58. The Crypto Locker Virus

Ever since I have been running the U3A Computer Skills Group I have emphasised the need for a solid backup of essential data on our computers. It is very important that data and software can be recovered and re-installed should the worst happen and your hard drive fails, somebody deletes important bits of your operating system, or as is happening more and more frequently your PC becomes infected with one of the latest viruses called Ransom Ware. In this the virus can completely encrypt your entire PC then you will receive a message asking for money to de-encrypt it. THIS IS NOT A JOKE OR A RUMOUR, IT HAPPENS AND THERE IS NO SOLUTION. Even paying the ransom is no guarantee that your data will be released. The virus deletes itself after encrypting your data so there is no use trying to find and destroy it, the damage is done and the de-encryption key is the only thing which will cure the problem. Even the mighty Kaspersky company say that the encryption key is unbreakable.

Not only does your internal hard drive become encrypted but every externally attached drive which is switched on, and even your networked colleagues or Home Group who are attached to you when the virus strikes will be affected.


The way to avoid this happening is quite simple, do not open attachments or links in emails unless you are rock-sure of the validity and source of the email.
 
This is, I admit, a very glib answer. Who amongst us has not clicked on an inviting looking link or attachment and it is mainly good luck that we have not been infected with some sort of virus. The rule however still holds true.

If the worst does happen then obviously you are not going to hand over money to some crook who has just screwed up your PC in the hope that he does not do a runner, leaving you in the mucky stuff. Now is the time to reinstall your entire system from that emergency backup we discussed earlier. What do you mean you haven’t got one?

If you look at the Computer Skills Group, page on the U3A website there is a link at the bottom of the page to detailed instructions on how to create both a complete backup of your system disk, AND an emergency recovery disc from which you can reboot your PC then go on to re-install all of your software and data.

It is not too difficult and needs only basic skills. The instructions are detailed and advice on where to download the necessary applications is included.

DON’T GET CAUGHT OUT - DO IT NOW.

For more information and help Google "Cryptolocker Virus"

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57. Easily Select a Large Quantity of Text

When you’re trying to select text in a long document, the usual way of doing it is by swiping over it with the mouse. You move the mouse to the left of the first word, press and hold the left mouse button and drag downwards until you’ve highlighted what you want.

As long as you can see both the beginning and the end of the text you want to select, this method works a treat. But what if the end of the text is somewhere below the bottom of the window? In this case, as you drag the mouse downwards, the whole document suddenly shoots upwards at an alarming rate and you find you’ve selected reams of extra text!

Here’s the trick to doing this in a more-controlled way. Start by clicking to the left of the text you want to select, so that the cursor is flashing beside it. Then (taking care not to click anywhere else in the text), scroll down to find the end of the text you want to select. When you can see it, hold down the Shift key on your keyboard and click to the right of the last word (or punctuation mark). When you do this, all the text between your first and second clicks becomes selected.

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56. How strong are your online passwords?

You may have read that the online systems of the major software company Adobe were hacked recently.

The hackers got away with the account details of 38 million Adobe users, and that’s an awful lot of passwords. Or is it?

Well, no, the actual number of passwords seems to be disappointingly small, because so many people were using the same easily-guessable passwords.

When the stolen data began appearing on hacker websites, a security researcher named Jeremi Gosney analysed it to see what he could learn about users’ password choices. The top choice, picked by almost two million Adobe users, is '123456’. And amazingly, the third most popular choice was the word ‘password’. The list also includes such gems as 'qwerty’, ‘000000’ and ‘iloveyou’. A notable feature of this Top 20 list is that not one of these passwords includes a capital letter or a symbol. In fact, the entire Top 100 passwords contains not a single uppercase letter or symbol.

The research revealed another interesting fact. Adobe allowed its users to set a so-called ‘password hint’ – a clue to the password – with the intention that if you’d forgotten your password, you could have the hint displayed as a reminder. Apparently, the majority of Adobe users had simply typed their password itself as the hint, thus cheerfully allowing their passwords to be displayed to any passer-by who wanted to know them.

The lessons to be learned from this security breach and others like it are straightforward. First, if you use the passwords ‘123456’, ‘qwerty’ or ‘password’ for anything at all, you might as well not have a password! Second, if you use the ‘password hint’ option to re-enter your password itself, rather than just an oblique clue to it, you don’t really have a password at all. And third, however simple a password you choose, throwing in a capital letter or a symbol (+, *, %, $, etc.) immediately takes your password out of the Top 100 and makes it far less guessable. Be aware however that simply substituting symbols for characters in popular words is the next worse case. Any hacker worth his keystrokes will have no trouble with ’Pa$$word’ ‘He110’ or ‘HarryP0tt3r’, so be careful.


The fourth lesson, unfortunately, is that the first three lessons don’t seem to be getting through!   

55. JPEG, Bitmap, GIF, PNG – What’s the Difference?

In most areas of technology, whenever a fight starts there tends to be just one winner. For instance, remember the battle for video-recorder dominance back in the 1980s between Betamax and VHS? They slugged it out for a while, VHS won, and Betamax slunk off to its corner. In computing, though, everything can be a winner as long as it has some modicum of usefulness. Prime examples of this are picture files, which you can save in a confusing variety of ways.

Whenever you save a picture in a picture-editing program, you’ll regularly choose between the ‘Big Four’ file formats mentioned in the title of this item, and perhaps a few others that don’t really matter. But what’s the difference between them, and which should you use?

Bitmap: this is the simplest type of picture file. Every individual dot of colour that makes up your picture is saved into the file in a long stream of numbers. The file isn’t compressed (you’ll see the significance of this in a moment), so a bitmap file can be huge. Let’s say you take a photo with a 5-megapixel camera, load it into a picture editor and save it as a bitmap (a file with a .BMP extension): that file will be about 16 MB. It’s big, but it’s an absolutely faithful copy of what you see on the screen.

JPEG: this is a file with a .JPG extension, and it’s the most common format for photos and any other pictures with true-to-life colour. The difference between a JPEG and a bitmap is that a JPEG is compressed: if you load that same 5-megapixel photo into a picture editor and then save it as a JPEG file, the file you get will be under 1 MB. That’s tiny compared to the high-quality bitmap, but there’s a reason it’s so small: the JPEG format uses ‘lossy’ compression.

The word ‘lossy’ is one that probably looks quite technical, but it’s actually another of those slightly-silly computing words. It really does mean that you lose something – there’s a loss. What you lose with JPEG is some of the fine detail in the photo, so the quality isn’t as good as that of the bitmap. And if you repeatedly edit a picture, save it as a JPEG, edit it again, and save it as a JPEG again, you’ll lose more and more detail each time.

GIF: here’s a spot of welcome relief – if you’re editing photos, you don’t care about GIF! It’s mainly used for hand-drawn artwork, such as cartoons and logos.

PNG: in case you’re wondering, it’s pronounced ‘ping’, and it’s a lovely file format. It’s a little like JPEG, in that it’s compressed, but that compression is ‘lossless’. You can probably guess what that means: none of the detail is removed from your picture. Returning to that 5-megapixel photo which ended up as a 16 MB bitmap (or a 1 MB JPEG with its quality reduced), a PNG version should be a little under 4 MB and will look just as good as the bitmap.

Most digital cameras save their photos as JPEG files, and that’s as a trade-off between quality and size. The quality won’t be quite as good as it could be, but that powerful compression means you can take and store lots of photos. If you copy those photos to your PC and keep them as they are, unedited, it’s fine to leave them as JPEG files.

But if you’re serious about photography and you use a photo-editing program like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel PaintShop Pro, then a better choice is to use PNG throughout editing and keep it at the end. The lovely thing about PNG is that it covers all bases: it retains all the quality of the original, so it’s fine for editing, but it’s nicely compressed so it doesn’t take up a huge amount of disk space.


From PC Tips for Seniors www.pcforseniors.co.uk.
(c) PC Tips for Seniors

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54. How Can I Use Someone Else’s Wireless Broadband?

  First things first: I’m not suggesting you try to use your neighbour’s wireless broadband – at least, not without asking first! This article explains how to join another wireless network such as at a friend's house or in a bar or shopping mall.



When you want to connect to someone else’s wireless broadband, there are two things you need: the name of the wireless network (which is technically known as the network’s ‘SSID’) and the network’s password (sometimes referred to as a ‘network key’ or a ‘security key’). 

If you take your computer to a hotel, library, coffee shop or somewhere else that offers Internet access to its customers, these details may be posted on a wall or the reception desk, or you may have to ask a member of staff for them.

Armed with these two pieces of information, the rest should be plain sailing. That’s the case whether you’re using a laptop or tablet PC with some version of Windows on it, or any other portable device that can connect to wireless networks – some other kind of tablet computer, a smartphone, an e-book reader – you name it. Your device will be able to display a list of all the wireless networks it can detect nearby, one of which should be the one you want to connect to. You select that network, enter its password, and Bob’s your mother's brother.

Here’s a quick run through how this is done in the various versions of Windows:

Windows 8: on the taskbar, click the wireless network icon near the clock. In the panel that appears at the right of the screen, click the name of the network you want to connect to. Tick the box beside Connect automatically and then click the Connect button. Enter the password and click Next. Finally, if this is a network in someone’s home, you could click Yes, turn on sharing and connect to devices. For any other kind of network (or if you’re in any doubt about which to choose), click No, don’t turn on sharing or connect to devices.

Windows 7: on the taskbar, click the wireless network icon near the clock. In the panel that appears, click the name of the network you want to connect to, tick the box beside Connect automatically and click Connect. Enter the password when prompted and click OK. Finally, click Home network if this is a network in someone’s home; for all other networks click Public network.

Windows Vista: on the taskbar, click the wireless network icon near the clock and choose Connect to a network from the little pop-up panel. Click the name of the network you want to connect to, then click the Connect button. In the next dialog, type the password and click Connect, then make sure there are ticks beside Save this network and Start this connection automatically and click Close. Finally, click Home if this is a network in someone’s home; for all other networks, click Public location.

Windows XP: on the taskbar, double-click the wireless network icon. Click the name of the network you want to connect to, then click the Connect button. In the next dialog, type the password and click Connect.

When you’ve done this once, Windows remembers the details of this network and connects to it automatically whenever you’re within range. So, every time you go to your favourite coffee shop which offers Free WiFi, your PC or tablet will recognise the wireless network and connect to it automatically, just as it connects to your own network whenever you’re at home.

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53. Where Is ‘All Programs’ in Windows 8?

In Windows 7, Vista and XP, when you open the Start menu, you initially see a collection of the programs you use most. If you want to use a program that doesn’t appear in this short list, you click on (or hover the mouse over) All Programs and you see all the programs installed on your PC, neatly organised into folders. In Windows 8, however, there’s no Start menu, so there’s no ‘All Programs’ item. So how do you find a list of all your programs?

The equivalent of the Start menu in Windows 8 is the ‘Start screen’ which contains lots of rectangular blocks called ?tiles’. There’s one tile per program, but you won’t find all your programs here. In particular, quite a few of the useful Windows accessories are missing – you won’t see Calculator, WordPad, Notepad, Paint, Character Map, and so on. (See Post 51 on our Blog via the link below).

Fortunately, there is an equivalent to the ‘All Programs’ list of old, and this is where you’ll find those Windows accessories along with all your other programs:

When you’re looking at the Start screen, right-click on any blank space. A bar will appear along the bottom of the screen: when it does, click the All apps button in the bottom-right corner. The layout of the Start screen will change, and now you’ll see all your programs organised into groups with headings. Those headings correspond to the folders you used to see on the Start menu, making it much easier to track down the program you want to use.

Extra Tip If you download and install a very nice, simple to install, free application called “Classic Shell” (Google it) you will be able to set up Windows 8 with the familiar Start Button and menu system. Try it to save a lot of frustration. I use it all the time so have the added features of 8 plus the comfort and familiarity of 7. 

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52. How to safely clean a flat screen monotor

Did you know you can permanently damage your expensive flat screen monitor or television if you clean it the wrong way? It's true. Most importantly, you want to avoid products that contain ammonia, ethyl alcohol, acetone, toluene, ethyl acid, or methyl chloride. These can discolor or dissolve important films on the screen.

There are some fantastic screen cleaners out there, but there's also a simple vinegar and water mixture you can make yourself that works equally as well. Simply mix filtered or distilled water with an equal amount of white vinegar.

Flat screen monitors and televisions, most of which are LCD (including LED-backlit LCD) displays, require special attention when cleaning. Older CRT screens, the kind used in large "tube" monitors and TVs, are glass and can be cleaned in pretty much the same way as you would any other glass in your home or office.

Flat screen monitor and television displays, however, are much more sensitive and are easily scratched and damaged. The same applies to your laptop or tablet screen, and often too to the screen on your smartphone or e-book reader.

Note: Plasma TVs are glass, as are many touch screens, but often also have very sensitive anti-glare coatings applied. I recommend taking the same special care with those types of displays.

Follow the easy steps below to safely clean your flat screen monitor, TV, or other device in just a few minutes.

Difficulty: Easy

Time Required: Cleaning a flat screen display, like an LCD TV or monitor, usually takes less than 5 minutes

Here's How:

1. Turn off the device. If the screen is dark, it will be easier to see the areas that are dirty or oily.

2. Use a dry, soft cloth and very gently wipe the screen. A great choice would be the microfiber type of cloth used to clean eyeglass lenses. A dry eraser works good too.

See Tip #1 below for kinds of cloths to avoid.

3. If the dry cloth did not completely remove the dirt or oil, do not press harder in an attempt to scrub it off.



Pushing directly on the screen can often cause pixels to burn out, especially on laptop displays, desktop monitors, and LCD/LED TV screens. This isn't so much an issue on screens designed to be touched, like phones and tablets, but be careful nonetheless.
 
4. If necessary, dampen the cloth with distilled water or with an equal ratio of distilled water to white vinegar.


Many companies also sell small spray bottles of special cleaner for flat screens. Ultra makes a screen cleaning solution called Hydra LCD that people seem to like but honestly, the 50/50 vinegar and water mix is probably just as effective.

See Tip #2 below for types of products to avoid.

5. The plastic edge that surrounds the screen can be cleaned with any multipurpose cleaner but take care to avoid contact with the screen itself.


Tips:
 1. Avoid using paper towels, toilet paper, tissue paper, or something like your shirt to wipe the screen. These non-ultrasoft materials can scratch the display.

2. Avoid cleaning products that contain ammonia (like Windex®), ethyl alcohol (Everclear® or other strong drinking alcohol), toluene (paint solvents), as well as acetone or ethyl acetate (one or the other often used in nail polish remover). These chemicals can react with the materials that the flat screen is made of or coated with, which could permanently discolour the screen or cause other kinds of damage.

3. Never spray liquid directly on to any screen. It could run inside the device and cause damage. Spray onto the cleaning cloth instead.

 

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