Press CTRL + SHIFT + (+) to enlarge
Press CTRL + SHIFT + (-) to reduce

A spyglass icon shows on the URL bar. Click spyglass icon to see zoom panel.
I have my zoom set at 125%

An intensely annoying feature of Edge is a small black icon at the extreme top left of the screen on the tab bar - It looks like a small rounded square with a curved arrow pointing to the left. This is the Tab Actions Menu.

If you click this icon and accidently select on the dropdown panel "Turn on vertical tabs" all your horizontal tabs disappear and a single tab only shows at the centre of the screen - you cannot generate any more horizontal tabs.
Vertical tabs includes a small menu which shows down the L/H side of the screen.

Vertical tabs may have some obscure use, but not for me.

To get back to horizontal tabs - click the icon and select "Turn off vertical tabs"

On my browsing as found by DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials extension.

Some emails do not have a print facility for drafts, Outlook and Yahoo are two examples.
In this case just press CTRL + P and the print panel will show.

https://www.emsisoft.com/en/tools/emergencykit/

The Emsisoft Emergency Kit Scanner includes the powerful Emsisoft Scanner complete with graphical user interface. It is an aggressive scanner. Scans the PC for Viruses, Trojans, Ransomware, Spyware, Adware, Worms, Keyloggers and other malicious programs. It even scans your drivers.

Emsisoft Free Emergency kit belongs in any user's PC toolkit since that's exactly what it's designed for.

Quick Scan does a good job in scanning the user's active programs and checking for malware traces. Lesser malware are usually found this way. In the case of a more virulent infection, the Malware Scan function will look into all the places malwares often infect.

Users can also elect to have the program perform a custom malware search: you can toggle to search for active Rootkits, scan your machine's memory, and so forth. Scanning in email data files is also possible, as well as in NTFS Alternate Data Streams.

Anything remotely suspicious will be quarantined, and you can see everything at a glance there: you can choose to mark and restore a file when you know it's a false positive. While quarantined items cannot damage your computer, you can still delete them entirely.

Emsisoft Emergency Kit is a handy tool to have when you want to ensure your computer stays protected: prevention is better than cure, and periodic quick scans will keep your machine safe.
EEK is a fully portable program, no installation is required to hog storage space. Just delete after use.

After installing the above link a shortcut is placed on your desktop.

Click it and a panel shows >click install > panel shows> at bottom of list click Start Emergency Kit Scanner> loads data base - takes a few minutes>EEK program panel shows - see image - choose your item and start your scan.

Impeccable - if you are selling or disposing of your computer, Bleachbit Shredder will erase your drives better than anything else. I used it to dispose of my previous computer - result - the drive was empty.

Hillary Clinton used the open source cleaning software BleachBit to wipe her computer systems clean of 30,000 emails during her court investigation some years ago "so even God couldn’t read them,"

I have been using Bleachbit for very many years with no problems. I use it as a manual cleaner of selected items every night before shutdown.

The latest Avast AV update now detects Bleachbit as a threat containing virus IDP.Generic and places the program in quarantine. Bleachbit is now killed off.

Solution - Open Avast, click Protection on left side>Quarantine - you will find Bleachbit listed - click the 3 dots - panel comes up asking if you wish to restore the program - click YES and Bleachbit is now restored.

Click Menu>Settings>Exceptions and Bleachbit is now listed as an Exception and will no longer be detected as a threat.
IDP.Generic for Bleachbit is definitely a false positive.

Windows will not update in Sleep Mode if the Wake-up timers are disabled.

In all my 14 years of computer activity I have never used the clipboard.
Just to see what it is all about I enabled it.
Normal copying and pasting is by using CTRL+C and CTRL+V without the need for clipboard or anything else.

Disaster ! My copies were then shown on the clipboard using CTRL+C - a tiny panel with tiny printing, simply recording copied texts in series.
The mind boggles as to why anybody would want to store everything they copied. Utterly pointless.

My routine is to use the Notepad icon on my taskbar, a large panel (I use half screen) with the usual control features listed in the menu bar, when constructing a texting composed of part pasted elements. I use this method for most long texts.

The final text is then promptly dealt with under "Edit" - Select all">Copy. The copied text can then be transferred to anywhere I wish using CTRL+V.

Windows Notepad -
Click Start>Windows Accessories>Notepad
Right click Notepad>More>Pin to taskbar>use as needed
Notepad is a superb facility for composing texts.

Windows clipboard - rubbish.

I had reason to import my Edge passwords into Chrome, but found only "Export passwords" listed on the Chrome dropdown.

Although Chrome includes the option to import a CSV file of your saved passwords from another browser, this option isn’t visible by default.
You need to access Chrome's flags page, which lets you enable and disable various features. Here, you can also make the password import option appear in Chrome.

Type the following in the address bar and press Enter : "chrome://flags"

On the flags screen, put the cursor in the search box and type "Password import".
You should now see the Password import flag in the search results.
To enable this flag, click the dropdown menu next to the flag and select "Enabled"
"Import passwords" now appears on the Chrome dropdown.

Having created a CSV file on my desktop from Edge export passwords by clicking the 3 dots against "Saved passwords", I could then import my Edge passwords into Chrome.

Today, I have replaced my black ink cartridge, I try never to use the colour ink, however, today when I went to use the printer, it would not work. I am assuming, it is because I got a message saying the colour cartridge was empty.

My question, is, can I replace the colour cartridge with a black one, to make it work, as I do not have a need for a colour cartridge? TIA.

My login goes - lockscreen - sign-in - Desktop.
Generally no problems at all, but occasionally the lockscreen freezes and I cannot logon.
Have to shutdown and start again, when all is then perfect and back to normal.

OK its a problem that can be fixed with major surgery as can the disabling of the lockscreen, but I do not wish to challenge fate.

Solution - Press - CNTRL + ALT + DELETE
My login screen then appears immediately and all is OK to logon.

Taskbar Thumbnails are minimised pictures, a snapshot of the open screen tab, which appear when the cursor hovers over the open tab icons on the taskbar. If you then move the cursor over the snapshot, the whole window appears on screen to show you what is running on that tab. If you then click it, the screen logs onto that window and completely displays it.

1.Press ‘Win + X’ to open the Windows shortcuts menu.

2.Click on ‘System’

3.On the ‘System’ settings page, click on the ‘system info’ option appearing on the right- hand side.

4.Now select ‘Advanced System Settings’.

5.In the ‘Advanced’ tab, locate the ‘Performance’ and click on ‘Settings’.

6.In the ‘Visual effects’ tab, locate the following settings:

Enable Peek

Save taskbar thumbnail previews

Show thumbnails instead of icons

7.To enable the Taskbar thumbnail previews, select the boxes; while to disable it, uncheck the boxes.

8.Click ‘Apply’ and then hit ‘OK’ to save the changes.

Click image to view

For the technically minded.

Speccy is a simple program accessed by a shortcut on your desktop.

Speccy gives you detailed information on every piece of hardware on your computer. Save time trawling through your computer for stats like CPU, motherboard, RAM, graphics cards and more. See everything laid out for you in one clean interface.

https://www.ccleaner.com/speccy/download

MRT.EXE is the executable file for the Microsoft Windows Malicious Software Removal Tool. You’ll find this file on every computer running the Windows operating system. Microsoft designed the Malicious Software Removal Tool to occasionally scan your computer for popular malware, viruses, and worms.

By default, the Malicious Software Removal Tool hibernates in the background and only runs once a month. You can also manually use the tool to run a Quick scan, Full scan, or Customized scan of your computer.

If the tool detects any infection, it removes it immediately and creates a report containing the number of files scanned, files infected, and files removed.

Winkey+X>Run>enter mrt.exe>OK>Panel click YES>mrt panel>Next>Quick scan>Next>scan starts

Takes 2-3 minutes on my PC.

Press key "Print Scrn" - first key after the F keys on top line of keyboard to screen shoot an image.

Click Paint icon on taskbar or select Paint from Menu.

Click Paste - hold mouse left key down and move image to centre of screen.

Click Crop - hold left mouse key down and trace round the image you want to save - see dotted outline.

Click Crop - image selected moves to top L/H corner of panel.

Click File - then "Save as" - select JPEG.

"Save as" panel shows - select the file to save the image in from L/H column.

Enter file name for image - Save.

Your saved screenshot is now in the file you selected as an image.

The Paint screen is used to save screenshots.
1. Click Start - taskbar bottom left.
2. Scroll to Windows Accessories - expand to Paint - right click - click More - select Pin to Taskbar.
Done.
Taskbar icon can now be clicked to show Paint screen.

Regardless of what some "experts" think, defragging is highly beneficial to keeping your computer clean from becoming progressively fragmented and slow.

You can of course use a third party program like Auslogics - https://www.auslogics.com/en/software/disk-defrag/ - defrag is quick.

I use Auslogics on demand.

Or let Windows defrag your computer - recommended but slow because it optimises the drive.

Windows -

Search - taskbar bottom left - enter "defrag" - click Open.

Panel shows - you can analyse or defrag=optimise manually.

To schedule a defrag click Change Settings.

Enter the details shown on the image - weekly is adequate - click OK - done.

Windows will now defrag weekly.

When your PC is in Sleep mode, the Internet is disabled.

This is a revealing (non techy) article about long distance Internet data traffic, who owns the cables, and why. Useful general knowledge for the tech-minded.

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/facebook-google-subsea-cables

Windows 11 has just been panelled on my updates. It seems to imply that Windows 11 will simply be a normal Feature update.

More of a curiosity than a tip, but it is worth a mention in case members get mouse trouble.

For no reason I could see, my computer suddenly developed cursor/mouse trouble.

Typing text did not show up immediately, but suffered a delayed action before it showed.

Highlighting by holding the mouse L/H key down did not work.

Using the page slider was jumpy as was the mouse scroll - instead of scrolling it had delayed jumps.

Even selecting items with the cursor did not work.

This all happened on the Internet, whatever browser I used, but offline Skype worked perfectly, as normal.

My PC was almost unusable.

The web said if restarting and/or shutdown did not cure it, to try a different USB port with the mouse plug.

I unplugged my keyboard and mouse from the PC USB sockets and swapped them round, then restarted.

BINGO !!! It worked, my mouse is now doing everything perfect again and all is back to normal.

How secure is yours??

https://tinyurl.com/9jefhwr2

This is a brilliant extension which I have used for many years.
Unlike most notepads, this one does NOT delete the notes no matter how large the content or time, including shutdowns etc. The notes remain there indefinitely until you manually delete them.

I have it on Chrome, Edge and Opera.
Extremely useful as a quick notepad for pasting oddments on for later use while working on something else.
All the other notepads I have had delete the contents - this one does not.

This search engine is widely acknowledged the world over by experts and users alike.
No more snooping and personal data stealing, it is an extremely efficient search engine second to none.
I have used it for many years. It is my default search engine.
DuckDuckGo - https://duckduckgo.com/ : make it your browser default.
and
DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials - https://tinyurl.com/3mfhryhu
Chrome web store - can click install for Chrome, Edge and Opera.

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/poper%20blocker

I have had this extension on my three bowsers for many years.

It is superb in blocking pop-ups and invaluable in removing those wretched overlays which shade the screen on many sites so you cannot read them, or removing those "we have detected you are using an ad blocker" panels.
Just right click the item and select "Remove overlay" shown on the dropdown panel against the Poper Blocker icon.
You get an occasional failure, but not many.

Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and Opera can install this extension from the Google web store.

Would not be without it.

on creating an email account, disappear to, please?

Occasions arise when all the desktop icons are suddenly reshuffled and when this happens it is very difficult remembering the original icon layout if you have many icons. I have had this happen several times over the years due to some glitch and DeskSave has restored my icons at a mouse click.

To recover the original icon layout simply install a tiny desktop program called DeskSave - https://desksave.en.uptodown.com/windows
with the shortcut on your desktop.
I use it on my Windows 10, it works to perfection in saving and restoring the primary icon layout.

To adjust the text size, make everything bigger, increase brightness etc. just bring up the display settings -

Start>Settings(gear icon)>Ease of access and the display settings appear. You can now personalise whatever you wish to make viewing and reading easier.

To enlarge the page slightly for easier reading -
Press CTRL + SHIFT and + key
Page goes to 120%
To return to original size -
Press CTRL and - key
Press WINKEY + CTRL + M to bring up Windows magnifier settings.

I would add that once the page is enlarged, it remains like that until CTRL and - key is pressed.

Opera is a superb browser, almost a spit image of Chrome in style and layout, settings and operation.

You can even install extensions from the Chrome web store.

The free VPN is already installed and can be activated by a mouse click. It has a selection of locations.

Verdict - excellent and secure browser, easy to use and almost identical to Chrome. The VPN works fine in hiding your identity and location from the web.

Some would argue that the VPN is no more than a secure proxy - well bully for their technical nit-picking. I have used it for many years with an excellent record. Using the VPN has eliminated the barrage of spam emails I used to get. The few I still get are due to my non-VPN activity.

Note - I use the superb DuckDuckGo as my search engine, Google hate VPN's, they stop their intrusive snooping dead.

Note - Opera has VPN disabled by default - you have to enable it, here's how -
Click the Opera logo - top left on screen - a red "O"
Then Settings>"Advanced" at bottom of page >VPN>Enable "Browse with VPN to prevent third parties from tracking you">Enable "Connect to VPN when starting browser"
All done.

Highly recommended.

Start>scroll down to Mail>Right click>More>Pin to taskbar

The Mail icon is now on your taskbar.

Click>Settings>Manage Accounts>Add Account.

Go through the process of entering your email and password. If your email is not on the dropdown list, choose "Other account". All your email accounts are now on the Mail app.

You can check all your email accounts in one viewing.

By clicking the taskbar icon you can see all your emails listed with Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Deleted, Junk etc.

If a mail has arrived, it is indicated against the Inbox for each email account.

You can also Send replies.

Whatever you do on the Mail app. is reflected on the actual email online account.
I have three email accounts listed - Outlook.com, Gmail and thunderbird.

Settings>Update & Security>Change active hours>Change.

Windows will update outside of your specified active hours, so you are not interrupted by a Windows update. I set mine at 10.00 - 19.00.
I always update at my convenience manually in any case.

Let’s be clear: lots of icons on the desktop have no impact on your system speed. It has a tiny impact on how long it takes to start up the desktop, but that’s in terms of 2-3 seconds.
Desktop icons are almost all shortcuts and take no power whatsoever. You can have as many shortcut icons as you wish on your desktop.

A desktop icon provides an immediate means of opening a program and is extremely convenient. Clutter ? Its not clutter, its efficiency and convenience.

ATF is a freeware, temporary file cleaner for all Windows versions, Firefox and Opera with a simple, easy-to-use interface. The main screen allows the user to either clean all temporary files, or selected files for cleaning.

I have used it for over 15 years as a desktop manual cleaner, use it every night before shutdown. It only takes seconds to run.

I have it auxiliary to CCleaner and Bleachbit as a quick clean as required. It is well worth having.

https://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/atf_cleaner.html

What’s the Windows 11 release date? Microsoft announced Windows 11 on June 24, 2021, and says the official public release will be later this year. We may expect it in October 2021

No need panic about Windows 11 - Microsoft is ending support for Windows 10 on October 14th, 2025. It will mark just over 10 years since the operating system was first introduced.

So we have 4 years left of Windows 10.

I have had two Windows crashes where Windows 10 had to be totally reloaded.

Providing all browsers and emails are kept in sync during operation, the browsers will return completely unchanged with all passwords and the emails will be complete and unchanged. All as previous.

Photos and personal files.

I used Onedrive to sync all my photos and personal files - the free 5 GB version.

In each case all the photos and files synced to Onedrive were recovered without any loss.

These were mainly covered by syncing my Desktop to Onedrive which covered these files in my case : Documents and Pictures can also be synced.

Onedrive syncs the files to the Microsoft cloud storage.

All photos and screenshots can be instantly saved to Onedrive at the press of a mouse if you wish, otherwise Onedrive will sync these from any selected folder listed on Ondrive.

Onedrive comes in-built with Windows 10 and is not enabled by default, follow this -

https://www.ghacks.net/2017/07/11/how-to-use-onedrives-files-on-demand-feature/

Right click any free space on desktop>new>shortcut.

Enter " ms-settings:windowsupdate" for location>next>enter name e.g WINDOWS UPDATE>finish.

You now have a shortcut to Windows update on your desktop, which you can click any time to see Windows updates.

Change icon -

Right click the shortcut>properties>change icon. Select which icon you like, then OK>apply>OK.

Click Start - extreme left on taskbar, the entire Windows menu is listed.

For any program listed that you wish to have a shortcut on your desktop, place cursor over it and hold down the cursor left key.
Drag the program to the desktop and release

You now have the program shortcut on your desktop.
This does not move the menu program, just creates a shortcut.

Right click any free space on desktop>new>shortcut.

Enter "C:\Windows\System32\timedate.cpl" for location>next>enter name e.g CLOCK>finish.

You now have a shortcut to Windows clock. Left click it and the analogue clock panel will show.

This can be left on the desktop as long as you wish - just click cancel or X to dismiss it.

Change icon -

Right click the shortcut>properties>change icon.

There is a clock icon amongst the many shown - click it>OK>apply>OK and the new icon now shows.

First create a desktop folder - right click any free space on your desktop>new>folder> give it a name e.g PHOTOS

1. Click Onedrive icon on taskbar or click Start>scroll to Onedrive - click - Onedrive panel comes up with listed folders.

2. Click the folder you want - list of files comes up - put cursor over the file you want to copy and it highlights in blue.

3. Go to "Home" in menu then "Copy to" - popup panel shows - scroll down list to the new folder you created and click, then OK/Apply.

A panel comes up copying the selected item to the new desktop folder. All done, the Onedrive folder/file is now in your new desktop folder.

Note - 2. A folder can be copied or a file inside that folder, using the same procedure.

Note - 3. If the new folder is not on the dropdown list shown, go to bottom of the list and click "choose location", another panel shows, go to bottom of the list and your new desktop folder should be shown - click it then "copy" and copying will start.

The whole thing from creating a desktop folder to copying the selected file only takes a couple of minutes.

My computer shows the American date e.g 07/05/21 when the UK date is expressed as 05/07/21. I find this very misleading. To correct to UK format do this -

Right click time and click "Adjust date/time".
Click "Date, time and regional formatting", top right.
Click "Change data formats" at bottom.
Short date - select format 05/04/2017
Long date - select Wednesday, 05 April 2017
All done - date now shows Monday, 05 July 2021 (today's date).

This is really for the techie.
1. To see Windows system information, simply type "system information" into the search box, taskbar bottom left and open the file.

2. To place a shortcut on your desktop, right click any space on the desktop, then on the popup panel - New>Shortcut. Enter "msinfo32" into the location box, click Next, type a name in the name box - e.g System Information and then Finish - you now have a desktop shortcut.

I have an extension which blocks all tracking cookies - DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials.
Normally sites just have 1-5 tracking cookies, but I have just noticed that Amazon have a world beating total of 21 tracking cookies !!!

I have never seen that number of site tracking cookies in my life.
SL have 2 tracking cookies - Google and Facebook.

Setting your browser to "Do not track" is simply a request, sites often ignore it.
The only way to stop trackers is by installing an anti-track extension.

https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-privacy-what-are-tracking-cookies.html

I answered to an email from a neighbour requesting if I would buy something for her £200 as she had trouble with her credit card and wanted it for a birthday the same day.
My answer I do not have accounts with Paypal or Amazon and I only mentioned 2 Supermarkets I do home delivery.
Phoning her this morning I found out it was a scam.

---Should I take further actions?----

After all the warnings --- and thinking about it now how could I.

This has just arrived on my updates panel for installing.
I personally will leave it a while before I install as i always do for Feature Updates.

Put the cursor on the top of the taskbar until the arrow turns into a vertical bar, then drag it up slightly until the day shows above the date.

The icons which showed on the bar are now in the pop-up box by clicking the arrow between the speaker icon and the weather.

when I try to strike the "e" key it does not always appear on my laptop screen I have to hit it several times to get it to work. Is there a quick fix, please?

Hi

Can any of you recommend a good, reasonably fast, and ideally free or low cost, Usenet news server, which carries the alt.binary groups, in particular the various groups related to old time radio?

Also ideally one where I can get a free trial to see if it carries the groups I want and how fast it is.

My ISP (Virgin Media) has just switched off it's news server, which I've been using for about thirty years, so I'm looking for a replacement.

Cheers

Tony

This is a Windows 10 built-in program, easy to use, only takes less than 3 minutes to run and is well worth running periodically.

You have to be logged on as Admin. to run it. It will delete any malicious software it finds.

It depends on how much you have on your C-drive, how long the scan will take to run. My C-drive has 915 GB max. storage and my used storage is 77 GB - a very small usage. Obviously more the storage, the longer the program will take to finish.

To use

Winkey + X>Run>Enter MRT.EXE>YES in popup panel>Next>Suggest Quick scan>Next>Scan starts>About 3 minutes>See results if needed>Otherwise Finish.