lot of plugins (as I always do), it may take a while to load.

Posting directly from blogger isn’t so bad either, but once again, you still have to wait for the browser to load.
Writer on the other hand is free for Windows user and you have to at least have XP service pack 2 according to their website. This is good, you don’t have to pay for an upgrade to Win Vista or 7 to get it. You can download the whole package here, or you can download just the writer here.

So far, it’s been pretty easy. Setting up is a no-brainer. When you first load live writer, it asks you for your blog username and password. Then you just have to wait.

Now you are set to go. Not only is it easy to set up, but you can manage multiple blogs. So far I have this blog and my WordPress Blog set up. Yes, I finally set up a WordPress blog just to see how Writer handles it. Haven’t gotten around to it yet. As a matter of fact, I haven’t tested many features at all. I just wanted to see how quickly I can get a blog post up.

So there you have it. If nothing else at all, you can at least post from Writer very quickly and easily – and of course, it’s FREE.

I'm still testing Windows Live Writer so in the near future, I may come back to this topic.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Free Stuff: Evernote

Image via CrunchBase
Possibly one of the most useful free program you will ever find. Considering that I've tried many, MANY different programs, that's saying a lot. You can check it out here at http://www.evernote.com

Now, suppose you see some really interesting page on the web that you are absolutely sure that you are going to use in the future. Of course, we all know that it will just get buried in your bookmarks and you will probably never use it again. If you do, you end up just searching for it because you can't seem to find it. Worse, if you do find it, the page is gone.

Enter Evernote Web Clipper. You sign up for an account (important if you have more than one device/computer) then install the software on your computer and whatever device you own. Then when you come across the site you want the notes from, you simply highlight the text you want to save, right click on the highlighted text (or click on the icon in the toolbar), and add it to Evernote. Now it's available to all of your devices and computers. Add your tags to the note to make it even more easy to search.

One feature that I found the best was the text recognition in photos. Take a photo with your smartphone and the text in the photo becomes searchable. I have been using my Blackberry Curve to take photos of posters and text since it's much faster than typing it.

This is a great tool for everyone, including stay-at-home moms who have a lot going on.