Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
As you probably know by now, Microsoft designed Windows 10 and Windows 11 to be quite intrusive when it comes to your privacy.
By default, the operating system collects all sorts of sensitive user data and stores it on your PC’s hard drive and/or sends it back to Microsoft via the Internet.
Luckily, most of Windows’ “spying” can be either mitigated somewhat or disabled completely if you know where to look for the various settings. [Read more…]
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You’ve probably heard by now that Microsoft was going to stop supplying updates of any kind for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025, and that includes the all-important security updates.
Well, that infamous day has arrived.
How this change will affect you will depend on the type of PC that you own right now, your personally acceptable level of risk and how you typically use your computer. [Read more…]
There’s an old scam that keeps popping up from time to time, and I’m hearing lots of reports that it’s spreading like wildfire at the moment.
A while back I wrote a post explaining that neither Microsoft nor Apple will call you to let you know that your machine has a virus.
And they won’t, so if you get a call like that from out of the blue you should know right off the bat that the call is a scam. Just hang up on them.
But now there’s a quickly spreading variation of that scam that’s costing a lot of folks a lot of money and causing tons of grief to boot.
If you have installed the latest Windows Updates you’ve probably noticed a new icon on your Taskbar labeled Copilot (preview).
According to Microsoft, Copilot is a new tool that adds artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to Office 365, the Bing search engine and even Windows itself.
Personally, I’m not a fan of AI in general (at least in its current form) and I prefer not to have Copilot invade my computing environment. [Read more…]
Question from Cilla: I had a conversation with a computer salesman a couple of years ago.
He told me that if I was using Windows, there is virus protection built into the software and there is no need to install another antivirus program.
And as I recall, he said if you did install another one, it will turn off the Windows antivirus.
I decided to believe him and haven’t had any problems but I’ve always had a little doubt about it. Does Windows really have a built-in antivirus? [Read more…]