40. Does More Software Make My PC Slower?

Have you noticed how a PC that was very speedy when new gradually seems to get slower? And have you ever wondered why?

Well, there are two reasons. The first is a trick of the mind: when a PC is new, you’re frequently amazed by how fast it is, but gradually that speed becomes the ‘new normal’ and instead you increasingly notice the times when it makes you wait.

The second reason is software, but not for the reason you might imagine. You might be expecting me to say that all that those added programs are filling up your hard disk, but that’s not the problem: unless your hard disk is more than about 90% full, your PC won’t mind at all.

The problem is actually the registry, the hidden database where vast amounts of information and settings for your PC and software are stored and which Windows is constantly consulting. The bigger the registry gets, the longer your PC takes to find anything in it, and since it’s in constant use that can lead to a noticeable slow-down of the whole system.

Most of the programs you install add at least a little information to the registry, and some may add quite a lot. And even if you uninstall a program, it may not remove what it stored in the registry. That’s partly because many software makers are a bit slapdash, but a lot of software leaves its registry information behind on purpose.

If you install a 30-day trial of a program, that program uses the registry to keep track of how many days you have left before it starts insisting you pay. What you might think of doing at the end of the trial is to uninstall the program, install it again and have another 30 free days. To prevent this, the program purposely leaves behind that registry data when you uninstall it. This way, if you do install it again, it knows you’ve already finished your free trial.

I’m not suggesting that you shouldn’t install software, of course – you won’t get far without it! But if you’re the kind of PC user who likes to install and try out every program you come across, on the basis that you can uninstall it if you don’t like it, it would be a good idea to rethink that strategy!

This is a great use for an old PC if you have one lying around. You can install new programs on it to try them out, and only install them on your main PC if you decide they’re really worth having.

If you don’t have a spare PC, think carefully before installing something new. Do you think you’ll really find it useful? Is it worthy of adding a little extra weight to that bulging registry? If you’d only be installing it out of vague curiosity, my advice is to give it a miss!

39. Use Any Photo as Your Desktop Wallpaper

Windows offers a standard way of changing the wallpaper picture shown on your desktop: you right-click a blank space on the desktop and choose Personalize (in Windows 8/7/Vista) or Properties (in XP), select Desktop Background (or Desktop in Windows XP) and choose the picture you want to use.

But perhaps you’re approaching this from a different direction: perhaps you’re looking through your photos and you come across one that would look good as your desktop wallpaper. If so, there’s no need to go mucking around with the steps above, just use this quick method: right-click the photo you’ve found and choose Set as desktop background (or Set as desktop wallpaper) on the context menu that appears.

You can do this as often as you like, and the photo you've chosen will remain in use as your wallpaper until you choose something different. Indeed, if you like this way of changing your wallpaper, you can even use it to choose between Windows’ built-in wallpapers: just navigate to C:\Windows\Web\Wallpaper where you’ll find the various background pictures included with Windows, and you can right-click one of those to set it as your wallpaper.

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38. Will This Folder Fit on My Flash Drive?

How do you find out whether a particular folder (or collection of files and/or folders) will fit on a USB flash drive. Here’s how to go about it:

1. Plug in your flash drive and wait a few seconds for Windows to register its arrival. If any dialogues or windows open as a result, just close them.
2. In Windows 8, press Win+E to open File Explorer. In other versions of Windows, open the Start menu and click Computer.
3. In the Computer window, right-click the icon for your flash drive and choose Properties. In the dialog that appears, find the line beginning Free space and at the far right you’ll see the space available on the flash drive. (You might like to keep this dialog open as you follow the next few steps, perhaps moving it to one corner of your screen to get it out of the way for a moment.)
4. Now you need to see whether the folder (or files) you want to copy to the drive are smaller or larger than this. Make your way to the folder containing the items you want to copy and select them. If it’s just a single folder you want to copy, that just takes a single click; if you want to copy multiple folders, click the first to select it, then hold down the Ctrl key as you click the others.
5. Right-click one of the items you've selected and choose Properties. In the dialog that appears, you’ll see the total size of everything you've selected alongside the word Size. (If you selected several folders, or a folder containing a large number of files, you may have to wait a few seconds while Windows tots up all their sizes and the total is displayed.) Now, of course, it’s just a case of doing a quick comparison between this figure and the one you found in step 3.

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37. Microsoft takes a step back in Windows 8

During the development of Windows 8, Microsoft carefully turned a deaf ear to users’ complaints about it, and with some justification: any sort of change to something as familiar as Windows always leads to cries of anguish, and protestors always have the loudest voices.

Unfortunately, after Windows 8 was released and the dust had settled, the complaints continued just as loudly. And this week, news emerged that Microsoft is going to relent over a couple of widely-criticised changes: the next version – Windows 8.1 – will bring back a pair of familiar Windows features.

The first is the option to start at the desktop. Currently, after you log into Windows 8, you arrive at the new Start screen. From there, it’s easy to get to the desktop (where most computer users need to be): you just click the Desktop tile. Alternatively, if you move the Desktop tile to the top-left corner, a quick press of the Enter key as soon as the Start screen appears will do the job.

Easy though it may be, many Windows 8 users don’t like being thrust into this Start screen at all, and in Windows 8.1 there will be an option to go straight to the desktop automatically.

The second change is the one that’s excited the most comment: the Start button is set to return. This has been widely interpreted as meaning that the Start menu is coming back, which would constitute a huge climb-down by Microsoft, but the truth is going to be much simpler.

At the moment, there are two main ways to reach the Start screen: using the keyboard, you tap the Windows key; using the mouse, you move the pointer to the bottom-left corner of the screen and click. What are you clicking? Well, nothing really – there’s nothing to see in that bottom-left corner. It’s just one of those peculiar things about Windows 8 that has to be learned or discovered by accident.

The new Start button will give you something to click, and that’s all – a visible button in the bottom-left corner of the screen which, when clicked, takes you to the Start screen.

If Microsoft really were to bring back the Start menu too, it would be like confessing that the Start screen was a bad idea. More practically, it would mean two different places from which programs could be started. And would the Start button open the Start menu, as in previous versions? If so, how would you get to the Start screen? And which one would appear when you pressed the Windows key?

For those using Windows 8 and who prefer the traditional Desktop and Start Button then you can quickly download and install a completely free application called “Classic Shell” from http://www.classicshell.net/. This is a fabulous little application which I have been using for some months and which rids me of that dreadful Windows 8 Home Screen which has been designed for touch screens but is not what I want to see when I open Windows on my Laptop or Tower Computers. Try Classic Shell, you will love it.

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36. Office 2013

Microsoft has recently released the new version of its best-selling Office suite, Microsoft Office 2013. The release means that we finally know the UK prices of the various Office editions, so we can tie up a few loose ends. Let’s start with the pricing to buy Office 2013 in a box and install it from using the product code:

•Office 2013 Home & Student edition costs £110 and gives you Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. (An important change is that this edition can now be installed on only one PC; in previous versions of Office, this Home & Student edition was licenced for use on three computers.)
•Office 2013 Home & Business edition costs £220 and gives you the same four programs as the Home & Student edition plus Microsoft Outlook.
•Office 2013 Professional costs £390 and gives you the five programs in the Home & Business edition plus Publisher and Access.
(It’s worth mentioning that these are Microsoft’s own prices (rounded up by a penny, as they all end with a pointless 99p), and you should be able to find any of these editions cheaper in the shops and at online software stores.)

There’s another way to buy Office 2013, and that’s via a subscription. Microsoft has long wanted to get its Office customers onto a subscription model, so this offering was always going to be temptingly-priced. For either £80 a year or £8 a month (again ignoring the odd penny), you get your hands on ‘Office 365’ which gives you all seven of the programs included in the Professional edition for as long as you subscribe, and a licence to install them on up to five PCs.

If you want to find out more about Office 2013, visit the Office section of Microsoft’s website at http://office.microsoft.com, or http://office365.microsoft.com for details of the new Office 365 subscription product. There’s just one catch to keep in mind: if you’re using Windows Vista or XP, you’re out of luck – the new Office only works with Windows 8 or Windows 7.

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35. 32 bit or 64 bit, what is the difference?

The smallest piece of digital data is the "bit" (binary digit) and this can represent a 1 or a 0. Everything which is transmitted by computers is in this format. 8 bits make a byte, and so on. We are used to talking in megabytes and now gigabytes and these mean 1000 and 1000000 respectively. So a megabyte (MB) is 1000 bytes (actually 1024 bytes) and a gigabyte (GB) is 1000 megabytes. In these days of cheap storage we think nothing of having a 500GB external hard drive.

The term "32-bit" refers to the number of bits a computer processor uses when processing data and performing calculations. Operating systems and applications are labeled "32-bit" or "64-bit" to indicate the type of processor with which they should be used. 64-bit processors, operating systems and applications are beginning to replace 32-bit technologies because of their superior speed.

Processors
32-bit processors can process 32 bits of information at a time. Most processors sold in computers today are 64-bit, but the additional processing power can't be capitalized on unless the operating system and applications are made for 64-bit processors.

Operating Systems
Even though most processors sold in computers today are 64-bit, the operating system that comes with the computer may not be. Windows Vista and Windows 7 are available in 32-bit and 64-bit variations.

Applications
Even if a computer's processor and operating system are 64-bit, the applications and programs that run on the computer must also be 64-bit to take advantage of the computer's advanced processor. The 32-bit applications can usually be installed on a 64-bit system, but drivers for printers, scanners, digital cameras and other electronics can cause conflicts. As a result, you should research the compatibility of a 32-bit application before installing it on a 64-bit system.

Definition
A 32-bit processor is essentially a chip that processes data with a lane that is 32 bits wide. This means that any instructions that pass through the processor at any one time can be up to 32 bits (4 bytes, or a DWORD) in size.

Benefits
All 32-bit processors have the capability of using larger chunks of data and crunching 4 bytes in one single clock cycle. This is quite handy when doing very complex and large mathematical operations (such as graphics rendering).

Function
The function of a processor, regardless of the bit width, is to perform operations based on instructions given to it and data attached to the instructions. Larger bit width allows for a larger instruction set and larger registers.

Potential
Processors with higher bit width are constantly being developed. The 32-bit processors have a limited potential because of the small bit width they have, but their potential is much higher than 16-bit processors, for example.

Processing Speed
As tempting as it is to get a processor with the highest clock speed, consider also the bit width. Processors with a higher bit width will be able to take larger chunks of data from programs that actually use the full potential of their registers.

Background
64-bit processors can represent larger chunks of data at a time than 32-bit processors, allowing more efficient handling of all types of computer calculations. Although 64-bit processing is inherently faster, it also requires more temporary storage--random access memory (RAM)--to accommodate the larger chunks of data and provide better system performance.

RAM Considerations
32-bit operating systems can only use about 3.5 gigabytes (GB) of RAM, even if you install more; 64-bit operating systems can use much more. For example, the 64-bit versions of Windows 7 Professional and Ultimate support up to 192 GB of RAM. According to Microsoft, you need at least 4 GB of RAM in order to experience an increase in system performance with 64-bit processing. If you have less than 4 GB of RAM, moving to 64-bit could actually decrease system performance.

In summary, most laptops and PCs which we buy now have 64bit processors and are future proof. Having said that the expected speed increases will not occur until all of the software falls into line and is capable of taking advantage of the64bit OS.

34. Choosing the correct dictionary for "spell-check"

This is a problem often encountered. You open a Microsoft Word document sent by email and notice that  words like ‘colour’ or ‘centre’ are given a wiggly red underline.

Obviously Word thinks they are spelled wrongly, and when you right-click the words to look at the suggested spellings, you see ‘color’ and ‘center’. Clearly Word wants to use American spelling, but why? And, more immediately, what to do about it?

The reason is fairly straightforward: Microsoft Word’s spelling and grammar checkers support many different languages, and you can tell Word that certain parts of a document (anything from a single word to the entire document) are written in, say, French, Spanish or Italian. Word will then consult the appropriate dictionaries when it checks those parts of the document.

The solution is straightforward. Start by pressing Ctrl+A to select all the text in the document. Having done that, look at the status bar running along the bottom of the Word window and you’ll see English (U.S.) (in our subscriber’s case, or perhaps ‘French’ or some other language). Click on English (U.S.) and a ‘Language’ dialog will open. In this dialog, find and select English (U.K.) and click OK. That tells Word to treat the entire document as being written in British English, and all those errant red underlines will disappear.

Incidentally, this tip is worth keeping in mind if you do ever need to type in different languages in Word. Rather than putting up with all those foreign words being marked wrong, just select them, click that ‘Language’ button in the status bar, and select the appropriate language from the list.

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33. Easily copy text from the Internet or an email

I often copy text from web pages when compiling notes for the Interest Groups I organize within the U3A, or indeed for the snippets of advice which appear on this page.

Many times the information on the page from which I am copying contains Hyperlinks (those words which normally appear in blue and are underlined). These hyperlinks are meant to let you move to other pages for additional information, or they may pop-up underlying text etc.

If I were to copy this text into a word processor such as Microsoft Word, these hyperlinks will remain in place but would be of no use as the pages to which they link are still out there on the Internet.

Now you can take the arduous route of removing all these links manually, and if your text comes from Wikipedia this could take some time, or you can easily and simply remove them as you paste the text into Windows' most simple word processor - Notepad.

This tiny program which most of us only use to read .txt files can save a lot of time when copying formatted text from the Internet or indeed from one document to another.

Notepad supports very little formatting so all that italicised, bold, underlined, superscripted, or hyperlinked text will simply become normal text when pasted into Notepad. After the text is all pasted into Notepad you then may copy it into your main word processor and format it as you wish.

This tip can also be used if you want to print out an email. Normally the option to print an email gives you a big coloured Gmail or Hotmail heading and all sorts of other rubbish which wastes ink and paper. By copying just the text you really need into Notepad, you may then print off the information in a simple way, or if you need to format it with bold or underlined words you transfer the text into the word processor of your choice.

32. Add your own words to the dictionary in your word processor

When you’re typing in Microsoft Word or other WPs, you’re probably used to seeing your misspellings underlined in red. These handy red squiggles draw your attention to mistakes, and you can go back and correct them – either by editing them yourself or by right-clicking them and choosing the word you meant to type.

It’s important to note that these red underlines don’t necessarily indicate a mistake, though. More accurately, they indicate that the word you typed doesn’t appear in Microsoft Word’s dictionary, and although it’s a fairly comprehensive dictionary, it certainly doesn’t contain every known word. As a result, all sorts of names and specialised words that you type correctly could be given the red-underline treatment.

A good habit to get into is to add those to Microsoft Word’s dictionary so that it recognises them in future. That way, you’ll notice any words that really were mistyped and – more helpfully – a finished document should always be pleasingly free of red underlines.

Adding words to the dictionary is easy: when Microsoft Word gives them a red underline, just right-click them and choose Add to Dictionary from the context menu. (Make sure you really have typed them correctly before doing this, though!) Straight away, Word will remove the underline from the word you right-clicked and, whenever you type it in future, it will be treated as correct.

You should take great care however as your Word Processor is unlikely to spot words which are actually spelled correctly but used in the wrong way. For instance if you meant to say "tongue" but you typed "tong" your WP will ignore it as it is in itself a correct word.

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31. PC problem preventing access to online banking

If your PC is more than around 5 years old, here’s a problem you may well run into. There are various ways in which you might discover it’s happened, and a friend of mine found out in quite an unusual way. At many of the websites he visited, he saw a message like this:

“There is a problem with this website's security certificate. The security certificate presented by this website has expired or is not yet valid. Security certificate problems may indicate an attempt to fool you or intercept any data you send to the server.”

Effectively, whenever he arrived at a ‘secure’ web page (one whose address starts with ‘https://’), he was being told that the page wasn’t secure at all, and therefore wasn’t to be trusted. The security certificate issued to the website to prove its authenticity had the wrong dates on it: either it had expired, or it didn’t become valid until some future date.

If this happens on just one website, there’s obviously a problem with that site’s security and it’s not to be trusted. However, if every secure website has the same problem, there’s something more unusual going on. I asked him to check the date and time on his PC by holding the mouse over the clock on the taskbar and, sure enough, it was shown as being a little after midnight on 1st January 2003!

This little error prevented him from accessing his online banking page.

This wrong date on his PC is the culprit. When his web browser checked the issue dates of the security certificates at websites he visited, it found that those certificates were not due to become valid until some date well into the future – in other words, well after January 2003 – so it understandably felt there was a security problem with the sites.

This is an unusual and roundabout way of discovering your PC’s date is wrong, as I mentioned earlier. More common ways are to find that every email message you send was seemingly written years ago, or to notice that the clock doesn’t tell the right time (or show the correct date).

The reason this can happen is due to something you may have idly wondered about: how your PC ever knows the correct date and time when it spends so much of its time switched off. The answer is that these details, among others, are stored in a computer chip named the ‘CMOS’ (pronounced see-moss) and a tiny battery powers this chip. When that CMOS battery is on its last legs, one of the symptoms is that it loses track of the date and time. You’ll either start seeing very erratic dates and times or you’ll find the time set to midnight on 1st January of some long-past year.

The CMOS battery is a little disc-shaped battery of the type used in watches, and it generally has a lifetime of 5–10 years. If you discover that your own PC’s CMOS battery needs replacing, it’s a cheap part to buy, and a quick and easy job for someone who knows their way around the innards of a PC.

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30. Prevent Word Turning Web Addresses into Links

Here’s a tip from the ‘Daft Features of Microsoft Word’ department (and a busy department that is!). When you type a web or email address into a Word document, you’ll find that Word turns it into a hyperlink. In other words, the address turns blue and gains an underline. It also behaves like a hyperlink, more or less: if you hold down the Ctrl key and click that link, you’ll be whisked to the web page in question (or, for an email address, a blank email window will open).

What’s daft about this? Well, I suppose daftness is in the eye of the beholder, but since Word is mainly used for writing documents that will be printed, and you can’t click a hyperlink on paper, those addresses might as well be left as you typed them.

If you find this behaviour as daft as I do, there are three ways to prevent those addresses being turned into links:

Method 1: Undo the change
When you type the address, and then type a space or punctuation symbol or press the Enter key to start a new paragraph, that’s when Word converts the address to a link. As soon as it does that, press Ctrl+Z to undo the change and revert to ordinary text.

Method 2: Convert to plain text
If Word has already created a hyperlink in one of your documents, right-click that link and choose Remove Hyperlink from the context menu that appears.

Method 3: Turn off the feature entirely
This is what I always do in Word, because I never want blue hyperlinks in documents. Follow the appropriate steps for your version of Word:

Word 2010/2007: In Word 2010, click the blue File tab followed by Options; in Word 2007, click the circular Office button and then Word Options. Click the Proofing item on the left, then the AutoCorrect Options button, and select the AutoFormat As You Type tab. Remove the tick beside Internet and network paths with hyperlinks, then click OK in both windows.

Word 2003/2002: Go to Tools > AutoCorrect Options, switch to the AutoFormat As You Type tab and remove the tick beside Internet and network paths with hyperlinks, then click OK.

(With thanks to PC Tips for Seniors)

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29. In praise of the iPad

Ever since the iPad was announced I have been telling people that it is not for me, it is just a large iPod Touch, it won’t run MS Office applications etc. etc. Add to that the number of my colleagues who have bought an iPad then spent the next few weeks trying to turn it into a Windows mini-PC by buying apps to liaise with MS Office, apps to make it print, methods of adding storage, and any other thing you can think of to change the product from what it was designed to be.

I did however want a tablet PC for its size, portability, etc.

Whilst preparing for our seasonal migration to England I was looking for a better method of connecting to the Internet than the Vodafone-type dongle we used previously. Living in the countryside, on a caravan park without our own telephone landline poses connectivity problems and our Internet connection has to be via a mobile phone network. Of the major networks we found Three to be the best for 3G in the area where we live in the Yorkshire Dales. O2's phone connection is good but they do not recommend using their network for the Internet.

Looking through the options on Three's website I found that they offer a laptop or iPad as a means of connecting to their 3G network. This gave me the push I needed and with a large chunk of mental rationalisation I went for the iPad-3, 32GB, 3G model. It costs me £25 per month and is like a mobile phone contract. I stay with Three for the two year contract, and included in the charge is 15GB of Internet traffic per month and no initial charge for the iPad itself. (In Spain I had been paying 34 Euros per month for only 10GB of traffic from Vodafone and this does not include an iPad although it does include a wireless router). There are lots of pros and cons to argue about the cost of the contract in the UK but over 2 years I am happy to pay for this solution.

And so to the iPad itself. It is just a joy to use. I read all the pitfalls before I decided to buy it so was well prepared for the things it will not do. For instance it has only 32GB of on board storage which nets down to about 27GB after the operating system etc. This storage can not be increased neither can you insert a memory stick or card. By modern day standards this is not a lot but you have to remember what the iPad is for.

I would not use it as my only computer. It works extremely well as a supplementary PC as long as you have another one at home on which to store your large amounts of data, films, music etc. 

What it is though is a very stylish and easy-to-use portable device on which you can create documents and spreadsheets, receive emails, navigate using SatNav, surf the net, take photographs and short videos, talk to people via Skype, play games (if you really want to, but not on mine whilst I breathe), read books in PDF, Kindle, or epub formats, read newspapers, watch films, listen to music (it is a full blown iPod), and view your favourite photographs. It will act as a Wi-Fi hotspot so that you can connect other PCs to the Internet. It is a fully functional iPod. You can watch full length films on it. It is instantly "on" when you open the case or slide the unlock icon on the screen and a full charge will give you up to 10 hours of use. The display is the best display you will ever see. I don’t let the lack of storage become a drawback as films, music, books, or other data may be removed when not required and replaced by other data as you would with any other portable device.

Applications for it are either free or are usually quite cheap. Apple produce their own version of a mobile Office Suite which produces files which may be saved as Microsoft compatible files. Compatibility is not 100% as some of the clever things which may be created in Pages (the word processor) will not work in MS Word. However the finished document can easily be saved direct from the iPad as a PDF document thereby keeping all that clever formatting. The spreadsheet application is called Numbers and to date I have not really given it a thorough workout but I expect great things from it. Both applications come with a huge supply of templates so that you can begin to easily create beautiful looking documents or spreadsheets from the off. Total cost for both apps is less than 14 quid.

Both of these major apps have their detractors but what doesn't. Some of the comments I have read are from people who have bought an iPad and are expecting it to act like a full blown desktop PC. Get real! If you want all the bells and whistles of MS Word then pay the price for MS Office (about £170) and there they will be. All of this extra functionality (and there is not really much extra you can do in Word) can then be used on a net book if you want portability.

From all this it may be gathered that I have been converted to being a fan of the iPad. I would like to become a fan of Apple overall as I also love the iPod and iPhone but alas their computers are outside my price range at present. Add to that the fact that my friends in Spain who I teach in our Computer Group are all on MS Windows then it becomes less of a viable move.

If the lottery comes up then blow it, I will have both. 

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