Our expanded member education services will include instructional articles, video presentations and how-to’s for every aspect of your digital world. Included is information on Windows and Mac computers, smartphones, tablets and peripheral devices. We also address password management, anti-virus and ransomware protection and best computing practices.
These educational materials primarily focus on the most common problems our members currently have with technology. They are in the form of interactive articles, live and prerecorded Zoom presentations or webinars, and will always be available for subsequent viewing or download on our website.

Much like our Mac Special Interest Group (SIG), we plan to add additional SIGs in areas like Smart Home, Cord Cutting and other requested areas. If you would like to be a part of our ongoing educational efforts, send an email to [email protected].

FLS Home Visits and “Meet with FLS” Sessions are temporarily suspended because of the COVID-19 Shelter in Place recommendation until further notice.

However, please see the discussion below as an alternative means of support during these challenging times.

TeamViewer is a very useful tool to allow the First Level Support Team to provide remote support for Computer Club Members PC or Mac machines.  It provides a secure way (the sign in password is changed every time TeamViewer is started) for you to control who is connected to your machine and allows the FLS team to see and, if necessary, actually to run your machine remotely.  This will greatly enhance FLS ability to assist you with computer issues during this time of social distancing and self-isolation.

If you do not already have TeamViwer installed on your machine, go to How to Install TeamViewer and read how to install the software.

Cost:  Free to $5 a month
There are three ways to block robocalls.  The first is to sign up for the federal Do Not Call Registry, which will limit the number of legal sales pitches you get.  The second:  Check with your phone’s service provider to see what it offers (providers are under pressure to step up protections against robocalls).  The third is to sign up for a third-party robocall blocker.  This software blocks most robocalls to your mobile phone; some can cover your home phone, too.  Among the respected services are Nomorobo, YouMail, Truecaller and RoboKiller.

How to start:  Get on the Do Not Call Registry by phoning 888-382-1222 from the number you wish to protect (or sign up online at donotcall.gov).  For third-party services, go to their websites, review the choices and follow the sign-up instructions.

The U.S. Postal Service is now offering a terrific service: Each delivery day, it will send an email to you containing digital scans of the letter-size mail that will soon arrive at your box or door. The email also details packages that will arrive that day or soon. Now you can cross-check for mail theft or ask someone to pick up a package if you’re away.

Sign up at informeddelivery.usps.com.

Replacing Primary Drive with Solid State Drive

I have recently converted both my wife’s laptop and my desktop to an SSD as the primary drive.  SSD pricing has come down to where converting your primary drive to speed up your machine is worth considering.  My machines are all using SATA 3, and don’t support NVMe, so the fastest SSDs can’t be used, but SATA SSDs still give a much appreciated speed improvement.  I put a Western Digital Blue 1 TB in her laptop, and a SanDisk 1 TB in my desktop.  These two SSDs are the same unit (SanDisk is owned by Western Digital) but the SanDisk was two dollars cheaper.  May have been overkill, but we won’t run out of space, and the bigger drives have a little better performance.

There is one caveat I have to pass on.  It concerns any instance where the current machine contains a small SSD as a speed up device for a normal HDD installation.  This was the case with my Dell XPS 8700 SE, which was purchased from Costco in late 2013, and contained a 32 GB Samsung PM830 SSD mounted in an mSATA socket on the motherboard.  It never reported as a separate drive in Windows, but is listed in the Dell BIOS.  A casual user would never be aware of it.  It contained some of the Windows boot files, and led to some speed up but only when booting Windows.  The only other place I was aware of any improvement was with CCleaner, which evidently used some of it as a cache.

I have one problem to report, which appeared with the SanDisk.  The instructions suggested downloading and installing SanDisk Dashboard software for measuring SSD performance.  When I used that software to report on my new SanDisk, it gave blank results.  I later discovered that this was caused by the small 32 GB SSD, which confused the software.  I had cloned my HDD to the new SanDisk SSD using MiniTool Partition Wizard on my laptop.  All the Windows boot files had been on a reserved partition of the HDD, and were now on the new SanDisk.  I no longer needed the small SSD, so I removed it physically from the motherboard socket and rebooted into Windows.  Everything works OK, and the SanDisk Dashboard now reports as it should.

The point I am making is that if anyone who has a system that might have a small SSD in it for fast boot, such as a Dell XPS or similar, and is considering switching to an full size SSD for drive C, the small SSD will be superfluous, and is no longer needed.  Just a heads up.

Bob