The next meeting is on the 14th July, please come along ...The next meeting is on the 14th July, please come along and support your club As usual, our meeting will start with a 'problem

THCUG bits & bytes 2015 Issue 06

Page 1July Newsletter

The Hobart Computer Users Group

The next meeting is on the 14thJuly, please come along and

support your clubAs usual, our meeting will start with a 'problem solving' session where members can help otherswith advice and suggestions on their day to day problems. Many problems require research topresent practical solutions and for this reason you should describe the problem including details ofthe computer, memory and operating system in an email to [email protected] Anysolutions found will be included in the next newsletter or at the next meeting, particularly if a morevisual explanation is needed.

Membership DriveAs always we are trying toincrease membershipof our Group. If youintroduce a newmember you canhave the option ofhaving your AnnualSubscription waived for theyear.

JOINTHE HOBART

COMPUTER USERSCLUB AND IMPROVE

YOUR SKILLS



Don't Upgrade to Windows 10 on July 29BY JOHN C. DVORAK PCMag

The most important event in the history of thedesktop will be the end-of-the-month rollout ofWindows 10. It will also be one of the mostconfusing moments in computer history.BecauseWindows10 is a freeupgrade, the rolloutwill be a fiasco of epic proportions. The averageconsumer will want to upgrade to Windows 10immediately because everyone is in a rush.Just look at the lines outside Apple Stores everytime a new iPhone is released. Who really needsto buy the new iPhone the second it goes on sale?No one. These days, you can waltz into the storelater that afternoon, and pick up a device with nowait whatsoever.Maybe the phenomenon is preparation for aneconomic downturn. The same idiots will bewaiting in a bread line and say, "Naw. This line isnothing, you should have seen the line for theiPhone 4!" (A New Yorker cartoon beckons).For Windows 10, the public will likely crash thesystem and prove, once again, that Microsoftcannot work the cloud properly. If you werehappily running Windows 7 or 8 on Tuesday, whydo you need to change to Windows 10 onWednesday? You don't, but you'll try.Of courseMicrosoft, like Apple, will use this failingas positive publicity: "We knew it would bepopular, but not this popular. Wow."I have advised people to get the upgrade after thefirst bug reports. You have one year to upgrade forfree. There is no rush.Another note of confusion has recently appearedin the news. Windows 10 may not work with oldhardware. This seems to be targeted at olderlegacy graphics cards youmight find in an XP boxthat was later upgraded to Windows 7. As far asI'm concerned, if Windows 7 runs on themachine,so should Windows 10. How hard can it be? Myanalysis is one thing, reality is another.I have never fully understood how Microsoft goesfromOS toOSwhilebreakingdrivers left and right.I wrote a whole column about Windows 7 notsupporting my Epson printer and failing to

recognise a NAS that Vista clearly saw.I suspect that they have death panels in Redmond,where a committee decides to pull the plug oncertain products by yanking the drivers from theWindows native support bundle. If you were usingone of those products you are out of luck.Windows10will be the final arbiter.Get ready tomakeadumprun with gear you will never be able to use everagain.There is another thing I must reiterate. Microsoftclaims that Windows 10 will be the last Windowsever. This means one of three things: the companyis planning on going broke in the next few years; itplans to incorporate a subscription-modelperpetual OS upgrade scheme that has yet to berevealed; or it's simply dropping the Windowsbranding and there will be some sort of new name.I'll leave it to others to come upwith jokes regardingfuture nomenclature.Since this is an era of reboots and new beginnings,I predict that the next Microsoft operating system,the one to eventually replace Windows, will becalled OS-1 or maybe just ONE. You watch.Windows 10 will be a big deal. Because of the freeupgrades, it will be declared the "most popularversion of Windows in history" in an attempt togenerate positive buzz. The fact that Microsoftcould dream up a trick like this should be lauded.The Windows 10 code is not so radical that it willcreate much of a backlash like Vista did. In fact, itlooks like Windows 8.2 to me. So it should besmooth sailing. But because there's little that isradically different, that again tells me there is nohurry to upgrade. Wait a few months. Do it over aweekend when you have time on your hands. Andwhatever your strategy, prepare to buy newperipherals.I've long had mixed feelings about onlinesubscription services and the cloud in general,especially when its usefulness pales in comparisonto workstation-centric computing.Fix the Cloud, or Give UpBY JOHN C. DVORAK PCMag

If I can buy 5TB of portable hard disk storage for$150, why should I be spending $10 a month forsub-terabyte cloud storage formybackups?Offsitestorage safety?Well, I can keep the backup drive ina safe deposit box at the bank, the trunk of the car,at a friend's house, or in a fireproof safe at home.

News Bytes



I did sing the praises of the Adobe Creative Cloudbecause professionals get specialised tools andaccess to all the Adobe products. I'm losing hopefor that idea. Adobe is suddenly introducingadditions, such as crappy stock photos, for anadditional fee. This should be part of the CreativeCloud Suite and defeats the purpose of theoriginal idea.Microsoft got on this bandwagon with Office 365,which includes three to five licenses for a yearlyprice between $65-$100. This includes a terabyteof cloud storage on OneDrive, which is onlymarginally useful with a file limitation of 20,000files (which the company promises to fix).

Still, this model has potential.The real winner will be the vendor that figures outwhat the cloud can actually do that cannot easilybe done at the desktop. I don't mean the storageand sorting of email, the distribution of money byPayPal, or the storefront and inventorymanagement of a NetSuite.Here's an example: Autodesk and its cloudoffering is designed to take complex plans and docertain mind-numbing calculations that areimpractical on the desktop.A more recent example will soon be implementedby the backup and recovery company Acronis. Ina recent meeting with the CEO, it was revealedthat the company intends to develop the code todo full text searches on the giant backup filesmaintained by users.In other words, if I back up to the Acronis cloud, Ican now use search software to hammer the fileslooking for very specific wordage or whatever.Thiswouldbeagodsend if thesearchwas fast andefficient compared to the miserable and always-failing Microsoft search, the resource hungrydesktop search engines from various vendors, orthe brute-force search of programs such asFileSeek.What are some of the added benefits that can beperformedondata stored in thecloud?Thinkhigh-end machine translation where massive amountsof computing power can be targeted at a languagetranslation chore. Right now, online translationsseem to be using underpowered tools that caneasily be run on the desktop (often with betterresults).Microsoft should add a cloud-based grammar and

spelling analysis that would be impossible at thePC level. It should be something that workswell toan extreme. A sentence such as: "I right the sintense wit it in mind that thee worlds are speltwrung" should not be seen as okay in anyuniverse. But Microsoft Word looked over thatmessandgave it the thumbsup.Noerrors. Lettingcrap like that pass with flying colours is laughable.In fact, running the manual spelling and grammarchecker gives me the message "Spelling andgrammar check complete. You're good to go!"Really? Use the cloud to fix these things! I'm surethat when you think about it, you'll discover lots ofcools ideas that can be implemented in the cloud,too. Let's do it.Email Is Dead, AgainIt was a big deal this week when Google made"Undo Send" an official Gmail feature—six yearsafter introducing it as a Labs experiment.Email is one of the oldest Internet applications butis still an integral part of the Web experience.Email has also been the Internet's red-headedstepchild for over 20 years, neglected and takenfor granted.Do any of you recall the prognostications of adecade ago? Email is dead because instantmessaging works better. Email is dead becausenobody uses it anymore. Email is deal becausespam is strangling it. A friend of mine made haywith a lecture on how email marketing is deadbecause of RSS. It goes on and on.In 2009, even I jumped on this bandwagon with afun column titled 9 Reasons E-Mail is Dead. Mycomplaints are still valid. Nothing has changed,and nothing has improved—except for the un-send button.Herein lies the problem: People take email forgranted, and few are willing to pay for a premiumemail experience. They're finewithGoogleminingtheir most personal communications for a freeservice.Yahoo and Microsoft email services are just asgood, if not better, thanGoogle, butGoogleseemsto always have the most buzz.It seems odd to me that blogging software—which, like email, is mostly free—has improvedlike crazy over the last decade while email haslanguished.



I use a video conversion tool called Handbrake.It's astonishing. Comparing what it can do to whatany email client can do is laughable. Most emailclients cannot even do something as simple as"schedule to send." How hard can that be? Allblogging software does it. Why can't Gmail?When researching this piece, I came across awebsite called Email Is Not Dead, which is filledwith useful stats for anyone out there wonderingwhether email was or was not, in fact, dead. Forexample, I learned that, according to McKinsey,email is almost 40x better at acquiring newcustomers than Facebook and Twitter. Wow. Ofcourse this website was designed to promoteemail marketing.But let's look at some basic email stats: 4.1 billionemail accounts with over 2.5 billion users andgrowing. Over 122 billion emails sent every hour!And yet, the email clients, systems, and programsare not much different than what we had 20 yearsago.With physical snail mail, there was nothing thatcould be described as user control. Youwould justget the mail in the box and that's that. This ideahas, unfortunately, transferred over to email as ifemail were just a virtual incarnation of mail andnothing more. It's not. Once the industry and theworld figures out that it is something radicallydifferent, then maybe it can be modernised withmore capabilities and features than the simple un-send button.Why Apple Doesn't Want to Speed Up YourMacBY SASCHA SEGAN PC UserApple's Mac OS X El Capitan is coming, butbeware the Apple reality distortion field.While El Capitan puts a needed focus onefficiency, Apple is still a hardware company, andits interest is in selling you new hardware, not inoptimising your older Macs. That doesn't meanyou won't see performance improvements, butthey may not come from the OS.We have a spinning beachball problem at ourhouse. Our beloved Macbook Pro (13-inch, early2011, with 4GB of RAM) is slow. It's not like we'redoing anything newwith it, althoughwe studiouslyupgraded our OSes as far as 10.9 Mavericks.We're running the same Photoshop CS3 we'veused for years, along with Safari, Microsoft Office

2011, VLC, iTunes, Spotify and not much else,really.So I was excited when I heard that El Capitan willlaunchappsup to1.4 timesas fast andopenPDFsup to four times as quickly as what we're runningnow. But then I realised: probably not. Becausewhile El Capitan will absolutely run on our 2011MacbookPro, I suspect its speedupswill be tied tomore recent hardware improvements, such asSSD drives.That's because our household, which has had atleast one Mac since 1986, is actually Apple'snightmare. We are the entire PC industry'snightmare. We are the non upgraders. And theyneed to stop us.

They're All Selling HardwareApple is far from alone in trying to drive newcomputer sales through OS upgrades. The entireWindows PC industry relies on new versions ofWindows to drive desktop sales.Google and the Linux community run ecosystemsthat don't focus on needing new hardware torealise upgrades, which hasn't really worked outfor either of them. Google has found that phonemakers just don't bother to offer timely Androidupgrades because they'd rather sell new phones,and Linux has never gotten any real traction in theconsumer PC market, in part because it's noimpetus for selling new, powerful PCs. (Linux hasdone much better in the server realm, wherevendorsmake profit on service contracts asmuchas hardware.)For a company like Apple, which profits by sellingPCs and phones, hardware and software have tomove in sync. Apple needs to stop people likeme,and prevent the syndrome John Dvorak oncedescribed as "having a Ferrari idling in thedriveway"—having no software that requires thelatest hardware.You see thismost clearlywith someof the flagshipfeatures in iOS9.Byall accounts, salesof the iPadAir 2 have not rocked the world. So Apple isdelivering a feature lots of tablet users want—split-screenmultitasking—but designed it in awaythat depends on its absolute latest GPU tofunction. (Samsung has had split-screenmultitasking on slower devices for ages.) Thatsoftware is going to drive hardware sales.Thesamehas togo for every versionofOSX.Yes,



Apple wants to continue to deliver new features toexisting users, to prevent people from jumpingship to Windows. But it is balancing that with theabsolute imperative of selling new hardware.Time To Wash Your PCThere may be a big advantage to installing ElCapitan (or Windows 10, or any other major newOS version) on your slower, older PC. That isn'tthe software itself; it's the opportunity to do somelarge-scale spring cleaning.Why do we wash our hands after we go to thebathroom? It's not necessarily because thebathroom is grosser than other things we'retouching throughout the day. That's debatable.The world is gross. But it's a convenient time toclean up, aswashing up periodically is associatedwith good health.I've probably needed to flush our entire computerout and do a clean install for ages. But that's aweekend-long project—backing everything up,re-installing all the applications from scratch,trying to find ourMicrosoft Office license key, all ofthat.Upgrading an OS is a great opportunity to look ateverything on your PC, remove it, dust it off andput it back in its place. That's what we'll be doingon all of our home PCs as Windows 10 and ElCapitan arrive. And that may cure our beachballproblem—even if the new OS doesn't.

10 Years of Antivirus ProtectionBY NEIL J. RUBENKIN PCMagManyyearsago,eachnewcomputer viruswasbignews, and each one got a name. Melissa,Michelangelo, ILoveYou, the list goes on. 1993saw the arrival of the November 17 virus, namedfor the fact that on November 17 it would damagethe hard drive of affected computers. One victim,a young Andreas Clementi, decided to fight back,embarking on a study of antivirus products as astudent project. Later, he teamed up with PeterStelzhammer tocreatewhat'snowoneof thebest-known antivirus testing labs, AV-Comparatives.The just-released Anniversary Report looks backover the lab's 12 years of testing.

Stalwart Participants

Over the years, the researchers at AV-Comparatives have evaluated three dozendistinct product lines. Some, like PC Tools andGeCAD, don't even exist at present. But a stalwartcadre of six products have participated in testingevery year for the last ten years or more.That doesn't mean they always earned topratings. As the report states, "We would like tocongratulate them on their ongoing commitmentto product improvement. This sometimes involvesaccepting a less than perfect result, but leads tobetter products and better protection for theconsumer." And in fact, most of these stalwarts doreceive good ratings, after all those years ofimprovement.Avast, Avira, Bitdefender, ESET, Kaspersky, andMcAfee actually participated in testing every yearfor the last twelve years. AVG managed the lasteleven years, and F-Secure contended during thelast ten. These six products received the AV-Comparatives 10-year Participant Award.Each of the honourees was invited to include acomment in the report, and (not surprisingly) allwere positive. Avast said, "The overview AV-Comparatives provides is vital for us and theindustry as awhole." AVG's TonyAnscombe said,"Wearedelighted tobeapart ofAV-Comparatives10-year testing milestone and look forward tocontinuing this partnership." And McAfee/Intelnoted, "Therearemany testers in theworld but thenumber of high-quality testers can be counted onthe fingers of one hand. AV-Comparatives inAustria is one such tester."

Tests Over the YearsDuring every year since 2004, the researchers atAV-Comparatives have performed single-producttests and reviews, on commission. As for publictests, the only one that spans the entire timeframeis the file detection test, which presents eachtested product with over 100,000 malwaresamples and notes how many are detected. In2008, they supplemented this test by checking forfalse positives (valid files erroneously reported asmalicious).File detection tests measure how well a productrecognises known threats; what about brand-newzero-day attacks? From the start, these testershave also attempted to measure how wellproducts handle unknown threats, usingtechniques like forcing products to use old

Tech Changes



antivirus signatures. At first, they called thistesting Heuristic/Retrospective, but later itevolved into the Proactive/Behavioural test. Inone form or the other, it's been around all twelveyears.Later additions include performance testing, real-world dynamic testing, and mobile security tests.Our reviews at PCMag have benefited immenselyfrom the wealth of data in the reports from AV-Comparatives and the other major testing labs.Here's to another ten years of research andreporting!How toMake Two-Factor AuthenticationWorkfor YouBY JILL DUFFY PC WorldHow much more secure would your onlineaccounts be if every time someone tried to log inthey had to plug in a USB key and enter yourpassword?Orwhat if yourGmail required not onlyyour username and password, but also a scan ofyour iris? Two-factor authentication can do justthat. Two-factor authentication simply meansthere's another barrier beyond username andpassword that you need to pass to get access toyour account. If you have a bank account thatsends a text message to you with a special codebefore it will let you log in, that's two-factorauthentication.In this article, I explain why two-factorauthentication is useful and how you can use it ina way that neutralises those excuses. And don'tworry. You won't have to buy a fancy new iris-scanning device to do it.What is Two-Factor Authentication?Online, you can prove your identity using one ofthree kinds of factors: something you are,something you have, or something you know. Ausername and password are something youknow, and they're usually the first factor in two-factor authentication. The second factor could bea smartphone tied to a phone number that onlyrings for you. The phonenumber is something youand only you have. Text messages sent to thatphone number with a six-digit code could be thesecond authenticator. Texting is one of the mostcommon implementations of two-factorauthentication.Other factors couldbea fingerprint(something you are) or a small electronic tokenthat generates a unique code every 60 seconds

(something you have).Why Does it Work?

At the very basic level, two-factor authentication issafer than a username and password alonebecause, quite simply, it adds another factor. Itmeans you need two keys to get in instead of one.That's good to know, but not very compelling, so letme explain why it works in practice.Remember that a lot of identity theft happensdue toreused passwords. Let's say you use the samepassword for Pinterest as you do Gmail. Maybeyour Pinterest account doesn't have any sensitivedata in it. Let's say Pinterest is hacked and thehackers get your basic account info, like your emailaddress and Pinterest password. You'd betterbelieve the bad guys are going to go straight toGmail and try to log in with the same combo. If theycan get into your email, they can look through yourarchives and figure out which banks you use toreset the passwords on your bank accounts.Horrifying!So number one: Don't reuse passwords. Use apassword manager to keep track of strongpasswords that are different for every account.Number two: If your Gmail had two-factorauthentication enabled, the bad guys couldn't havegotten into it in the first place, even if they had thepassword.Furthermore, if you had two-factor authenticationenabled via text messages, you would havereceived an alert immediately that someone wasattempting to log into your account. That would bea clear sign that you need to lock down youraccounts ASAP by changing all your passwords,and perhaps also notifying your banks that theyshould be on alert for fraud on your accounts. Nip itin the bud before it becomes a problem.That's only one scenario. What if an evil roommatehad been using a keylogger to try and break intoyour accounts? What if a perpetrator tried to breakinto your accounts using a program that appliedrandomly generated passwords? In both of thosecases, they couldn't get very far at all becausethey'd still need your second factor—like a textmessage or your fingerprint—to get into theaccount.Tips for Using Two-Factor Authentication

1 Turn on two-factor sparingly. Adding two-factor



authentication to all your accounts could takedays. But no one ever said you had to use iteverywhere. It's perfectly fine to only use it only onyour most sensitive accounts. These includeemail, bank accounts, and anywhere else youhave valuable information, such asDropbox if youkeep important documents there, or Amazon ifyou have One-Click Purchase enabled.2 Use a cheat sheet. Confused about where tofind the two-factor authentication setting inFacebook?Where is it in Evernote? Don't hunt forthe instructions when TurnOn2FA has alreadydone the work for you. This website has detailedinstructions for how to enable two-factorauthentication on more than 100 sites.3 Wearasmartwatch.Forme, inputtingasix-digitnumber froma textmessagemeans unlockingmyphone (I hide messages from the lock screen forprivacy and security reasons), going into thetexting app, opening the message, andtransferring it to the page. The whole process ismuch faster when I wear a smartwatch that showsthe contents of texts. Now, it takes me little morethan a glance to get the code.4 Save backup codes in a password manager orwallet.When you set up two-factor authentication,you usually get a list of emergency codes you canuse in case of a system failure. For example, sayyou have poor mobile phone reception and aren'tgetting textmessages, and you're trying to log intoGmail. But because phone service is down, thattext message with the unlock code you need isn'treaching you. In this case, you'd break out theemergency codes and use it instead. They workanytime, anywhere, but are only good once.5 Save those codes somewhere accessible! Twogreat places are a password manager (providedyou have access to it offline via your mobilephone) and a slip of paper in your wallet. As longas you don't write your username and passwordon the paper, the codes will be worthless toanyone who finds them.Looking for Something More High-Tech?

The tips I just gave are designed to help peoplestart using two-factor authentication quickly in asmart way that makes it easy to manage.But I know some readerswill want to go high-tech.YubiKeys are a great option. This set of high-techdevices, ranging from$18-$50, areUSB keys that

work more like house keys. When you want tolog into an application that works with YubiKey,you plug in a special USB stick to unlock it. As anindividual, you can only use YubiKey on Googleaccounts, including Gmail, LastPass, andWordPress. If you want to use it other places,you'll need a business-grade key and anorganization that is willing to support it.TheUsher app is designed for business use, butisworthmentioning.Whenusedonan iPhone5sor later, Usher can authenticate your identitythrough your smartphone (one factor) and yourfingerprint (second factor) via TouchID. Usher ismade by a security firm called Microstrategy,and I recently toured its headquarters to seefirst-hand how User works. Employees carryaround their smartphones, which authenticatetheir identity at typical security checkpoints,such as the parking garageentrance, doorways,elevators, fitness centre, and even computerterminals. The company can adjust the level ofverification needed at each checkpoint. Forexample, to get into the parking garage, youmight need nothing more than your mobilephone,whichconnects toaBluetoothbeacon forauthorisation. To get onto the top floor of thebuilding, however, you might need the phone,your fingerprint, and a four-digit PIN.The Nymi Band is a wristband that acts asanother authenticator by using a uniquebiometric: your heart rate signature (ECG). Forthe band towork, you need your uniqueHeartID,as well as the band itself. As of this writing, theNymi Band is only for developers, with adevelopment kit running $149. Last year, I had achance to try the Nymi Band in its early stages,and it packs a whole lot more convenience intoit than verification codes by text message.I imaginewe'll seemore support for two-factor ormulti-factor authentication using wearabletechnology in thecomingmonthsandyears. TheApple Watch already works with plenty of two-factor apps, and I bet there's more to come onthat front.Untilwegetabetter system inplace forverifying identity, two-factor authentication isone of the best tools of defence we have, so besure tomake it as frictionless as possible so thatyou'll actually use it.



12 Tips to Speed Up Windows 7BY MICHAEL MUCHMORE PCMagWindows 7 made notable speed improvementsover its predecessor, Vista, but it can't comparewith themuch fasterWindows 8. Andmost peoplehaven't experienced the 15-second boot thatMicrosoft engineerswere shooting for inWindows7 (and achieved in Windows 8 for manymachines). There are certainly times when you'llstill have to wait for that spinning blue doughnut inthe earlier OS. If you're still timid about upgradingto Windows 8 despite the speed advantages,there are plenty of things you can do to speed upyour installation of Windows 7.The problem with most "speed-up Windows 7"stories is that they tell you to turn off some of theoperating system's more charming visualfeatures. The first nine of my dozen tips show youways you can speed up your Windows 7 systemwithout compromising its appearance. For thosewho need even more speed or don't care abouteye candy, I've listed three at the end that boostsystem performance at the expense of somevisual effects.1. Uninstall bloatware that came with yourlaptop or PC.Or even apps you installed but no longer want.Head to Control Panel | Programs | Uninstall aprogramand take the hatchet to anything, such asunwanted games, that you’ll never need. Manyprograms will load processes at boot time andtake up valuable RAM and CPU cycles. Whileyou're in here, you can also click "Turn WindowsFeatures On or Off" and scan the list to see ifthere's anything you don’t use. You might also trysoftware like PCDecrapifier and Revo Uninstaller2. Limit startup processes.In theStart button's search box, typeMSCONFIG,then head to the Startup tab. You'll likely see aslew of apps, mostly for system support, but you'llbe able to identify some that clearly aren'tnecessary. There's absolutely no need to haveGoogleUpdate or even QuickTime running all thetime, for example. Don't delete those that supportyour hardware or security, but anything blatantlynonproductive can go. Youmay have to check the

program names online with a site likeprocesslibrary.com to see what they are—theymay even be malware. If you want to get moregranular, run Microsoft's Autoruns utility.3. Add more RAM.Windows 7 isn't has much of a hog as Vista, but ifyou'removing fromXP, thememory requirementsare greater.4. Turn off search indexing.In Vista I, would only do this if I saw the searchindexing icon in the system tray and noticed aperformance lag, but that notification isn't presentin Windows 7. Of course, if you do a lot ofsearching, this won't appeal to you, as somesearcheswill be slower. To turn off indexing, openthe IndexingOptionsControl Panel window (if youjust type "index" in the Start button search box,you'll see that choice at the top of the start menu),click "Modify" and remove locationsbeing indexedand file types, too. If you want to leave searchindexing on, but find that it occasionally slows youdown, you can stop its process when you needextra speed. Right-click on Computer either in theStart menu or on the desktop, choose Manage.Thendouble-clickServicesandApplications, thenServices. FindWindows Search, and double clickon that. From this properties dialog, you canchoose a Startup type of Manual or Disabled tohave the process silent by default.5. Defragment your hard drive.Your disk stores data in chunks wherever there'sspace on disk, regardless of whether the space iscontiguous for one file. Defragging tidieseverything up and blocks a program's bitstogether so that the reader heads don't have toshuttle back and forth to read a whole executableor data file. While this is less of a problem withtoday's huge hard drives and copius RAM, a slowsystem can still benefit from defragmenting thedisk. Windows 7 comes with a built-in defraggerthat runs automatically at scheduled intervals.Mine was set by default to run Wednesdays at1:00 AM, when my PC is usually turned off; so itnever got defragged. If you're in a similar boat, youcan either change the scheduled defrag, or defragon demand. Just type "defrag" in the WindowsStart Menu search bar, and click on "DiskDefragmenter." The version of the utility isimproved in Windows 7, and shows more

How To...?



information about what's happening on your diskthan Vista did. The Windows 7 engineering teamposted a very in-depth, informative article on theEngineering Windows 7 blog.6. Change power settings to maximumperformance.Of course, this isn't a good choice if you want tosaveelectricity, but it couldboost your computing.Head to Control Panel / System and Security /Power Options. From here, click on the left-panelchoice "Create a power option" and choose "HighPerformance."7. Clean up Your Disk.From the Start menu, choose All Programs,Accessories, System Tools, and Disk Cleanup.This finds unwanted junk and files such astemporary, offline Web pages, and installer fileson your PC and offers to delete them all at once.You may even find that your Recycle Bin isbulging at the seams: Mine had 1.47GB I didn'tknow was there! This will generally only have anoticeable affect on speed if your machine isgetting close to full, however.8. Check for Viruses and Spyware.You can run the built in Windows Defender or athird-party app. You could start with our Editors'Choice, Spyware Doctor with AntiVirus 2015. Ifyou don't want to pay, though, there are plenty offree antimalware options. Our current Editors'Choice for free AV is Panda Cloud Antivirus 20159. Use the Performance Troubleshooter.In Control Panel's search box, type"troubleshooting" and under System andSecurity, you'll see the choice "Check forperformance issues."Run the troubleshooter andit may find the root cause of your slowdown.10. Turn off Desktop Gadgets.Now we come to the tips that require shuttingdown some of the operating system's bling.Windows 7 ditched the actual visual sidebar ofVista, but there's still a sidebar process running.Turn it off by typing "gadgets" in the start menusearch bar, choosing "View list of runninggadgets" and select each in turn and clickRemove to shut any gadgets you can livewithout.11.Don't useabeautiful desktopbackground.This will free up extra RAM and therefore boost

speed slightly. Right-click on the desktop andchoose Personalize, then Desktop Backgroundat the bottom of the resulting dialog window. Setit to a solid color.12. Turn off Aero effects.Head to the Control Panel's PerformanceInformationandTools section, andchooseAdjustVisualEffects.Hereyou'll finda long list of effects,but simply choosing "Adjust for bestperformance" will turn everything off. You'll feellike you stepped back into a decade ago.12 Tips for Printing Great PhotosBY M. DAVID STONE PC WorldIf you've tried your hand at printing your ownphotos and been disappointed in the results, youmay be making some mistakes that are easy tocorrect. Most inkjet and thermal dye printerstoday can print photos at drugstore quality orbetter with little or nowork on your part. However,it sometimes helps to follow the 80-20 rule,although in this case it's more of a 90-10 rule: youcan get 90 percent of the best possible photo for10 percent of the effort it would take for theabsolute best. Here's an overview of the mostimportant things you need to know to get to 90percent. (A companion article, Easy PhotoPrinting Tips and Tricks, is geared to beginnerslearning the different ways of printing: fromPictBridge camera, USB key, direct fromcomputer, etc.)A word on printers. For a start, it helps to knowwhat you can expect from your printer, which willalso be worth thinking about before you buy yournext printer. The most important issue is theprinter's technology. There are only two printingtechnologies today that can print at true photoquality: inkjet and thermal dye (aka dyesublimation, although that's a misnomer).Laser technology is getting better at printingphotos, but it is well behind inkjets on that score,andonlya fewcolor lasers todayevencomecloseto true photo quality. ZINK technology, which isrelatively new and improving quickly, may soonjoin inkjet and thermal dye as suitable for high-quality photos, but isn't quite there yet.Most general-purpose inkjets, whether themanufacturer labels them photo inkjets or not,can print photos at about the same level of qualityas you'd expect from a typical drugstore photo or



online site. If that's more or less the quality of thephotos you're printing, you're probably getting themost you can out of your printer.Two categories of inkjets usually do better thandrugstore-level quality: dedicated photo printersand near-dedicated photo printers. Dedicatedphoto printers, a category that also includesthermal dye printers, are limited to small-formatphotos, which usually means amaximum4- by 6-inch photo size, although some print panoramicsizes and some print photos as large as 5-by-7.Printers in this category generally focus on easeof use along with photo quality. Most can printbetter-lookingphotos thanyou'dget froma typicaldrugstore, but if they're not printing at least atdrugstore-quality level, you're probably doingsomething wrong.Near-dedicated photo printers are aimed atserious photographers, both amateur andprofessional, and are among the most expensiveinkjets you can buy. They're near-dedicatedbecause they can typically print at sizes up toabout 13 by 19 inches, which means they canprint standard letter- and legal-size businessdocuments. However, using them for such non-photo printing would be a waste of their talents(and ink).Printers in this category almost always have awide range of choices for photo paper—includingseveral fine art papers meant for professionals—instead of the one or two choices typical for mostinkjets. Their output quality is amatch for the kindof photo lab a professional photographer wouldgo to for custom prints. If you're not gettingexceptional quality with this class of printer, oddsare you're doing something wrong.1. Choose between direct printing options. If yourcombination of printer and camera gives you achoice between printing directly from the cameraand from memory—which includes cards andUSB keys in this context—be sure to experimentwith both. The two choices can yield significantlydifferent output quality for the same file, withnoticeably different colors and retention of detailbased on shading in dark and light areas. It's wellworth investing a little time and effort to printseveral photos both ways to see how great thedifferences are and which one you like better.2. Get familiar with your printer's auto fix feature.Most current dedicated photo printers, and some

standard inkjets, include some variation of anautomatic fix feature that analyzes the image andmay adjust several settings at once. These mayinclude anything from contrast, brightness, andgamma (which changes contrast differently atdifferent levels of brightness), to automaticallydeciding whether to apply red-eye reduction.With most photos, these automatic fix featuresimprove the final result, but in somecases theydomore harm than good, or even undo an effect thatyou were trying for. Here again, if your printerincludes an automatic fix option, it's worthinvesting a little time and effort printing anassortment of photos both with and without thefeature turned on to get a feel for what it does andwhen you might want to turn it off.3. Previewphotos for direct printing. If your printercan print directly from memory cards, it may limityou to previewing photos by printing an indexsheet or by looking at the images on a built inpreview screen. If it gives you both choiceshowever, keep in mind that there are advantagesto each, and that you may want to use one or theother at any given time.Using thepreviewscreen is faster, sinceyoudon'thave to print twice—once for the index sheet andonce for the final print—and it costs less, sinceyou don't have to pay for ink or paper to print theindex sheet.On the other hand, if you've taken several similarphotos with minor variations in settings, forexample—a trick professional photographersuse to increase the odds that one of the shots hasthe right settings for the picture to look its best—an index sheet is the preferred approach fordeciding which version to print at full size. Theprinted thumbnails will give you a better sensethan the image of the preview screen of howcolors will print in the final photo and how welldetails based on relatively small differences inshading will show.4. Get familiar with your printer's editing features.Printers with preview screens often let you editphotos before printing. The editing choices maybe limited to a few basics like cropping images orremoving red-eye, or they may include options toadjust brightness and contrast, add graphics andframes that are stored in the printer, and more.The process is similar to using the kind of photokiosk you can find in drugstores, and is almost



always designed to be self-explanatory and easyto use. If your printer includes any editingfeatures, they are certainly worth exploring.5. Don't fix photos before you see how they reallylook. Keep in mind that the colors and shadingthat you see on screen (whether your computerscreen or the printer's preview screen) will almostnever be an exactmatch—and are often not evenclose—to the printed version. (This is true for allsorts of reasons that areway beyond the scope ofthis article). For photos you care enough about towant the best possible photo with minimal work,it's generally a good idea to do any cropping thatyou want first, print the photo, and thenmake anymanual adjustments you like based on what theprinted version looks like. If the printer or theprogram you're printing from has an automatic fixoption, you might want to try printing the photoboth with and without the fix feature beforemaking any manual changes.6. Use paper that's appropriate for the task.Better-quality paper yields better-quality prints,but it costs more too. If you're printing a photo toframe and hang on a wall, by all means use thehighest-quality paper available for the printer. Ifyou'reprintingaphoto topost on theofficebulletinboard or stick under a refrigerator magnet,however, consider using plain paper, inkjetpaper, or a less expensive photo paper.—Next:Tips 7-12 >7. Experiment with different papers. The glossyfinish that you'll find on most drugstore prints andmost photo paper is so common thatmost peopledon't even consider other possibilities, but thereare other choices. Some printer manufacturersdon't offer any other options, but you shouldcheck to see if there are any available for yourprinter. Many professional photographers preferhow photos look on matte paper, for example.You might want to try it as well.Papers from other manufacturers are anotherpossibility, but be aware that output quality—andcolors in particular—will vary with the paper youuse, something you can prove easily enough byprinting a photo on both photo paper and plainpaper on almost any inkjet. Before you invest in alot of third-party photo paper, thinking that it willsave money, experiment with a few sheets tocompare the output with the same photos on theprinter manufacturer's own paper.

8. Make sure the printer is set for the paper you'reusing. One printer setting deserves specialattention. Make sure that the printer (for directprinting) or printer driver (for printing from acomputer) is set for the type of paper you'reactually printing. More than one manufacturerhas told me, based on calls to tech support, thatthe single most common mistake people make isnot changing the paper type setting to match thepaper.Some manufacturers have tried to bypass theproblem with sensors that automatically detectthe paper type, but they don't always workreliably. Unless your printer uses symbols on theback of the paper that the printer can read like barcodes to confirmpaper type, don't assume that anAutomatic Paper Type settingwill work.Get in thehabit of setting the paper type manually.9. Print from an editing program. For the best-quality prints,move your photos to your computerand print from a photo-editing program. Photoprinters aimed at professionals generally don'toffer direct printing, because professionals—andserious amateurs—know that they get muchbetter control over basic features like cropping,resizing, and color management, as well as farmore sophisticated editing tools, with a photo-editing program. With some printers, a photo-editing program will also let you print higher-resolution photos than you can when printingdirectly from a camera or memory card.You probably have one or more easy-to-useediting programs that came with your printer,camera, or scanner and are well worth exploring.In addition you can download a free copy ofPicasa from Google.Even low-endprogramsoften includesurprisinglycapable, easy-to-use features for fixing commonproblems in photos, such as red eye, yellow eye(the equivalent problem to red eye for animalphotos), backlighting (with a bright background,as with sun streaming in a window behindsomeone and turning his or her face into asilhouette), and more. Even better, if your printeror scanner is aimed at a relatively sophisticatedaudience, itmaywell have comewith amid-rangeor high-end photo editor designed for thataudience.You may not want to spend the time and effort ittakes to master even a moderately sophisticated



photo editing program, but if you already have onefor free, it'sworth taking a lookat it. Even if youuseonly some of its features, youmay be surprised athowmuch you can do to improve your photos withvery little effort.10. Edit copies, not originals. Before you startediting a photo—which can mean anything frommaking minor tweaks, to applying special effects,to cropping the original to use only a part of it—create a copy first. That way you can return to theoriginal if you need to. And don't plan on editingand then saving under another name. It's safer tocreate copies before you open a file to avoidaccidentally overwriting it. Once you have a copyto work with, you can feel free to experiment.11. Avoid compression woes. Most camerasdefault to—orareeven limited to—savingpicturesin a compressed JPG format. It's always a goodidea to turn off compression (if you can) when youwant the best possible photo quality. Even moreimportant, however, is that you should never edita compressed photo on your computer and thensave it back to a compressed format. JPG is alossy compression scheme, which means it losesinformation every time you save the file andrecompress it. If you edit a compressed file, saveit in the editor's native format or a format like TIF,without compression, to avoid degrading theimage further.

12. Explore your printer driver. Virtually everyprinter's driver offers settings that affect picturequality. The choices may be limited to choosingbetweengood,better, andbest quality, or youmaybe able to adjust brightness; contrast; red, green,and blue levels; and more. If you want the bestpossible output, it's worth investing the time toexplore your driver. At the very least, experimentwitheachof thequality settings to see theeffect onthe output quality and speed, so you can decidewhether the improved output at high-qualitymodes is worth the extra time it takes to print.There are other techniques for improving photoprinting, but these are the most important. Themore you experiment with them, the better yourprintswill become,andyou'll have learneda rangeof methods you can apply to any given situation

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The next meeting is on the 14th July, please come along ...The next meeting is on the 14th July, please come along and support your club As usual, our meeting will start with a 'problem