Do you want to know which programs are using your internet data?

Do you want to know which programs are using your internet data?

By Emile Greyling / Kim Komando

Not everyone is fortunate enough to have uncapped internet all the time. Have you ever wondered where your monthly internet bandwidth has gone to? 

Sometimes we are not even halfway through the month and all our data has been depleted.

Do you know what your computer is up to while you’re away, or what it’s doing right under your nose? 

If you have a server or firewall on your network it makes this task much easier – since all internet traffic can be routed through the server / firewall and a detailed report can be generated on who accessed what sites and the amount of data that a specific user consumed during the month.

If you are a home user or if you do not own a server or firewall – internet monitoring and management becomes more difficult.

Home users and small business owners usually do not have the need to spend a large amount of money on internet monitoring, but they still want to have basic controls over what happens with their bandwidth.

Luckily there is a easy way to monitor where your data has gone.


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Capture notes quickly with Dictate in OneNote

Capture notes quickly with Dictate in OneNote

By Sofia Thomas adapted by Emile Greyling

Dictate in OneNote

Leverage the power of your voice to conquer the blank page and capture notes at the speed of thought with dictation in OneNote. The Dictate feature is supported in more than 50 languages!

Now it’s easy to break away from the keyboard and stay in the flow by using Dictate with AI-backed voice commands to add, format, edit, and organize your text. Over the next few months, we’ll be adding new voice commands as well as some that are already available in other Office apps to OneNote.

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What can you do with your old Computer?

What can you do with your old Computer?

By Jeandre de Beer updated by Emile Greyling

IT equipment has a limited life, but that does not mean that it can’t still be used by someone else.

So what can be done with your IT assets once it has reached the end of its life for your organization?




Here are a few ideas:

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The cost of not having reliable backups?

The cost of not having reliable backups?

By Jeandre de Beer updated by Emile Greyling

We all spend a great amount of time on our computers for important personal or business dealings. There are so many stories of people who have lost all of their files due to system crashes or computer viruses.

Backups must be an essential part of your to-do list. It is imperative to store your important files in a separate location from your computer.

If you have reliable backups and your computer crashes or become infected with a virus that results in a loss of files, you will still have access to your files on backup disks which you can then restore.

Do I really need backups?

Do not fall into the trap of thinking that data loss will never happen to you. Data loss happens more regularly than you think.

Imagine for a moment that one day you go to work to find that all your company data – meaning your email, your Word and Excel documents, PDFs, databases, contact lists, accounting data, billing information, etc. – has simply vanished, permanently.

Gone is everything that makes your company what it is and that has allowed it to operate and grow as a business.

How will your company recover? Are you going to recreate years worth of data in a few months, while trying to support and manage your current business obligations?

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How do I protect my eyes when using my computer?

How do I protect my eyes when using my computer?

By Jeandre de Beer updated by Emile Greyling



When using our computers for an extended period of time – our eyes can become sensitive and irritated.




What can you do to minimize these negative effects?

1. Clean your monitor on a regular basis.

Monitors can become dirty from dust and finger prints. Make sure the monitor is clean to reduce strain on your eyes – especially when reading text.

2. What is the ideal distance between your monitor and your eyes?

Though the size of the monitor does impact this… The best overall for proper viewing and reduction in eye strain is between 50cm and 75cm.

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How to Set up Parental Controls in Windows

How to Set up Parental Controls in Windows

By Emile Greyling






This article explains how to enable, change, or disable parental controls in Windows.







Before you start:

To use the most recent Windows Parental Controls and Microsoft Family Safety features, both you and your child need a Microsoft Account (not a local one). Although you can get a Microsoft account for your child before you configure available parental controls in Windows 10, it’s simpler and more straightforward get the account during the configuration process. Whatever you decide, follow these steps to get started.

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How did Spammers Get my Email Address?

How did Spammers Get my Email Address?

By Jeandre de Beer Updated by Emile Greyling

It seems that everybody receives spam emails – no matter how careful you are. How does spammers get our email addresses and is there anything we can do to hide ourselves from them?

The truth is – there is no fool proof way of preventing spam.

We will discuss a few steps to protect your email address the best we can.



But how do they get your address?

The easiest way for spammers to collect large lists of good, active email addresses is via leaked account databases. These leaks happen on a regular basis – this is even the case for large corporate companies.

Adobe, Yahoo, Sony and LinkedIn is just a few companies that have been attacked by hackers and had their databases stolen.

Spammers then use these leaked databases and add millions of email addresses to their email lists. They know that the majority of these email addresses should be active, so these databases are an excellent resource for them.

There is really not much you can do to protect yourself from a spammer getting your email address in this way.

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Why has my computer become so slow?

Why has my computer become so slow?

By Jeandre de Beer Updated by Emile Greyling

It’s very frustrating to work on a computer that seems to take minutes to open a program or respond to a task.  It adds to our stress levels when we have a slow computer and deadlines that are looming.

We still remember the time we purchased the computer – it was fast and responsive – but lately it takes forever to boot into Windows, applications are slow to open and it seems the machine is sluggish to do just about anything.

Computers gets slow for a variety of reasons : Virus or Spyware infections, out dated software, not enough memory, faulty hardware and various other reasons.  Read more

How to disable browser tracking cookies.

By Karrar Haider/Emile Greyling

 

Previously we covered what cookies are. but today we cover how to be rid of them if you want them gone

 

 

Many websites ask for your location to offer better services or request to show desktop notifications to keep you updated. These prompts will stop you from navigating the website and won’t go away until you hit the “Allow” or “Deny” button. If you are tired of seeing these prompts, you can easily disable them in your browser.

 

In this blog, will be shown how to disable location tracking and desktop notifications in Chrome & Firefox.

 

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Why do so many support people tell me to reboot my computer when I have a problem?

By Jeandre de Beer/Emile Greyling

 

It can seem like every time you contact your IT Support person with a problem – they recommend rebooting your computer or switching it off for a minute and booting up again. This could seem like a time waster – or as a generic reply just because the IT person does not really know what the problem is. Most of the time this is not the case – a good old reboot works surprisingly well.

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