Friendly Computer Training

Website Won't Display On One Computer Only

I had a strange experience today whilst designing a site for a client. Suddenly my laptop wouldn’t access her site. The site was displaying perfectly ok on her laptop and also on my second laptop. Usually when a computer won’t access a site it is an issue with the ip address being blocked by the website’s server.

That didn’t seem to be the case here. All 3 computers were accessing the internet via the same router, so all three should have had the same ip address. Something had to be happening on the computer that wouldn’t access the site.

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Set default opening program to office starter edition

Just recently I installed Open Office on my new computer. Before that I was using the MS Office Starter edition.

I love Open Office, but I didn’t want it as my default Word Processing program, so I tried to reset the Word starter edition as the default program. Initially I couldn’t do it – the only option in the list of default programs was the full edition of Office 2010 – which kept wanting me to buy a licence. I was quite happy with the Word Starter Edition.

To change the default program you RIGHT CLICK on a ANY saved

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Do Your ISP’s Installation Personnel Know How To Protect Your Wireless Network from Leechers and Hackers?

Thank you to Joshua from InfoSec Institute for this guest post.

In the UK your ISP won’t install your router, they will send it to you and expect you to install it yourself. If you live in the US your ISP will install your router for you. Does our ISP understand the important of training their staff on the proper use of security measure?

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There are many security issues with wireless networking; the one that I see the most is security carelessness of some ISP’s contractors and installation personnel.

ISP based WEP Vulnerability: I have noticed an ISP (Internet Service

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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

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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

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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,

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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

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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 carol(@)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

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