A surprising number of Facebook accounts are being stolen and recovering them is difficult, if not impossible. That’s why it’s better to avoid trouble in the first place. In Short Circuits: Although your internet service provider includes domain name services, there’s a good reason to use one of several alternate services. • Efforts by the federal …

You still have about a year and a half to decide what you’ll do when Microsoft ends support for Windows 10. There are several choices, but not all options will work for all users. Let’s take a look at some that will keep the computer out of the trash. In Short Circuits: Although Microsoft has added a file renamer function to PowerToys, it won’t be …

Romania-based security company Bitdefender offers a comprehensive protective suite for Windows and MacOS computers, as well as IOS and Android phones. The package includes enough licenses for all devices used by everyone in the family unless you have an exceptionally large family or everyone has five or six devices. In Short Circuits: Your internet…

The virtual desktops feature that was added to Windows 10 and improved in Windows 11 can help organize the computer when you need to work on more than one task at a time. In Short Circuits: Artificial intelligence is now being used to improve audio recordings by removing flaws such as background noise and room echo. Despite being new, the results a…

If you regularly mutter to your computer that it doesn’t do something you want it to do or doesn’t do something the way you want it to, stop for a moment and investigate. There’s a good chance that the computer can accommodate your desires. In Short Circuits: Anyone who has trouble finding where TV programs they want to watch are streaming, or who …

One of the most common ways that people are victimized online involves the victims failing to recognize social engineering and giving their login credentials to scammers. In Short Circuits: Facebook accounts are filled with gold that scammers like to mine. There’s a quick and easy way to view what crooks see so that you can modify your account to m…

When a charge for a service I didn’t recognize showed up in an alert from my bank, I found that I had been signed up for a video streaming service I’d never heard of. Eliminating the service was easy enough, but a lot of people have reported terminating it was difficult. In Short Circuits: Even those of us who are not typographers, graphic designer…

Exposure hasn’t had an upgrade from the X7 version, which was released in 2021, but it’s still a good choice both as a standalone application and as a plug-in for Lightroom Classic. In Short Circuits: Speaking of golden oldies, I encountered a little connector that could be used to join lots of devices two years ago. It saved the day a week ago whe…

A hijacked Facebook account can be a lot of fun, but only if you have a most peculiar understanding of the term “fun”. It wasn’t my account, but I had to deal with the repercussions of a hack recently. In Short Circuits: The technology that powers GPS, Bluetooth devices, and other modern high technology was invented 83 years ago by someone consider…

Which is better, cable or streaming? There are lots of variables and cable is perfect for some people while streaming is the winner for others. After switching to streaming three years ago, now seemed a good time to re-evaluate. In Short Circuits: You might have some old digital photos that would benefit greatly from today’s AI-powered applications…

The more digital photos you have, the harder it is to find the one you’re looking for. Excire Search, a plug-in for Lightroom Classic, makes the process much easier. In Short Circuits: Libre Office is the ideal office suite for those who are unable or unwilling to pay a monthly subscription fee. The latest version, though, has a surprising number. …

Free, open-source software is often viewed as being second rate when compared to commercial software, but sometimes the best application actually does cost nothing. In Short Circuits: When something starts with Windows, but you don’t want it to, finding a way to make it stop can be a challenge. Autoruns fixes that. • Phones no longer have dials, bu…

Windows 11 cannot be installed on certain computers, mainly older models that lack sufficient hardware, but it is possible to force-install Windows 11 on computers that would fail otherwise because they lack hardware security features. In Short Circuits: With so many free email clients, you might wonder why anyone would be willing to pay $60 per ye…

Anyone who has digital photos that are more than a decade old could improve their quality substantially with an application that uses artificial intelligence to fill in details that don’t exist in the originals. In Short Circuits: Speaking of AI, if you’re trying to keep up with what’s new, you may suspect that it’s difficult and maybe impossible. …

The Sysinternals suite of utilities has been around since the 1990s and has been part of Microsoft since 2006. More than 70 utilities make Sysinternals essential for all Windows computer users and today we’ll take a look at just two of them. In Short Circuits: Believable sound effects are essential for motion pictures and podcasts, but it’s not an …

We don’t run out of disk space as often now as we did in the early days, but you might wonder about discarding some old junk even if space isn’t a significant problem. Several utilities are available to help you identify the junk. In Short Circuits: Scammers work hard to earn your trust and then steal your money. A Washington Post article about a r…

Microsoft’s new PC Manager takes the place of some other utilities such as CCleaner and offers quick, easy access to built-in Windows functions that are often several layers deep in Settings or the Control Panel. In Short Circuits: If you’ve ever wished you could unsend an email because you forgot to add an attachment or make an important point, Se…

Because digital photographs are free, we take a lot of them and that can be a problem when we want to find one particular image among tens of thousands on the computer. A new version of Excire Foto adds artificial intelligence that helps a lot. In Short Circuits: Anyone who operates a web domain on one of the big hosting services may occasionally h…

Like the Windows 11 Start Menu or hate it, Start11 from Stardock can make it better. Maybe you’d like the start menu to work the way it did in Windows 7, 8, or 10. Maybe you like the Windows 11 approach, but would like to add some features. That’s the point of Start11. In Short Circuits: Python is a popular programming language. It’s powerful, but …

Playing DVDs and Blu-ray discs on a computer can sometimes be better than watching them on a television, but Microsoft doesn’t include a player with Windows, and the Media Player app is quite limited. Other options exist, but some are pricey. One is free. In Short Circuits: Even if you use just a single chat application, taking a look at Beeper is …

Development cycles for large applications once were frequently 18 months. Now it’s a rare day that we don’t receive a bug fix, security update, or feature release for at least one application. Keeping up is a challenge. In Short Circuits: Heat is the enemy of electronic devices and notebook computers are highly vulnerable. I recently added a device…

Artificial intelligence is something Adobe has been working on for several years and this year’s advances mark the beginning of what seems likely to be an explosion of advanced capabilities. In Short Circuits: Adobe pointed to some of its plans for future products at the annual Max conference in Los Angeles. The sneak peeks could easily be mistaken…

AeroAdmin is an excellent choice if you need to help friends or family solve problems with their computers and when you want to log onto your computer when you’re not in front of it. In Short Circuits: Artificial intelligence can create text for you, and it can paraphrase your text. Is it worth trying an application such as QuillBot to see how good…

Copilot is the most significant new feature in the Windows 11 Fall update, version 23H2. If your computer hasn’t been updated to 23H2, you can force the update or obtain some of the new features even without updating. In Short Circuits: Opera is a good browser that I’ve recommended several times in the past 25 years, and I still do recommend it, bu…

Adobe didn’t wait for the annual Max conference to roll out some of the new features for Photoshop and other apps. Generative Fill and Generative Expand are still resolution limited, but they are already surprisingly useful. In Short Circuits: Printers have long been the bane of IT support, and Microsoft has plans to make printers a bit less vexing…

The main article is really three short pieces: One about PowerToys Run, a quick and easy way to start an application or launch a search; the next about the now limited “unlimited” hosting plan from Bluehost; and finally a fond farewell to WordPad. In Short Circuits: Living like it’s 1983. If you loved WordStar, you can now install WordTsar and try …

Even basic smart phones can create remarkably good videos and more people are editing videos at home. As a result, there are lots of applications, both free and paid, designed to take the place of editing suites that once cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to build. In Short Circuits: New features in Adobe’s audio editor, Audition, are rare, but…

It’s a good idea to check out any file you receive as an attachment, even if the file seems to have come from someone you know. Jotti’s free malware scan will show the file to more than a dozen antivirus applications so you can make an informed decision. In Short Circuits: Sometimes modifying a computer setting fixes a problem even when you’re abso…

Being able to tell the difference between truth and lies is increasingly difficult, especially on the internet, but also with organizations that claim to be presenting facts. We can’t escape bias, but we can at least try to be aware of it. In Short Circuits: Mouse Without Borders, a relatively new feature in Microsoft’s PowerToys utilities, solves …

Whether you’re a graphic designer or not, Adobe Express has something for you. Professionals can use it to give themselves more time for custom creativity and non-designers can leverage Express to perform tasks they couldn’t do by themselves. In Short Circuits: Although Python has been available as a paid add-in for Excel, it will soon be included …

Buying a new computer includes some of the same processes and decisions needed when buying a new car, and it’s important to base the buying decision on facts instead of on emotions. In Short Circuits: Sometimes antique computer-users like me say old DOS computers seemed faster than today’s Windows machines. That’s not entirely inaccurate and the Wi…

Disk partition managers are essential tools for technicians, but they can also be useful for any computer user. Third-party partition managers include more features than the one that came with your computer and might be free. In Short Circuits: The Employee Retention Credit Act was established at the height of the covid pandemic to help businesses …

Mozilla has been working on a new version of Thunderbird for a while and the combination of improvements, new features, and ongoing debugging make it well worth looking at regardless of which email application you’re using now. In Short Circuits: Sometimes Microsoft does something so astonishingly ignorant that it’s hard to believe management was a…

Internet access is slower and more expensive in the United States than in many other countries, so it’s important to figure out how much speed you need and then to confirm that you’re getting what you pay for. In Short Circuits: The Windows package manager, WinGet, provides access to more apps and utilities than the Microsoft Store does, but it’s a…

Sometimes saving money is a really bad idea. For example, doing without a backup system for the files on your computer because you don’t want to spend $100 to $200 per year. How much are your files worth to you? In Short Circuits: The utility CURL has been around since 1996, but it was just added to the Windows operating system this year. It’s a co…

Scammers are always trying to find new ways to extract money from people they can fool. New variants of old cons are common, and for the past several months phony feedback surveys have been big. Most scammers can be defeated by treating any offer with a bit of suspicion. In Short Circuits: Early personal computers had the command line and no graphi…

When pointing your browser at a website, the browser needs to find the site’s IP address, so it calls on a domain name service server. Using a better DNS server can improve the browser’s response time, but only by a bit. There are other reasons to use DNS not from your internet service provider. In Short Circuits: Adobe’s Firefly (generative fill) …

Microsoft 365 might be the best office suite for you, or maybe Google’s offerings would be better. Or perhaps you don’t need a suite at all. Let’s ponder that. In Short Circuits: Correspondence today heavily favors email and text messages, but sometimes you might need to send a real paper letter in an envelope using the US Postal Service. You can, …

When you set up an account on a Windows 10 or 11 computer, it can be a Microsoft account or a local account. Some pundits maintain that Microsoft accounts should never be used, but I don’t like the word “never”. There are good reasons to use a local account and good reasons to use a Microsoft account, so let’s look. In Short Circuits: Scammers are …

Whether you need to replace a notebook computer that has a built-in screen or find a new monitor for your desktop system, it’s important to think about screen size and resolution. In Short Circuits: Renaming one or two files is easy, but when you’re faced with hundreds of files that need to be renamed, it’s time to call for the Bulk File Renamer. •…

Whether you need a huge camera with a lot of heavy and bulky lenses, just a smartphone, or something in between depends on how you approach photography. Let’s explore that. In Short Circuits: Most new computers come with solid-state drives. If you have an older computer that you’re not yet ready to retire, now would be a great time to upgrade the b…

A VPN is essential whenever you use a mobile device with a public Wi-Fi hotspot, but it can also improve privacy and security at other times. It’s important to understand the trade-offs, though. In Short Circuits: Some internet crooks are stupid and I like to make fun of them, but there’s no shortage of crafty criminals. We all need to be aware tha…

Your browser blocks ads and pop-ups, you use incognito mode, and you don’t allow sites to access the computer’s hardware. Safe, right? Your browser can still be fingerprinted and you can still be tracked. In Short Circuits: Canary is an email application that runs on Windows, MacOS, IOS, IPadOS, and Android. In addition to artificial intelligence f…

Small specialized apps generally known as “utilities” can solve problems and add capabilities not provided by the operating system. We’ll look at new functions in PowerToys utilities from Microsoft and from two individual developers. In Short Circuits: Adobe released Firefly a few weeks ago for people to try and now the AI component has been added …

Instead of massive home stereo systems, most of us now listen to music on our computers. Adding a software equalizer can improve sound, even on less-than-perfect sound systems. In Short Circuits: Photoshop Camera is free and it may be the best way to have fun with the camera that's in your smartphone, but it's not compatible with every device. • Me…

Even if your scanner came with a scanning application, using the scanner will be easier and more productive if you buy a copy of VueScan. In Short Circuits: I’ll tell you about some of Adobe’s new photo suite features soon, but one that stands out above all the others is a game changer called Denoise. • Geoffrey Hinton, Google’s former chief artifi…

Anyone who wants to create a website needs to start by selecting either an application that edits website code or a service that offers site design tools. Many choices exist, but the two primary contenders are Dreamweaver and WordPress. In Short Circuits: A virtual private network on your computer is on the way to becoming essential, and Google’s V…

Windows has features that, while not quite annoyances, don’t work the way you’d like. The Ultimate Windows Tweaker fixes a lot of these not-quite annoyances, and it’s free. In Short Circuits: When I bought a new keyboard, I noticed a lot of extra keys. Some of them are surprisingly useful. • Trying to print a website page is often an exercise in fr…

When I set up a new computer, MacroExpress Pro is one of the dozen programs that are installed immediately. Those who don’t need all the power of the pro version may find one of the three more basic options useful. In Short Circuits: DPReview has been an essential resource for anyone who uses digital photography, but Amazon has ended its quarter-ce…

Reinstalling Windows 11, as I did a few weeks ago, gave me the chance to rediscover some of the “features” Microsoft offers that don’t work quite the way I want them to. Let’s look at some annoyances that are easy to fix. In Short Circuits: Maybe you consider the seemingly never-ending announcements and notifications from Windows 11 to be an annoya…