Technical Solutions 2020
The Ottawa PC Users’ Group is considering presenting a series of Zoom video-conferences to provide answers to your technical issues. This is your chance to request topics that you would find useful and suggest the best times to run such sessions.
Review the following topics and then click on the link at the bottom of the page to send your preferences to the organizers.
Whoa, backup! Effective strategies for keeping your computer files safe
Think about everything that is on your computer; videos of the grandkids playing in a park, photos of your trip to Patagonia (lucky you!), tax records, emails… Now think about whether those files exist anywhere else. If the answer is no, you need to think about backup. You could lose data due to viruses, fire, theft, tornado, hard disk failure, making an unintended change to a file, or a wayward finger deleting a file rather than copying it. Chris Taylor and Alan German will discuss various ways you can ensure your important data survives any catastrophe.
Windows Performance Tune-up
If your Windows computer is getting sluggish, you don’t have to re-install Windows just to gain back lost performance. Chris Taylor will demonstrate and explain how to safely use many native and free 3rd party tools that can help speed up Windows. While a few techniques are exclusive to the latest version of Windows 10, most also apply to older versions of Windows.Basic photo editing – learn easy, stunning techniques
It is easy to take hundreds of photos with your digital camera. But then what? Lynda Buske will help you discover easy ways to organize and enhance your photos by adjusting light, colour, and composition so you will be proud to display them. Lynda will be using free photo editing software available for both Windows and MacOS.Sharing photos for free on the web
Lynda Buske will show you how to put your pictures up on line so they can be viewed by friends and family. See how to set up a shared site at Shutterfly.com with unlimited, FREE storage and how to customize your site. Learn how to add and organize both photos and albums and how to enable people to make comments.
Upgrade your PC – at least the easy stuff
Some hardware upgrades are actually very simple to do yourself. Desktop computers are usually the easiest as there is ready access to the interior and lots of space in which to work. (In fact, the hardest part of the process may be removing the cover from the case!) Some laptops also let you replace some items by providing access covers. In this session, Alan German will focus on upgrading some hardware components that can really improve your computer’s performance – including more memory and swapping a conventional hard drive for an SSD.Linux 101 – An Introduction to the “Other” Operating System
In this session, Alan German will explore some of the reasons why one might consider running Linux rather than or, more likely, in addition to Windows. We will see that a typical Linux distribution contains everything one might need – the complete operating system and many useful applications – and that installation of all of this software is a snap. We will also find that, as with all computer-related items, Linux has its own share of annoyances, but is also capable of being extensively tweaked, with detailed instructions readily available from web-based sources. And, did we mention that all of this comes at zero cost – apart from the expenditure of a little time?
Reduce the anxiety of managing your passwords using #PasswordPhrasing
#PasswordPhrasing is all about making it easier to manage passwords. Lawrence Patterson (ISSO, ITIL & two decades supporting people’s personal / professional technology needs) will review the changing landscape of keeping our lives secure by evangelizing our individualism, showing how typing the same set of characters can bring an inner smile as well as sharing techniques that will focus less on the complexity and more on the way we each think. Acknowledging that password advice has varied significantly in the last few years and is expected to change further in the coming months / years, Lawrence will explore the challenges and discuss why #PasswordPhrasing is important to all of us, all the while making the connection between passwords and footwear!Scam avoidance and trust
For as long as humans have been communicating with each other, scams exist in one form or another, we no longer just have our front door or home phone to guard against and now the baddies have multiple ways to have the victim immediately become susceptible to blind trust actions. Join Lawrence Patterson (ISSO, ITIL & two decades supporting people’s personal / professional technology needs) as he reviews the significant difference between blind and wise trust, the various scam sources, tips to be aware of, details common to all scams and most importantly how to take control. As we review the various scam methods, participants will be encouraged to speak out on their own examples as we all learn how to become more aware and protect our electronic and personal lives.
Complete our questionnaire on the topics and
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