Dual boot

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

I've cracked it!

After lots of research and then taking several deep breaths, I've managed to set up my laptop with Vista AND Windows 8. It's all a bit geeky-techy, but you can create a separate space on the hard drive (a partition) and then install Windows 8 on that.

This is known in techie-circles as a "dual boot". If you're keen to try it, follow the excellent instructions on Mashable tech

The link itself is:
http://mashable.com/2012/11/08/dual-boot-windows-8/#1006651-Get-Windows-8

I know it talks about keeping Windows 7, but it works for Vista as well. Having said that, I found that my Vista wouldn't open the Windows 8  .iso file that I carefully downloaded and saved to a DVD disc,  but when I did it again and saved it to a memory stick (OK..."flash drive", if you insist!), it worked easily.

No, I have no idea why. I'm not a techie!

So there you are. You can have a go at Windows 8 without losing your "old" operating system. When you start your computer, you are given the choice of the two systems. It will default to Win 8 after 5 seconds, but you can change both the default system and the time delay.

I just wish I knew about this earlier! As I moaned in my last post, Windows 8 wiped out my installation of MS Office 2007 - and some other stuff. Did I say that Microsoft are getting greedier and greedier? I think I did. Very little is "bundled" with Win 8. There's not even "Microsoft Works", the free office suite that they always provided in the past. It was a simple version of Office, but good enough for most home users. (Someone told me that "Microsoft Works" was a great example of an oxymoron.....)

Back to the Start

Another moan I had about Win 8 was the absence of the Start button, leading to the Start Menu. I find the Start Menu really useful, so imagine my joy at finding a download which restores a Start Menu to Win 8. This came from a newspaper cutting which a client gave me today, after I persuaded him not to buy a new computer but to stick to his ancient IBM running XP. 

The cutting was taken from the Daily Telegraph 24th November and if you read it, you can find the link to StartMenu8

Well, there y'go! I've given you the link anyway!

Once you've downloaded this, you also get the chance to turn off the Windows 8  "Metro" Play School desktop and those  "pointy-in-the-corner-peek-a-boo" gizmos that the poor gentleman in the video on my last post failed to find! You won't need them if you've got the Start Menu. In fact you can make the whole desktop just like Windows 7.

I'm very pleased with this, as it gives me an option to offer to my more-experienced clients who have to buy Windows 8 in the future. They can still have something that looks familiar.



Colin

Windows 8

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

The Good Old Days....

When I first started this business four years ago, Windows Vista was the latest operating system from Microsoft. Anyone buying a new computer back in 2008 would have had to get to grips with Vista, and so I needed to be able to advise any clients who might be starting on a new computer. Although I'd been happy with Windows XP on my PC for the last 5 years, I invested in a laptop running Vista.

...and The Not-So-Bad Old Days

Well, by October 2009 - just a year later - Microsoft realised that the computing public were not entirely happy with Vista and so they brought out Windows 7. This was basically Vista without the annoying "gadgets". Windows 7 started up quicker than Vista, and Microsoft also made sure this time that the shut-down button on the Start Menu actually did shut the computer down.

I thought about upgrading my Vista to Win 7 but decided that it wasn't worth it. I adjusted the default "Sleep" to a genuine "shut-down" through Control Panel, turned off the "gadgets" and installed Windows Live Mail.....and near as dammit I had Windows 7. But after reading the promotional blurb about Windows 8 this Autumn I realised that this new operating system would have to be investigated. So I downloaded it and installed it over my Vista system.....

The Present Day

First, I was really surprised how cheap it was to get a new operating system upgrade from Microsoft. One should be surprised to get anything cheap from Microsoft!

£24.99 it cost me to download it. It installed very easily too, and I was left with the suspicion that Microsoft were really keen for me - and everyone else - to have Windows 8. Here's the logo that Microsoft use to promote Windows now:

After the colourful logos for preceding versions of Windows, this one looks as though it's still in draft. But that's a minor point. I'd done some preparatory reading about Windows 8 so what I saw on my screen wasn't a complete surprise to me.

I'd read that things were going to be very different.......

This is what greets you on Windows 8. Some of these tiles, anyway. Each one represents an "App" - that's "application" if like me you're comfortable with four-syllable words. You can get your "Apps" from the Microsoft App Store. Some of them are free - and others aren't! The tiles remind me of chunky Lego. As I remember, I was given Apps for Twitter, Facebook, News feeds.....but had to go to the Store to get the "Google App". One of the tiles said "Desktop" and when I clicked on it I breathed a momentary sigh of relief - there I was looking at a familiar desktop.

But.....

THERE WAS NO START MENU!

Now my preliminary research had prepared me for this, but it's only when you start exploring Windows 8 for yourself that you realise the implications of this. For years, I've made a habit of using my Start Menu for all the stuff that I use regularly.
(Microsoft put all sorts of unlikely things on the Windows 7 Start Menu but you could easily wipe those off in Control Panel/Task Bar and Start Menu and then "pin" your own preferences to the menu.)
The "old" Start Menu also contained "All Programs" so you could easily see what was on your computer.

I don't want to be labelled an old fogey - I'm going to have to face up to Windows 8 when someone gets a new computer for Christmas - or even before - and wants some help with it. After all, that's what my business is all about! I am going to have to be professionally encouraging about Windows 8 to those clients who are new to using a computer, They won't have known anything different. But anyone who's been happily  using XP, Vista or Win 7 will get a rude shock when they buy a new computer from the High Street stores. Windows 8 is designed with hand-held or "tablet" devices in mind, for people whose primary use of a computer is for "social networking". But for PC users it's going to be full of frustration.

See what this gentleman has to say about it......

I never thought I would hear myself say this, but I prefer my old Vista OS to Windows 8 and so I re-installed Vista after just two days. Perhaps I should have given Win 8 more of a chance, but I know I'll meet lots of it in the coming year. I wonder if it will last even as long as Vista did.

Incidentally, I had the complete suite of Microsoft Office 2007 on Vista. It wouldn't work in Windows 8. No doubt I would have had to buy numerous "Office Apps". My built-in microphone wouldn't work with Win 8 either, so using Skype was a frustrating experience - a mixture of text messages, exaggerated smiles and hand gestures on my part! The re-installation of Vista wiped out my Office suite completely.....and I had four days-worth of updates to install to get things back to "normal".

Grrrrrrrrrr!

Back up!

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

I keep all my clients' info on an Access database and all my accounts on an Excel spreadsheet. I'm quite proud of the database - in a modest sort of way. I devised it after several months of self-imposed study of SQL Server so that I had some idea of relational databases, all part of a rather desperate strategy to add to my fledgling programming skills and make myself more employable. There's a whole story there which I won't bore you with now. Anyway, by the time I'd waded through a whole fat blue Microsoft "Self-paced Training Kit" I had the basics of how to set up a home database and make queries of it.

I'm lucky to have Access. Time was when you could buy the full "Microsoft Office Suite" for a reasonable price. I'm talking Office 2003 here, which included:

• Word
• Outlook
• Access
• Excel
• Publisher
• PowerPoint
• Office Tools

Since the 2007 edition of Office, Microsoft have been less generous - oh let's call a spade a spade, they've got greedy - and although you could get Home & Student editions of Office 2007 and Office 2010 which included Word, Excel and the PowerPoint Viewer, you would have had to buy Outlook, PowerPoint and Access separately - at considerable expense! 

When I bought my latest desktop PC in 2007 it had the Vista operating system installed, but I'd read some reviews by then and the first thing I did with my new computer was to wipe Vista off and install good ol' Windows XP. Although I didn't realise it immediately, this was a good move for my "Office" as it enabled me to keep my old 2003 suite, including Access. 

And since then I've been happily keeping my records on 2003 software....until last week, when I came home from a client and tried to open my Excel spreadsheet to record my acquisition of yet more hard-earned loot.

It wouldn't open! 

A little window popped up to tell me that something "couldn't be found" and please put in the Office 2003 disc. Well, the disc "couldn't be found" either - heaven knows where I've put it! -  and panic nearly ensued. None of my Excel spreadsheets was working, so all my accounts for four years were inaccessible. 

But it's not like me to panic - not immediately anyway. My Access database was working, so was Word, so was everything else, so perhaps I'd done something inadvertently stupid to Excel. I tried looking for answers on Google, and after browsing through several forums (fora??) someone mentioned "restore point". It's something I have very rarely used but I thought this might just save the day - or save four years, to be more precise! Excel was working the day before - and the day before that - and all through 2011....so if I could take my PC back a couple of days all might be well. 

And so it turned out. I used the System Restore and took the PC back. My spreadsheets are miraculously working again. But it gave me a scary few minutes and reminded me of the advice that I read on other tutors' sites: 

BACK UP YOUR FILES! 

For something as important as the accounts, I really should get in the habit of storing them on a disk......and I shall.

PostScript

After the initial panic, a little analytical reason kicked in and - before I tried the System Restore - I did successfully right-click on an Excel icon and "Open with..." OpenOffice.org 

I installed this suite some time ago and have worked with it, mainly so that I could help a client use it a couple of years ago. It's free to download and is generally very good. I'd recommend having this as a backup office suite - you might prefer it to Microsoft's. 

Colin

That was Summer

by COLIN MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Very slow over the summer. Well, you know - June, July and August, what we usually call "Summer". Looking back over my records 2009-11 I see that this time of year has been not quite as lucrative as Autumn and Winter and I put this down to the good weather that we expect. My clients get out in their gardens or just get out and about, but as the weather cools and the nights draw in business picks up dramatically through September and October.

Well, so I fervently hope! I thought that all the rain we've had would have kept people indoors and they'd be on the phone asking for lessons - something to do while the rain poured down! Maybe these same people left the country, seeking the sun elsewhere. Or maybe it's The Recession. Whatever the reason, it's been a bad summer for my business. How was yours, computer tutors?

Still, I haven't been idle. I'm looking to expand the web design side of my services and have been searching out techniques and practising them. I am determined to keep my websites "Web compliant", strictly in line with the World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C) guidelines. I'm not a SEO guru - huge books are written on the subject and people run businesses totally devoted to Search Engine Optimization - but I do know that the search engines favour webpages that follow the W3C. The basic good design principles are:

• Use W3C-approved HTML for your content mark-up
• Separate the styling from the content 
• Make sure each page has a relevant title

And then some 'Dont's':

• Don't use table HTML for the layout of your webpage
• Don't use JavaScript
• Don't stuff 'keywords' into the head metadata 
• etc
• etc

So I keep all the styling in a Cascading StyleSheet (CSS), or maybe use more than one. And I'm always looking for ways to achieve the effects I want by using "pure CSS". Google's wonderful for this. Recently I wanted to find a way to make a picture viewer, where the user can click on a little 'thumbnail' picture and the big version appears in a window on the page:

You can see an array of thumbnails on the left and the main viewer window showing the beautiful Monica Bellucci. Any pictures will do to experiment with - I found a gallery of the lovely Monica on the web and borrowed some of the pictures!

All done with clever CSS. You can make the thumbnails 'opaque' until you hover over one. Here, they are 40% opaque except one on the right (because I left the mouse pointer 'hovering over it)

This is a very useful technique which I'm longing to use on my next project - if it demands it, of course. Bed & breakfast and similar websites will benefit from this viewer showing pictures of the different rooms, for example.

Also found a way to make pretty coloured columns all the same depth, no matter how much content is in them, like this:

Most webpages are arranged in columns. The really good thing about this is that the columns are defined as a percentage of the total width available on your screen, so however small the screen is, you can still see the full width of the page.
Very pleased to have found this technique. I shall be using this a lot if I get the chance. Do contact me if you'd like to know more.


August Charity

Very briefly.....

Bumped into Sam in High Town, Hereford, who was toting Friends of the Earth. It was very near the end of the month and I hadn't decided on a charity, so I said hers would be it. Realise now that I did FoE back in the Spring, but never mind. Sometimes it's just first come first served!

Colin

July Charity

by Colin  MY COMPUTER TUTOR

It's still July and I'm going to make it! I'm going to post about my month's charity within the month. I like a charity to present itself each month - and usually it does. One of my clients might bring a charity to my attention, or a charity might bounce up to me in the street. As you know, that's happening to me all the time!

Well, a couple of weeks ago I was mooching through Sainsbury's, hoping that something would suggest itself for supper, when I spied the shapely back of a T-shirt that said "Cathedral Belles". I thought that was quite witty - and anyway I recognised the lady as a local teacher. So to cut a long story, she was going to run thousands of metres in aid of Cancer Resarch UK. And I wished her well and thanked her for becoming my July Charity.
Carole and Co., the aforementoned "Cathedral Belles" have run their race. Here there are in a promotional pose. Hmmmm....Carole's the one not holding a race number. I hope I didn't back the wrong filly!

Hundredth post!

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR
Yes, this is my 100th post. Not sure what the average postings for bloggers is, but I think I've been "blogging" for two-and-a-half years so I post roughly once every ten days. That's more than I thought, considering I've let it go for two months not so long ago!

Web Design: A Salutary Lesson

I've designed and published four websites, including my own, over the last three years. I practised with HTML and CSS on my own computer to see what the results would be, and then a friend asked me if I could design a website for his B&B business. It was one of the fastest decisions I've made in my life - I said yes, I could. I dashed home and frantically studied the ins and outs of domains, registering them, hosting etc. etc. and convinced myself that I could do it.

My friend got an absolute bargain - he had no artwork, no logo nor any sort of branding and I put in hours and hours of work to make sure he had a robust, informative and welcoming website. I'd already quoted him the overall price and generously said that it would include two years' hosting. But it was my very first professional attempt....and I've learnt a lot since, not least about pricing!

And having used him as the 'guinea pig', I went ahead and designed myself a website for My Computer Tutor. Since then, I've had a couple of other commissions and the experience of using music players and picture viewers - I've had to do some study, but I really enjoy the challenge.

And I really thought I'd got the basics sorted...until two weeks ago when my web hosting company informed me that they'd moved my domains to new IP addresses. I was told I didn't have to do anything, unless I was "managing your own DNS entries". They said that this was "unusual", so I assumed that I need do nothing. But then a week later, all four of "my" websites went down.

Now, it's not like me to panic. I thought that an email to Mine Host would sort this out:

Dear Sirs,
My websites have disappeared. Please tweak whatever it takes and make them appear again before my clients notice. Lots of love..

I'm not going to name my hosting company - they've been very good over the years, and I have had prompt replies on previous queries of mine. It's just that they seem to have got security-twitchy. Whereas previously they were happy if I quoted their "ticket" reference to convince them that it was indeed ME, now they insist that I give the last four characters of my password OR the last four digits of the banker's card I use to pay them OR the PIN for my control panel....on EVERY email I send! But eventually I got the expertise I needed.

Their new computer doesn't like index.htm

The "home" page of a website is usually identified by the file-name 'index', and as the file is written in HTML the extension for HTML files can be .html or .htm

Given the choice, I thought .htm was better because

• It's consistent with the great majority of 'extensions' which are three letters
• Typing three characters takes less time and effort than typing four!

Well, how wrong was I? Mine Host's new computer uses UNIX or something. whereas their old one used Windows, which is - of course - good ol' Microsoft! Now don't get me started...as a rather geeky friend pointed out to me the other day:

As long as Microsoft are around, you'll never be out of work, Colin!

I spent a very tedious couple of hours last night going through all the files of all "my" websites changing all references to index.htm to index.html It's solved the problem. The websites are all up and running again. Hey ho! There's always something to learn..............

Colin

June Charity

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

A quick post to say that I've decided on my June charity. Or rather, it's been decided for me. It's the old story - there I was returning from the bank in Hereford High Town and one of those happy young women intercepted me. She was wearing a bib which said Concern Universal on it.

I told her that I'd already contributed to her charity this year, but I didn't protest too much. After all, it was the 21st June and I hadn't found a charity, and here was a perfectly good one smiling at me! I told Jodie I'd been "chugged" but she immediately translated that as "charity hugged, which I thought was quick and charming thinking!

And after all (again) Concern Universal's HQ is Hereford - just around two corners - so it would save me a postage stamp. So, there y'go....that's the June charity sorted.

(I can't believe I wrote that....must be all these young kids I keep meeting)

Colin

PPI

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Are you getting lots of phonecalls recently? Are you dashing to the phone when it rings, expecting or hoping it to be a friend, member of your family, a prospective or returning client, maybe...?
I pick up my phone and say "Good morning/afternoon/evening. Colin Rivett here..."and I expect the person who's phoned me to speak. But all too often - and I really mean far too often - it's an unsolicited call from people who assume that I took out a Payment Protection Insurance policy.

I'm wise to it now. There's always a 4-5 second delay before anyone speaks to you, so usually I put the phone down after 2 seconds. Sometimes it's a recorded message that starts to tell me just how urgent this is....and then I put the phone down. If I'm at my desk in the office it's not too troublesome - 2 seconds is all it takes to decide whether to listen or hang up. But if I'm downstairs doing something else, I tend to dash upstairs to the office when the phone rings because my diary and my notebook are up there and - there's always hope - it might be a client. Imagine my frustration, gentle reader, when it's one of those PPI calls.

That's me with a quizzical look on my face, holding my "legacy" handset. I look pretty frazzled, don't I? And that's a polite way of putting it. Sometimes I feel I should make my upstairs dash worthwhile, so I wait for the agent to speak and then tell him very firmly that I don't have PPI and please remove my number. It makes me feel a little better, but I'm not so naive to think that they won't phone again. The automated messages invite you to press '5' to start making your claim or '9' if you wish to be removed from the database, but I've read so many complaints on Internet forums from people who have tried pressing '9' only to find it makes no difference.
On my BT phone I can use the 1471 service, which tells me the last number to call me. By typing the number into Google (it's best to put a space after the area code) you can find out if there are any references on the Web. In other words, you can see if it's a business number. And Google always returns references from a website called PhoneNotes which tells you the area/city where the call comes from. You'll see several comments from exasperated people if the number is a PPI agency. The PPI calls seem to come from all round the UK.

And so:

The May Charity

The phone rang...."Good afternoon, Colin Rivett here" and a young man started asking me how I was today. Feeling a bit waspish, I hung on and let him woffle on a bit, expecting it to be PPI. But he said he was phoning from Save the Children and went on to tell me how terrible it was for children in various parts of the world and wouldn't I want to do something about it and....

I gently cut him short and explained that I made a contribution from my business to a different charity every month. I hunted through my records while speaking to him and discovered that I hadn't made a donation to Save The Children, so I thanked him for phoning and said that I would write a cheque and post it with my covering letter to their HQ.

But instead of thanking me he went on, trying to get me to sign up for a direct debit. And that's when I got suspicious! Donations over the phone would mean giving out my debit card details - and I had no guarantee that he was actually phoning on behalf of a bona fide charity.
And the worst thing was: He hadn't said "thank you"!

So I rather curtly stopped him and put the phone down. I made Save The Children my May Charity - I wrote them a cheque and sent it with my usual covering letter. I always describe the circumstances in which the charity was brought to my notice, so I reported the telephone experience I'd just had and gave them the number from which the call had come. (That very useful 1471 service again!)

About a week later I received a thank you letter from the Save The Children office, confirming that the phone number was a bona fide one of theirs. But I'm still surprised about the pushy sales technique.

Oh well, I wasn't going to pursue it any more. I mean, I wouldn't want people to start calling me grumpy!

Colin

Now where was I...?

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

This is disgraceful. It's two months since I last posted on my blog. And rather than splurge all my stories into one enormous posting, I'll split them up...but where to start?

I gotta new car...sort of

I've been meaning to show you the improved MCT car.It's the same old car but I've had the business name re-done. The first people to do the sign-writing service for me had their own quirky ideas about the lettering.
I knew what it said, of course, but anyone else standing more than 5 yards away had difficulty in reading exactly what it said - and little hope at all if the car was moving!
RS Signs up the road from me here in Hereford steamed the old lettering off and then re-did it in the Arial font I'd originally chosen for My Computer Tutor. In pure white, it shows up really well.

Would you believe it, I had this done back in October last year. My camera was a write-off and it's taken me all this time to organize some batteries for my son's old camera. That was all it needed! And yes, the photo was taken during Jubilee weekend - you can see some Union Flag bunting waving loyally over my mother's garage. You didn't think I'd hang up bunting, did you?

Colin
 

Spring is in the air...

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

...or so I thought! Two weeks ago I was out in my garden in shorts, playing with bricks. This week I don't think I've been out once without a scarf and I've been lighting the smoky old Rayburn in my kitchen to keep warm in the day.

Still, what can we do about it all? I rarely bother with weather forecasts because we just have to take what comes. Which is why the washing I put out to dry this morning is now having a second rinse! And here we are in April with its showers sweet - or shoures swich - or however Chaucer spelled it. I've come to realise that April is a 'down' month for the business, what with the Easter holidays, and gardens starting to show serious signs of growth. Many of my clientele are of the gardening/off-peak break/golf type....oh let's face it, they're retired! So bookings tend to drop at this time of the year as they rediscover The Great Outdoors.

But I don't let that get me down now. I can take advantage of it and give myself a break. It's very hard as director of a one-man self-employed business to tell yourself to take time out. Yes, time is money, as they say, but what is life if you're just living to work and working to live? So I'm taking a break for a week. All the Easter singing ends for me at about 1645 on Sunday and on Monday I shall be flinging a few essentials in a bag (man's packing!) and - as our US cousins say - outta here.

March has been a tolerably good month - the best this calendar year. That doesn't say very much, since March is only the 3rd month! March 2010 and 2011 were boom months - KER-BOOM months - and I'll need to do some serious advertising and promotion work when I get back to make sure the business picks up again. But for the moment, it's happy holidays!

April Charity

I've spent some time tidying up loose ends at the beginning of the month, which makes me feel good. And I've made sure I got this month's charity sorted promptly. I was on my way back from the bank in Hereford - I swear these lovely people stake out the banking areas of towns - and I got 'chugged' again!

Katerina caught my eye. I tried and tried to avoid her, but......well, as usual I got my spiel in first. She was inviting people to support Concern Universal, which is based in Hereford. I've supported them before, but it must be over a year ago and anyway why should that stop me doing it again? They are still a good cause. So that solved the monthly charity choice.

It's a very small office in Hereford, so all these people couldn't possibly fit. This must be a conference or something similar. Whoever and wherever...they look a happy bunch!


Colin

The Passage of Time

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

March Charity

Just up the road from where I live is The Courtyard Theatre and Centre for The Arts. It's only 400 yards from me and yet I rarely make use of it. It's an example of what we all experience in our own neighbourhoods. Because something is nearby you keep telling yourself "I can go there ANYTIME..." and so you never go there!
There's always something on, although it's not always to my taste, but over the passing years I must have missed loads of good plays, concerts, recitals....and films. In fact, every February/March for the last ten years, the Courtyard Theatre has been running the Borderlines Film Festival - and for nine of those years I've missed it. But this year I made sure that I went to see some films - four films, actually: The Artist, My Week with Marilyn, The Descendants and Carnage.

The Courtyard is a great place. It's not in a particularly good place, being smack-bang opposite Hereford United football ground halfway up Edgar Street, half a mile out of the city centre.

But people beat a path to its door and when I discovered that it is a Registered Charity I thought that I would make it my charity for March.

Well done and thank you, Courtyard. I'll be back!

My printer

I do so much printing of pages for the manuals I give my clients that I got fed up with renewing cartridges for my terribly slow ink-jet printer. So in October 2010 I went to one of those bright yellow cartridge shops and asked for advice. My bright yellow shop is run by a very helpful young couple and they advised me to go for a laser printer. And I did - and I've been using it ever since. It takes four massive "toner cartridges" and they have lasted 15 months!

I have just replaced two of them (£35 each) and I can see that the other two will need replacing in the next week or so, but what a bargain! I dread to think how many fiddly little ink-jet cartridges I would have needed over the course of 15 months. And the laser printer is so much faster.

I have kept the old "all-in-one" printer and use it purely for its scanning function. My super-duper laser printer can't do that!


Colin

Slipping!

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

I started this month by telling you about my January charity. I've come this far through February and still haven't sorted out February's charity. It's March next week!

So before another day slips away I shall make my February charity donation. I haven't been accosted in the town centre recently but I have started a new client whose husband is recovering from a stroke, so it's going to be The Stroke Association.

And I'm open to suggestions for March's charity.....let's see if I can get that done and dusted next week.

Leaflets

I've been out and about with leaflets. The calendar year has got off to a patchy start and I decided to tread the local pavements again and shove some reminders through doors! I have a Hereford street map pinned on the office wall and I've highlighted in yellow the streets I've leafletted over three years of business. I wrote several blogposts on the joys of distributing leaflets over a year ago and since then I've become more selective. Many local streets I haven't 'done' for two years. Each leaflet costs me 3.3 pence so I'm thinking quite carefully about the "likely" streets to target.

I've also had 500 "business" leaflets printed - leaflets which I shall put through the doors of small businesses. 500 is only a small print run and each leaflet works out at about 15p - very expensive -  but this is a bit of an experiment for me. I'm going for local businesses, bed & breakfasts, mobile services like gardeners, plumbers, builders. The idea is to emphasise my website design, spreadsheet and database services. I can spread these leaflets around far more widely, because after the initial consultation I could do this sort of work at home. I'll let you know what response I get....


Attachments

Dare I mention email again? I wrote a series of posts about Microsoft's mail clients last year. My general lament was that they'd done away with Outlook Express and applied their policy of

"if it ain't broke, do away with it and force the public to pay us more for something that we rushed out before fully testing it."

Well, at the moment I seem to be spending a lot of time steering people through the mysteries of downloading attachments with BT Yahoo! Mail. I'm not a great fan of webmail but if a customer has started using it I work with it rather than trying to introduce a mail client - unless it's AOL, of course!

I find that the important concept to get across is that 'webmail' means that you are looking at e.g. BT's mail computer, like any other website. So all your mail and the pictures that people send you are "out there somewhere", not stored on your computer. There are some advantages to this, but when you want to save those pictures, use one of them as your desktop perhaps, it's quite a lengthy process to download them.

I've spent a long evening taking screenshots of BT mail and compiling them into what I hope is a useful manual that explains how to download picture attachments and save them in a convenient folder. And it's the saving "in a convenient folder" that is the biggest problem. Perhaps I should say the fiddliest problem. BT still sends photo attachments in a zipped folder. The photos have to be extracted from this...and you have to be careful not to save the photos inside the same zipped folder!

• Does anyone know of any advantage now in using zipped folders? It seems that they save only a few kilobytes out of a total of megabytes - 3 orders of magnitude bigger!

• Does anyone else find that a major problem that people have with their computers is in the saving of things? The difference between Save and Save As... and the importance of choosing where to save stuff?

I notice also that Microsoft's "Windows Live Mail" (not to be confused with "Windows Mail" nor with "Live Mail" which used to be called "Hotmail"...silly me, how could anyone get confused?) stores photo attachments on a thing called SkyDrive. This, I presume, is a remote computer. So WLM is a hybrid between a mail client and webmail.

Is this what is meant by "cloud computing"? I suppose we'll all catch up with it eventually.

Colin

Long month

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

This month has seemed interminable. But I shouldn't complain about the passage of time. I have managed to get a lot done on the work and home fronts. It all started early, of course, with New Year over I was back to work on the 3rd Jan, although the first two weeks were very patchy. But over the third weekend emails came in and the phone rang and I ended up with 11 sessions for the following week.

For the last three years, January has been a really good month for this business. In fact, January to March and September to December appear to be the best seasons. So it was a bit worrying to have two thin weeks to start this year. Phrases like "recession" and "economic cutbacks" echoed round my head. But here we are at the end of January and it's turned out fairly well - a good mix of new and returning clients and some website maintenance work added up to a viable income.

Oh yes....that word "income". Play word association with that and most people would say 'TAX', would they not? I set aside a whole day to completing my return online last week but had it all done in a morning. And I mean all done! Online submissions to HMRC are scary, because you get The Answer straight back...and then it says "Pay Now". But The Answer was tolerable enough for me to pay and still leave something in the business. I felt good about having done it - nothing's certain except death and taxes, someone said. Not much of a choice, is it?

Two things made my tax return easier this year:

• I invested in a three-drawer filing cabinet to celebrate the start of my fourth business year last November, and after spending a morning labelling suspension files and putting all my records into them I now find it much easier to scoot my chair over to the cabinet and pick things out, rather than rummaging through wallet files which I kept in those 'magazine holders'. I should say I spent a painful couple of weeks recovering from single-manhandling the filing cabinet up the stairs....but it was worth it!
• Back in October - when I knew I'd missed the paper return and would have to do it online - I set up running totals for my business expenditure on the spreadsheet where I record all transactions. So when the Evil Day came I would have ready-to-hand the separate totals I'd spent on advertising, office materials, travel etc. etc.

I set these up at the bottom of the sheet. The column headings - 'Supplier', 'Invoice No.' etc. don't apply here!

This is an Excel spreadsheet, by the way.

You use the function SUMIF so that you add the money IF it was for "Travel", for example:

So when it came to filling in detailed allowable expenses this saved me a lot of time.

I'm was so pleased with this idea, that I've set up running totals for each category for my 2011-2012 spreadsheet, so that at any time I can tell myself how much I've spent on advertising or office supplies etc. etc. to date.

Next year's return should be a doddle!

Colin

New Year 2012

by Colin MY COMPUTER TUTOR

Well...never mind Bank Holiday! My phone was ringing at 9am today and I have clients booked for this week. Not a full week, but it's a start.

And I've found this to be the way it goes at this time of the year(s). December of course fizzles out on the 22nd/23rd and no-one wants lessons for the rest of the month. But come January and I've been very busy. In fact, January, February and March seem to be the best months for computer tuition demand. Perhaps people are still getting computers for Christmas, or maybe it's the New Year Resolution Syndrome.

So Happy New Year everybody! I've had a spasm of New Year Resolution Syndrome myself. It's not a matter of formally promising myself anything, just the natural feeling of turning the years - putting one year behind you and making a fresh start. Having got all the singing and the family visits out of the way I realised that I had 5 or 6 days in which I could DO THINGS without feeling that I ought to be teaching or advertising.

So I'm redesigning my kitchen....and as soon as I finished I have all those Seville oranges to turn into marmalade!


December Charity

One thing leads to another.....I needed to get a shoe repaired so went to a local repairer, expecting to book it in and pick it up a few days later. But the guy mended the shoe on the spot. When I asked how much I owed him he said "Oh it's nothing, only a dab of glue - just put something in the charity box". The charity he supports is the Air Ambulance, which is something I've been meaning to contribute to for some time, so there it is...December's charity. So I put some coins in the box, but there's a cheque in the post as well.

Goodbye to Joe

About a month ago I popped in to see my friend Joe who has run PC Retail in Hereford for many years. I recommend - and rely on - two 'techies' in my local area: Joe for repairs and sales, and Will for technical on-the-spot troubleshooting. But Joe had a sad tale to tell: he moved his shop only a year ago, because of ever-increasing rent and rates, to a better site - on a main road, more visible, customer parking - and yet he's had to wind it all up. He's got himself work in a different line of retail up in Yorkshire, which is good for him. But it's a shame that he's gone. He provided a very good service. All the best Joe!


Colin