This morning, I received a panic call from a customer that had overnight, attempted to upgrade their laptop to the latest version of Windows 10. They told me that after they awoke, they discovered that their laptop was only showing a spinning circle at the bottom of the screen. First thing in this situation is not to panic! Windows 10 is incredibly self-healing and many times can fix things when given half a chance. By this I mean not to…
A couple of days ago I visited an innocuous website that had been hacked, albeit unbeknownst to me, by Internet cyber criminals. As soon as the website opened, I was greeted by both a webpage and Windows messenger message. The crooks had also activated my computer voice to read an ominous computer voice telling me that my computer had been blocked to protect the Internet. I would have to call a telephone “support” number to have my computer unlocked. I could…
I recently attended an interesting trouble call, about an upgrade problem of Windows 10. The customer had a Lenovo notebook with only a 32GB hard drive installed. This in itself, is not problem. However, after having the Windows 10 OS and a few other programmes installed, the hard drive has only 5GB of space left! The Windows 10 upgrade needed at least 16GB of hard drive space for the 32bit installation and 20GB for the 64bit installation. This space is…
Today we attended a customer that was having trouble connecting her new laptop wirelessly to her printer. The wireless setup was continuously failing because the software installation gave an error that it could not find the printer on the network. The client also complained that the Wi-Fi speed was varying wildly and was unreliable. Suspecting a neighbour’s co-channel Wi-Fi network, I activated an App on my smartphone that allowed me to look at the Wi-Fi spectrum. I was horrified to…
