All good things must come to an end, even Windows 7. After January 14, 2020, Microsoft will no longer provide security updates or support for PCs running Windows 7. So what are your options…

1) Buy a new computer with Windows 10.
2) You can purchase a copy of Windows 10 and upgrade your PC so long as it has the basic requirements.
3) If you have Microsoft Office 365 Business you can upgrade your Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 for free.

You can continue to use Windows 7, but once support ends, your PC will become more vulnerable to security risks. Windows will operate but you will stop receiving security and feature updates. Support for Internet Explorer on Windows 7 devices will also be discontinued on January 14, 2020.

How do you know if you have Windows 7? Look in the lower left hand corner of your computer.

Colorful Microsoft Flag = Windows 7
White Microsoft Flag = Windows 8 or 10

I just received my new hard drive crushing tool. It is called Pure Leverage Crusher. It has a simple but very effective design. As I have told many of my clients, the best way to make sure that no data can be recovered from your old hard drive is to damage the cylinders inside. Some people will take a hammer to their old HDD and work out their frustration while others will use a drill. I always felt that these methods, though effective, were labor intensive. So I was so glad to have found the Pure Leverage Crusher. Rather than my trying to explain it in words, I will let these pictures tell the story.

The end result

Let’s try a HDD from a laptop

This was much easier to do

I recently install a new gadget. The Amazon Dash Button. A conveniently located device that allows you to order a common item at just the push of a button. In this case, toilet paper. I have strategically place this button on the inside of the closet door were we store our extra TP. Yes, I buy my TP online thanks to the fact that GP Kroger stores only sell the jumbo size rolls. Don’t they know that most of us have old houses around here where jumbo rolls do not fit into the dispensers?

Buyer beware! Compare pricing before choosing this convenient device.  I bought one for Tide and Kleenex but Amazon’s prices were to were close to Kroger’s.

This is a first for me. A friend of mine stopped by for a visit and mentioned that her iPad was all funky. When I asked her to explain, she showed me that the colors were all crazy. I noticed right away that the display was damaged and suggested that she must have dropped it recently. On the contrary, she hit it with a fly swatter over a year ago and the color issue only began yesterday. After laughing about the fly swatter I decided to see if there were any suggested fixes for such a problem, short of sending it out for a new display. Immediately Google presented a number of posts and videos where people were fixing this issue with a hammer. That’s right, just like the one in the picture. So we watched a couple examples and low and behold, the place to tap, and I mean tap lightly, was in the exact same place where her display was damaged. So I pulled out my handy dandy hammer and began tapping. Low and behold, within four taps the color returned to normal. That’s one for the books or Facebooks.

My computer is six years old and its tiny 150GB hard drive was maxed out. So I finally pulled the trigger and decided to upgrade to a 500GB Solid State Drive (SSD). For those of you who do not know, a solid state drive is like an over grown USB thumb drive but it goes inside your computer where your old hard drive use to be. It does not have any moving parts or spinning disks so its ability to read and write information is infinitely faster. Well maybe be not infinitely faster, but 3x to 5x faster. Not bad for $185 in parts.

The upgrade took about 3.5 hours but only needed about an hour of my attention. The other 2.5 hours were spent on the hard drive cloning process, which did not need my involvement. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy the cloning process was and even though I ran into an error during my first attempt, it was quickly remedied. That is the good news. Here is the better news. My computer now runs faster than it did when it was new. It takes less than 10 seconds for it to fully boot. Not just to show the desktop but to finish loading all the background programs as well. Additionally, all my programs load and run much faster. I’ve taken the waiting out of my computer experience.

Now keep in mind, I bought this computer with the best processor available at the time. That is why I was able to get six years out of it before getting frustrated with its performance. So if you have an older computer with an i5 or i7 processor and want to buy some more time, I highly recommend this upgrade.