You can’t change Edge’s “new tab” search engine away from Microsoft’s Bing Well, that’s not completely true. You can change the default search engine that is invoked when you type your search term into the address bar, but you can’t change the default search engine that is invoked when you use the search box in …
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Category:Blog
All blog posts are in the “blog” category, so clicking on this category will show all posts, paginated, in date order.
“Let’s finish setting up your device”
If you have a Windows 10 or 11 computer then this unwanted interruption has probably hassled you several times in recent months Microsoft’s screen that sometimes pops up with the exhortation “let’s finish setting up your device” is un-necessary and somewhat misleading. Maybe I am naive for thinking that no company with whom we deal …
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Deleting browser data upon exit
Chrome may no longer be deleting data when you close the browser I’m sure that there used to be a setting in Chrome that was relatively easy to find for deleting browser data when closing the browser. It’s just taken me fifteen minutes to find where they’ve now buried this setting. If you …
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Autocorrect – more tricks
You can do more with autocorrect than just correct spelling and type fancy characters In my blog post of 17/11/2023, I covered “re-setting Word options”. This included setting up your own autocorrect options so that, for instance, “thier” would automatically be changed to “their” every time you mis-type it. Let’s be clear that this is …
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Variation on a theme of an email scam
It’s a good idea to be aware of this scam used by email hackers A couple of months ago I received an email from a client (apparently) that revealed a bit of a twist on a well-known email scam. This client had suffered an email hack about a year previously (through having a weak password). …
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Re-setting Word Options
A few weeks ago I started writing about re-setting Word options if an update from Microsoft has set them back to defaults Then I allowed my attention to be hijacked away from Word options when Bard (Google’s AI) admitted lying to me. Let’s try again By default, Word automatically capitalises the first letter of every …
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A Conversation with Bard (aka Gemini)
One of Microsoft’s least endearing habits is re-setting “options” after installing updates Every now and again I get a phone call or email from a particular client telling me that Microsoft has done it again. It has installed an update and now Word has gone back to automatically starting sentences with a capital letter, and …
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Windows 11 Taskbar
There are some things you can change about the Windows 11 taskbar – and some things you can’t The first thing that my computer support clients usually notice about the Windows 11 taskbar is that its contents are centred – not left-aligned as in previous versions of Windows. I can’t help thinking that this is …
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Different browsers for different things
Keeping Google in its place Using different browsers for different things has many uses. Recently, I have been visiting Google’s AI offering – Bard (now renamed Gemini) – several times a week. I’m still curious about it and it has helped me out several times. However, to use Bard you have to log into a …
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Version History in OneDrive
Since the end of 2022, OneDrive has supported version history for all file types Previously, only Microsoft Offices files (eg Word documents and spreadsheets) retained earlier versions in OneDrive. My experience of Microsoft’s cloud storage facility – OneDrive – is that it is a bit of a curate’s egg. The basic idea of automatically backing …
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