Wednesday 8th March 2017
News
Outlook Outage
Yesterday – Tuesday 7th March – a technical problem
prevented thousands of people logging into their Outlook email accounts. It
also affected Skype and other Microsoft services, but has now been resolved.
Missing Patch Tuesday!
Microsoft normally issues Windows Updates on the second Tuesday of the
month. However, on Tuesday February 14th, this did not happen. This
seems to be due to technical issues with their update systems. Microsoft say
they will issue the February updates along with the March updates on 14th
March.
Verizon Purchase Yahoo
In spite of complications due to Yahoo’s data breaches, it is likely
that it will still be acquired by the US mobile phone giant, Verizon for a
reduced price of $4.48bn. Verizon also bought AOL in 2015 for around $4.4bn and
it will probably combine the email, messaging and other functions of the two
companies.
EE Closing Free Email
EE (now owned by BT) is closing its orange.net, wanadoo.co.uk,
fsmail.net and other email services on 31st May 2017. See this
notice from EE for more detail:-
EE are recommending users switch to Gmail which seems a reasonable
suggestion. They offer guidance (see
above web page) on how to import orange.net emails into Gmail.
I have never been a fan of using ISP-provided email services. Gmail is
a good option or you could also use Outlook.com or Yahoo mail – although many
have been put off the latter by their data breach (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo!_data_breaches).
MailStore
MailStore Home 10 is a free program for your Windows 10 PC which can make archive copies of your emails. It could be useful for users of the EE accounts mentioned above as a way of copying emails from these services before they close. I use MailStore to make backup copies of my personal Yahoo and Gmail emails. You set it up in a similar way to a standard email client. This free version of MailStore does not perform the archiving automatically, so you would have to open the Archive Email window and click Start whenever you want to archive. I have created a task in Windows Task Scheduler to run the archive process once a day. If you are feeling brave, this web site explains how to use Task Scheduler to automate MailStore:-
Window Update Not Completing
Margaret's laptop which has been upgraded from W7 to W10 is failing to complete updates. It may be necessary to re-install Windows. This can be done by signing in as an Administrator and going to Start, Settings, Update & Security, Recovery and clicking Restart now under the Advanced Start-up heading. When the computer restarts, click on Troubleshoot, Reset
this PC. You will then be
given the choice to keep your files or to remove all your data. Either way, you will have to re-install all
your apps and re-configure all your settings.
It might be worth waiting for the 1703 update to see if this fixes the issue.
How Secure Is The Cloud?
Ray asked how secure cloud storage is, and where is it stored. We had some discussion around this topic. Here is a New York Times article on these very questions:-
Don't Click Links In Emails
We discussed phishing email scams which may invite you to click on links in an email to go to a web site. Only do this if you are 100% sure you trust the sender, and even then, do NOT do it if the site potentially concerns financial or other personal data. Such links could take you to a bogus clone of the real web site which could ask you to enter passwords etc, so that the scammers can subsequently access your account.
For financial web sites and the like, type the web address carefully directly into the browser's address bar. Once at the true site, you can set this as a bookmark for future use.
Age UK has a leaflet on avoiding scams:-
We previously mentioned 'The Little Book of Big Scams' produced by the Met Police which provides a lot of sensible advice on all sorts of scams:-
Chromecast
Linda asked about using Chromecast to ‘cast’ from a PC. You need to use
Google Chrome on your PC to do this. This article from How-To Geek gives a
pretty full and clear explanation of how to do it:-
Google Photos
I was asked last time about Google Photos. This is an excellent free
service from Google which synchronises photos across all your devices and
stores them in the cloud. There is no
limit to the number of photos you can store. This service replaces the Picasa progam which Google have now ‘retired’. There are many web sites providing guidance on
the use of Google Photos including this one:-
Creators Update
The next big update to Windows, named the Creators Update, is due to be released in early April. We did not have time to discuss it this month, but we will talk more about it next time.
Next Session
Wed 12th April 2017 1:30 to 3:30pm.
