Computers have a long history in homes, not as long as I have existed on this planet, but long never the less. There has always been annoying problems using home computers and for people without any knowledge of computer operations, it is even worse. I can’t imagine what it would be like to know nothing about computing and something simple goes wrong. More often than not, you would either have to try and get someone who knows what to do to solve your computer problem or send the computer out to a repair shop. Unfortunately many of these problems are very easily solved, but not knowing this can cost you a few bucks and you just risk the problem coming back in the future. I have helped quite a few people in my neighborhood with these problems and I can tell you from experience they just keep coming back. This is why I suggest everyone should have a rudimentary knowledge of how to fix simple problems.

Some problems were caused simply because people didn’t know how to install certain software. One example of this is installing Microsoft office and then trying to set up Outlook. It does take a certain amount of knowledge to know how to set up this email program. Let me be a little clearer. After the program is installed you have to enter certain information into to so it can access your email accounts. Another problem I encountered was viruses. Many times when I went to these machines I found them compromised. Sometimes I could run a good cleanup program and it would take care of the problem, but there were times when the hard drive had to be cleaned and everything reinstalled including Windows. It is very important to have the best anti-malware software operating on your computer but some of these people were also doing things they shouldn’t like clicking on links in email which took them to infected websites.

It is true some of the emails can look like they are from government agencies and contain threats if the link is not activated. This is where education comes in. First of all you will get a letter in the mail from said agency if the agency wants you to do something, not an email. If you are still in doubt you can look up the telephone number for the agency, don’t use one in the email, and call them to see if they want to contact you, but back to computing. Sometimes there were memory problems caused by not having enough memory available because the computer they were using didn’t have enough installed or because something was going on which was using too much memory. Software running in the background can use a lot of memory depending on what it is doing. What bothered me was having to fix the same problems over and over after letting the people know what they were doing wrong. I was doing them a favor and never charged anyone.

Computers have had problems since there were computers, but it seems there were a lot more complicated problems years ago. The operating systems, that is what runs the computer, used to be a lot more unstable. Today with the proper care you can go a heck of a lot longer before having a problem. When you do get a problem many times it can be solved by a reboot. I always tell people try resetting the computer before doing anything else. I never turn off my computers and there are quite a few like me. To these people I recommend a reboot once in a while just to clear the system. I have also bitten the bullet and use Windows 10 with automatic updates. Only had a couple of very small problems which were easily corrected. When Windows 10 first came out there were some major concerns but these seem to have been addressed a while back.

In the old days of computing when you got a problem, many time it could be very puzzling. For many years I used an Amiga computer and the operating system was completely different from Windows. We Amiga users hated Microsoft Windows and there were millions of us. There are things about Windows which still seem to me to be very strange. Take the registry for example. This is a place in the operating system which is the database that contains low-level settings for the operating system and software being used. I never understood why the names of programs were repeated so many time in it. You would think there had to be a better way. When the registry is checked there are always hundreds of things which either need to be deleted or corrected. This is the favorite ploy for some software programs which offer a free registry scan. They bring up all these errors and then ask you to purchase their registry repair software. The Amiga computer used a completely different system and this was one of the things I like about it, you could find where everything was located and not have to try and dig through senseless sub-directories where you would find only numbered entries when looking for names of software.

Today there are three basic operating systems one can be using. The most popular is Windows which is followed by Mac OS and Linux. The Apple followers will swear by Mac OS, but I want to mention the OS which is consistently free and that is Linux. If anyone is pressed for money or had to erase windows from their computer for some reason, they could install the Linux OS for free and guess what, it is much like Windows and after getting a little used to will be easy to use. Another feature is a password is required to make any changes to the operating system so this stops most malware for getting on the machine. There are different versions of Linux and the one I prefer is Mint. When set up correctly it looks almost the same as Windows and anyone will be able to use it.

Computing today would be great if it weren’t for the malware being sent our way every day. Everything on our computers is much more stable and the computer hardware is vastly improved and incredibly more capable than what we had years ago and it is only going to get better. I read where there are systems being worked on which will allow what we are looking at on our screens to jump out and seem to be three dimensional and this is going to be accomplished by fooling our brains. Can’t wait to see this.