friendlycomputertraining.com

Welcome to the Friendly Computer Training website

I am a qualified IT teacher with 12 years’ experience of teaching IT to older learners. I am also a computer troubleshooter, web designer and internet marketer.

There are lots of free pages on this site with “how to’s” and general hints and tips. There are also tutorials for sale and software for sale.

If you have any suggestions for additions to the site or tutorials that you would like me to write, email me on help(@)it-teacher.co.uk.

Regardless of which model or brand of desktop computer you have, you can maximize its performance if you have the right software. If you look after you computer and use the right software to protect it and enhance it you can get the most out of even a cheap desktop computer. On this site you will find software and tips to help keep your compute running at its best.

Competing Results In Google

How many times have you read a blog post, or a forum post, or an article that tells you either:

a) how clever the person is to have got their site on page 1 of Google for it’s keyword when there are 43,087 competing pages, or

b) telling you to look for a keyword that has fewer than, say, 50,000 competing pages.

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself how accurate that number is that Google quotes you at the top of the search results? Do you blindly believe that there really are 43,087 competing pages?

I regularly say in forums that these results are meaningless – and wrong. Here’s what happened just a few minutes ago when I was searching for links to a website that I run. This particular site – www.itsbeennicked.co.uk – gets interest from the press and I was adding a page to the site with

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Keep Your Computer Running At Its Best - Part 3 - Remove Malware

As all my clients would testify there is one program that I install without fail on everyone’s computer. Malwarebytes. I wouldn’t be without and neither are my existing clients.

Cleaning malware off computers is a large part of my daily work. People phone me up and tell me that their computer has slowed down, isn’t working properly – or sometimes specifically state that their computer “has a virus”. Of course, for the techie amongst you, you will know straight away that a classic virus is rare these days. It’s more likely to be a trojan or other spyware or malware.

Malwarebytes isn’t fussy about what you call it – if it’s undesirable Malwarebytes will find it.

A question. How many of you have an additional toolbar that you don’t remember installing on your browser that takes you off to somewhere strange

Continue reading Keep Your Computer Running At Its Best – Part 3 – Remove Malware

Keep Your Computer Running At Its Best – Part 2 – Tune It Up

It happens to us all. You spend a lot of hard earned cash on a shiny new computer. It works wonderfully for a few weeks, making you realize just how slow and bad tempered your old one had become. Then slowly the performance of your new computer starts to degrade. Then the inevitable happens – your first crash.

Of course you restart the computer and all is well for a while – until it crashes again. Crashes become a cumulative process. The more your computer crashes, the more its performance decreases and so, inevitably, the more it crashes. Installing and uninstalling programs also contributes towards slower performance.

Unless a program is totally uninstalled traces of it are left behind, in the registry or as fragments of files that point nowhere and are attached to nothing. Each time your computer crashes, Windows tries to

Continue reading Keep Your Computer Running At Its Best – Part 2 – Tune It Up

Keep Your Computer Running At Its Best – Part 1

I spend a lot of my time removing malware from my clients’ computers and speeding up computers that are running slowly.

It never ceases to amaze me how people will continue to use a computer that is running erratically or has slowed to a crawl!

I’m like an over-anxious mother with my own computer. It only has to do something unusual and I scan it with a range of software in an attempt to keep it running properly.

This is how I look after my own computer.

Top Priority – Do Your Backups

I can’t stress this loudly enough or often enough. It’s one of the first things I say to most of my off line clients – “do you have a backup of your files?” You’d be

Continue reading Keep Your Computer Running At Its Best – Part 1

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