Reports from 2019

Update 5th December 2019

Another quiet week with only Anne and Keith at yesterday's meeting.

Like most members of the group Anne uses the free version of Avasat Anti Virus and she is being bombarded with special offers to upgrade and to use other services from Avast. Anne's PC was defaulting to the the recently introduced Avast Browser rather than her preferred browser, Google Chrome. We got rid of the unwanted browser using the Add/Remove function. (details here for reference)

We then looked at new Lostwithiel u3a website which has only been operational for a few days.

With Christmas approaching it was agreed not to hold a meeting on the third Wednesday this month (18th December)

The first Wednesday in January is New Years Day so it was decided that the next meeting will be held on 8th January 2020. There may be another meeting during January depending upon demand.

The first and third Wednesday routine will resume on Wednesday 5th February 2020.

Happy Christmas and Merry New Year to all group members

Update 21st November 2019

Only two people at yesterday's meeting.

We had both been suffering from a slowing down of our Windows 10 PC's which had become more noticeable following several recent updates from Microsoft. After looking at how our PC's were performing using Task Manager and preventing several unnecessary programs launching at Start Up, we looked at a couple of articles with suggestions for improving speed.

After the meeting Keith found an article about using ReadyBoost in conjunction with an external USB drive. Keith tried this suggestion on two computers and in both cases an improvement in speed was noticeable,

The next meeting will take place on Wednesday 4th December starting at 2pm at Keith's house.

Update 7th November 2019

Only Anne and Keith were at latest meeting, which was very informal.

We started the meeting chatting about the very impressive bulk emails that we had both received from Eden Project ( https://bit.ly/32uqDS9 ) and Lost Gardens of Heligan ( http://bit.ly/2WRUbHT )

As Anne had not used her PC recently we checked that all recent Windows updates had been downloaded correctly. The process followed was as follows

From Start Menu click on Settings > Update & Security settings > Windows Update. Here, press Check for updates

We then looked at ways in which a Microsoft username can be retrieved by sending an access code to a mobile phone and also to a linked gmail account.

The next meeting will take place on 20th November at 2pm at Keith's house.

Update 4th October 2019

Only two members of the group came to Wednesday's meeting.

Initially we looked at various cloud storage systems, in particular One Drive and Google Drive and how using one of these options allows you to access your files from several devices.

After discussing settings on Androd phones we then looked at ways of transferring a large number of images using Google Photos.

There will not be a meeting on 16th October.

The next meeting will take place on Wednesday 6th November 2019 at 2pm.

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Update 19th September 2019

Three people came to yesterday's meeting.

One member of the group hadn't used her PC very much over the summer period, so her PC is still using Windows Version 1809 rather than Version 1903. We discussed how these various updates are applied and how they can be "forced" via the setting window (More info in this article )

Quite a lot of the meeting was taken up discussing intearction between Android Phones and PC's. In particular we looked at the way pictures taken on a mobile phone automatically transfer to Google photos. We talked about photo file sizes and how the original photo (in terms of file size and dimensions) can be retrieved from Google Photos.

A group member had been sent a video in MOV format and we looked at ways of viewing this file on an Andriod phone. (Various options are described in this article. ) It also appears that the VLC for Andriod App should play MOV files on an Andriod phone, but we didn't try this.

The next meeting will take place on Wednesday 2nd October 2019 at 2pm.

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