A slow personal computer can be one of the most frustrating things for the laptop or computer user. Once you attempt to launch your computer it takes an age, you try to load a program – it will take an age. It can quite often even make the slowest typist look fast as your pc battles to catch up to display the written text while you type your current information!

The most important question will be how come this occur? All things considered – your pc wasn’t slow when you got it? Actually, at the time, your laptop or computer was quite quick! Exactly where did it all go awry? (more…)

Amongst all the many nasty things out on the world wide web you may have heard of the relatively new phrase called Phishing.

Phishing comes from the word fishing (believe it or not!) and is a type of Internet threat that tries to con you into providing personal information. You may have had emails yourself saying that you have an important bank message waiting for you or similar.

The people that set these up are generally pretty clever – even the most savvy Internet user can fall for them. (more…)

Wireless networking technology is growing ever more popular. More and more people have multiple computers in their homes, these ultimately share an internet connection. No longer do you have to trail wires across your house to achieve this thanks to wireless routers becoming affordable and readily available.

Setting up a wireless network can seem daunting but is not really an overly difficult job. There are two main types of wireless router and you need to ensure you select the correct type for your connection. (more…)

One of the worst computer parts that can fail is your hard disk or hard drive. Unless you have been sensible and backed up your data regularly you could stand to lose everything.

A hard disk or hard drive is an internal component within your computer where all your files and folders including your operating system is stored. Without a hard disk your computer will not function. If you are unfortunate for your hard disk to fail then you need to know how to go about changing it for a new. (more…)

When your computer has been around for a while you may find that things start to get very slow. Booting up your computer used to take about 20 seconds now it’s possibly taking 20 minutes. The likely cause is too many start up items.

Start up items are programs that automatically load when your computer starts. It is meant for your convenience but most are not needed at start up at all. In fact, over times as this list of start up programs grow, your computer buckles under the strain and almost grinds to a halt.

So what can be done about this? (more…)

When your computer goes wrong and you have lost all hope the normal practice is to reformat your computer. This will ultimately resolve any software issues, viruses or any other nasties and give your computer a fresh start. But what happens if you have reformatted your computer and the problem still exists?

This means you have a computer hardware fault. This is where the problems start. (more…)

Computers are great when they work – allowing you instant communication with the world, endless information to learn about and the ability to entertain the whole family. Problems begin, though, when a computer or computer components do not any longer work correctly. Without the right knowledge this can become extremely frustrating.

There are several reasons why a computer may fail or not function correctly (more…)

It is quite often that someone in serious need of some computer assistance calls us or visits  our live chat and states that their computer is no longer working as it previously did. One of the first things we will check is if they have a firewall. Often we find that people are using high speed internet connections with no security – This is a disaster waiting to happen.

This is very important to understand -  if you have a co (more…)

You may have experienced it more than once in an hour – having pop-ups come up instead of the site you want to see. Sometimes they are helpful, but most of the time, they are annoying. The dangerous fact is that they can also be used as an attack method by phishing scams, spywares or worse.

Phishing is a type of e-mail scam that is used to gather information about one’s identity, which can be your username and password. (more…)

Following our recent post about keeping your computer secure for free there are a couple of other things you need to watch out for in the computing world that a firewall and antivirus may not protect you from.

Whilst these are not usually as severe as a virus or hacking attempt they can lead to a very slow computer, annoying popups adverts and a slow Internet connection. Often information about what you are looking at and sites you regularly visit are being passed to unscrupulous people to then spam you with adverts.

Spyware and Adware are usually to blame for this. (more…)