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The purpose of the little manila folder icon, found in various locations on your PC, is often misunderstood; indeed, why a manila folder at all and what does it signify?

If we go back to the beginning of time offices had big steel filing cabinets full of physical folders and loose files represented by the C drive (usually) on your PC. Once you open (or browse) into that cabinet you'll see the folders and files therein and each click of a folder shows further sub-folders and files. Think of this as going down into the folder/file structure of your PC which in the past would have resulted in your legs dangling out of the filing cabinet as you delved deeper.

*Why C drive? Well, older clients will remember floppy drives so A and B were reserved for those, as copying between the two was a common practice.

Shortcuts are nothing more than icons which provide links to said files and folders, imagine them as pieces of string which, once pulled, would not only open the filing cabinet but go straight to the required folder inside. Shortcuts are easily identifiable by the little arrow in the bottom left of the icon, those without the arrow will be system shortcuts or actual folders and remember the "desktop" is nothing more than the visual representation of a folder called desktop.

Windows operating systems and Microsoft programs often have the file/folder structure represented on the left-hand side of the screen, whether it be data, pictures or email; with the right-hand side showing the contents of your current location within that structure. This is why you can often see back and up navigation options; back takes you to your previous location whereas up closes the folder and shows you its container (folder) and contents. Websites work similarly as these are simply file and folder structures at the end of the line and viewed via a browser (e.g. Chrome/Edge/Safari).

The often underused "Quick Access" area can be found in the top left of Windows Explorer and can be a much better option than the overused "add to desktop create shortcut" option. If you are using a particular folder regularly or for any length of time, you can right-click and select "Pin to Quick Access" and then right-click "Unpin from Quick Access" when the folder is no longer needed so regularly.

You aren't doing anything to the folder by pinning and unpinning, just making it easier to get to in the short term, you'll also have a much cleaner desktop without dozens of old shortcut icons cluttering the space.

Good Photo Opportunities

It's worth remembering that good light and sunshine are thin on the ground in the UK and most flowers and plants know this too. If you have a website/business social media account then these are the best times of the year to update external/internal images, even if you store them for later use. There's no substitute for greenery and good light so please don't expect similar photographic outcomes in the winter months.

Many clients and businesses are seeing a rise in their emails getting tagged as spam by recipients and this is mainly due to the proliferation of spurious emails circulating our inboxes. Unfortunately, as companies try to prevent people from falling victim to ever-increasing scams and junk mail, more and more legitimate emails find their way into the dreaded junk folder. 

To increase your reputation as a sender it's first important to see how third-party mail servers view your domain and sending mail servers (think of it like to postman who delivers the mail), a good start is to use a checking service which tests the many authentication protocols associated with the postman, a sort of due diligence on the sender. A good tool for the basics can be found here: 

https://basiccheck.service.ncsc.gov.uk/email-security-check/form

If your domain falls short of the requirements after this check, then there's a good chance your emails will be going to the junk/spam folders of some of your recipients.

There's also the concept of public blacklists to be aware of; this system has been around for some time and works by keeping a record of servers who send junk email. Unfortunately, your domain may share servers with other domains, so even if you've done nothing wrong your email may get tarred with the same brush, albeit temporarily. Blacklists get updated constantly so your email may be getting junked today, but not so tomorrow as the blacklist gets updated. You also have no idea which of the many (90+) public blacklists the recipient's mailbox may be referencing, hence why only some of your friends/customers may not be seeing your emails unless they check junk/spam folders.

Finally, there's the reality that the dominant players (Microsoft and Google) have no great interest in promoting each other's services so we often see Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook.com etc.) emails going to Google junk folders and vice-versa. 

We're often asked whether or not to simply accept cookies on all websites you visit, and whilst introducing probably the worst user experience since square wheels were touted, the cookie notices on most websites are a mild annoyance to your browsing experience at best. Many businesses will use data gathered on their website as a source of income or for marketing data; this information is often stored as a small text file, left on your device, called a cookie.

Obviously the developers want you to accept their notices so use a big colourful button using terminology such as accept or ok, having done so, such websites can now forward this information to advertisers etc. who can then target you with even more cookie-laden material.

Calls to action (CTAs) are used everywhere on websites, PCs, laptops and phones for example, and a very useful tool highlighting a suggested path for the end user. Just be aware that the path recommended may not always have your best interests at heart and the smaller (no thanks/reject cookies) text hidden nearby might be the better option.

As mentioned before, manufacturers are increasingly using every tool in the box (see CTAs below) to steer/frighten you into thinking you must use their cloud storage or your house will subside and all your hair will fall out, examples of cloud storage would be OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive etc.

There are many benefits of using cloud storage but, if you only have a relatively small amount of data, you could be financing the most expensive external hard drive you've ever owned. Also those little apps, constantly synchronising in the background, could be slowing your PC/internet down as they do their work in the background.

Backing up your data to a cheap USB drive achieves the same thing in many cases, plus you have the benefit of knowing you have a copy of your data to hand, should main storage ever fail.

There's still plenty of time to go, but it's worth making a note that all versions of Windows 10 will be EOL (End of Life) on October 14 2025, there's no need to upgrade to Windows 11 before this but it wouldn't be a good idea to use Windows 10 after this date as there will be no security patches for known issues. Only newer PCs are technically capable of running Windows 11 but it can run perfectly well on older hardware with a few caveats.

Traditional server-based systems can often be expensive to replace due to the cost of hardware and licensing and whilst it's tempting to put everything into a cloud-based solution there's often a good argument for having a modern NAS-based solution for your resources.

We've retired quite a few of our clients' servers over recent years and replaced them with Synology NAS (network-attached storage) devices. These small storage units offer encryption, hard drive failure redundancy, cloud backup and many of the features normally only found on more expensive server platforms.

Synology makes NAS solutions for home users as well as business clients, so if you struggling to manage a large amount of data it might be worth a look.

Every block of binary data on your PC (or Mac) is stored in bits (b), bytes (B), kilobytes (KB), megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB), terabytes (TB) etc. etc., the list goes on and up.

Think of 1 bit as a light switch being on or off, and if we had to communicate using only this switch our options would be limited, however, if we were to create a code using 8 light switch combinations we could probably come up with some more useful options; these eight bits are called a byte. A kilobyte (KB) is 1,024 bytes (it’s a maths thing) and 1 MB is 1,024 kilobytes or 1,048,576 (1024x1024) bytes.

Imagine a 1 MB square billboard made up of little lights (each light made up of 8 smaller lights) with 1024 along the top and 1024 down the side; using these lights we could probably present quite a complex image, and, from a distance, this could appear reasonably detailed (higher resolution). If you were to get nearer to that image though the individual groups of lights will start to become more visible (in a similar way the pixels on your screen start to show if you get too close to it).

A two-dimensional picture of a plain background will generally contain far less binary information than a detailed image of a landscape containing people, trees and flowers and a photo of this scene, at a high resolution, would create a large binary bucket of information with each click of the shutter. Video takes this a stage further by combining multiple still images (frames per second) to make a video compilation. Audio files will also have quite a large footprint, depending on the sound detail and length of the recording, whereas a single-page text-based Word document will be tiny in comparison.

In terms of computer storage the size of an image or video has nothing to do with the size it occupies on the screen. If you paste an image into your Word document that was originally 32MB, then grab those little crop handles and make it the size of a postage stamp on your screen, it is still 32MB as far as the computer is concerned.

Slow websites are often the result of uncompressed image or video content as the end users struggle with the download and it’s another reason why many people never see your embedded images sent in emails. Worse still, if you send big fat attachments by email you may unwittingly fill up the poor recipient’s inbox and/or bring their system to a halt whilst it tries to pull the elephant through the hose.

This is all (not) very exciting but might help the next time you consider why you are running out of storage, need more storage or wonder why email attachments are taking ages to send or download.

Those of you old enough to remember can probably recall a time when you would get a knock on the door by some determined, suited chap flogging items you had no need for, or had any desire to purchase. These same methods are regularly employed with modern operating systems using every opportunity to steer you down some road or other, with increasingly dubious scare tactics and inflated claims.

Microsoft’s OneDrive is not a requirement to protect your PC, just one of many available online storage solutions. All online (cloud) storage solutions come at a cost (once the initial limits are reached), and your computer’s speed will deteriorate if it is constantly synchronising data back and forth in real time.

Cloud storage has many advantages but keeping data backed up on a cheap USB drive can achieve the same result at a fraction of the cost in both financial and PC overhead terms.

When saving your files, and creating folders within your PC system, it is often tempting to use certain punctuation, whether it be for visual reference or to record dates or times etc. The use of certain characters though can cause problems down the line, the main culprit we see is the dot (or period), for example, a Microsoft Word file may be stored as follows:

Appointment with builder 18.1.23

The big problem here is behind the scenes this file is called:

Appointment with builder 18.1.23.docx

You normally don't see the .docx element because Windows has the viewing of file extensions turned off (this can be turned on in the view tab of any Explorer window or using the file explorer options in the control panel). If you do turn the file extension view on, you will see all your files end with a certain extension, this could be .jpg for images, .pdf for Adobe files etc. etc.

The point here is that behind the scenes Windows uses the file extension element (after the dot) to determine what program to use to open the file, this is called file association and adding extra dots to the file name can cause issues programmatically. Another problem may arise when you email your dot-laden file to someone as the mail server can identify your attachment as a virus and reject the email.

Excessively long file names (including the spaces), stored inside long folders, can also cause headaches when we need to transfer data to new hard drives and spaces introduce problems with scripts, so:

Appointment with builder 18.1.23 - would be better as BuilderJan23 for example, by reducing the length of the file name and removing the problematic punctuation.

If you do need to use characters in your filenames then underscores and hyphens are generally fine to use, so to summarise:

Appointment with builder 18.1.23 (not good)

BuilderJan23 (better)
(the use of capitals in the file name acts as the punctuation, this is called camel case)

Appt-Builder-Jan-23 (ok)
Appt_Builder_Jan_23 (ok)

With the scam industry making such large sums of money the convincing nature of the underhand tricks employed makes it more difficult than ever to spot some of the tells. Online scamming has been employed on an industrial scale for some time and shows no sign of abating; the lone wolf operating from the bedroom has now moved on to occupying entire floors of buildings, with teams of scammers in call centres. The criminals can now take your money from a distant country with no use for head stockings and shotguns.

These operations generally target the less tech-savvy during the daytime with a range of email and phone-based scams but their goal is always the same, the transfer of something of value to them.

This isn't always as obvious as direct fraud using your credit/debit card with the transfer of gift card codes from the likes of Google, Apple etc. being another favourite. The false bank transfer scam is another widely used, whereby someone shows you a false refund being placed into your account, the amount is more than you are entitled to and the operator faces losing their job/house/life if you don't refund the money by some means or other.

Fake emails, that appear to come from friends' bonafide email accounts, can also catch out the unwary. Once an account has been compromised the scammers will use the account to contact everyone in their address book with some story designed to reimburse the criminal with funds, remember their goal is always financial so never do anything without being 100% sure of the motive.

In short, Windows 11 has proven pretty stable so far on supported hardware. It still requires a very recent processor to be installed for all the boxes to be ticked, pre-install, but upgrading has been quite painless on most occasions.

Whilst Windows 11 may contain many features and security improvements deep in the code, you haven't got to dig too far to find the same interface from previous operating systems. The new user experience takes very little time to get used to and most things are where they were before so, with this in mind, we'd say there's no reason not to upgrade as things stand.

On the other hand, if you have a device which falls short of the upgrade requirements, you should be wary, as we've had some issues. Windows 11 can be "forced" onto devices which don't have the necessary hardware specifications (nearly always the processor is the culprit) and they can work without fault, but we've had many problems getting updates installed so this may not be a worthwhile endeavour.

Windows 10 will be supported until at least Oct 13, 2025, so there's no need to rush out and upgrade any time soon.

There's a growing trend with Macs and PCs to dispense with removable hard drives altogether, great for thinner laptops with smaller footprints and undoubtedly cheaper to manufacture but not so good should your expensive purchase suffer a non-repairable failure.

We say expensive because the "built-in" hard drive trend is more common on the higher end devices, and there is very little, if anything, you can do to recover data from these if they fail. Always make sure your valuable data is in two accessible places, not doing so will eventually end in an untimely loss of your digital assets.

Something we really dislike is this push to monopolise your hardware experience through scare tactics and big "do this" buttons (call to actions). Unless you like the overly complex, logged in permanently way of working on your PC, there's no need to be connected to a Microsoft account (Office 365 (Word, Excel etc.) requires this within the program itself, but very little else).

When presented with these options you can also select the smaller text which says "no thanks" or "skip". Not having a Microsoft OneDrive account is not a security issue (not backing up your data is) and you don't need to login to Microsoft to work your PC. Furthermore, we’ve seen some real problems with devices that have been setup this way.

Windows 11 now appearing as an option through the Windows Update section of PC’s so, if your computer is lucky enough to meet the required specifications, you may consider the upgrade.

Windows 11 has quite a strict set of pre-requisites which prevents it from being installed on all but the most recent of devices and early experiences point to the processor as a common stumbling block. Unless you have a very recent processor in your device the installation will fail and let you know this is the issue, the failed update should then revert the operating system back to its original state.

Microsoft say Windows 11 has a very high fail rate on older processors with stop and blue screen failures, hence the requirements so, even if you could force the install, it would probably result in a frustrating experience. There are a number of other hardware elements necessary for an upgrade but these are unlikely to be the root cause of any failed install if your processor (CPU) passes the checks.

The good news is Windows 10 will continue to be supported until at least Oct 2025 and we would always advise users to avoid new iterations of operation systems for a while, at least until the bigger bugs have been squashed.

If your PC/laptop is running slowly under Windows 10, and software isn’t the culprit, it is probably an older mechanical hard drive causing the lag. As Windows has improved it has also placed more strain on the hard drive which contains all the system information necessary to run its programs.

Historically processors, and available memory, have been a bottleneck but recently the performance of traditional hard drives has proven wanting. Modern solid state drives (SSD’s) remove this issue as the speed at which they are able to transfer data is greatly improved.

All this means that you may be able to get many more years of use from an existing PC by cloning your old hard drive to a newer SSD. This process is relatively easy to do with hardware cloning devices or software, and the new hard drive can always be used at a later date as a backup or storage device.

There's been an unpleasant rise in ransomware attacks recently which can be can extremely damaging to home and business systems. Most of the headlines have highlighted the crippling effect such attacks have had on affected businesses, as these are the intended targets, but home PC's can also be vulnerable.

Ransomware attacks can be extremely profitable to the originators as it can render data unuseable without the decryption key, this key is held until a payment (ransom) is sent, normally via a crypto currency.

Burdening your PC with resource hungry security software can bring its own issues, as we've mentioned many times before, but there are a few basic steps you can take to reduce the chance and impact of a ransomware infection:

1. Backup to an external device as follows - Plug in and external storage device, copy your important data to it then unplug it (important) from the computer. We've setup simple scripts for many of our customers to help with this process but it's nothing more complicated than having your important data stored on a disconnected external device.

2. Dont get fooled into opening attachments, or links, to webpages via email or text message, any misplaced curiosity here can be your undoing.

3. Avoid dodgy websites.

4. Keep your anti-virus software up to date.

5. One final step worth implementing is Microsoft's Controlled Folder Access feature, this has been proven to prevent previous versions of ransomware from affecting important folders. It works by only allowing known-good apps (programs) to make changes to those folders, any other processes trying to make changes will trigger a request sent to the user.

You can use the Windows Security app to view the list of folders that are protected by controlled folder access.

1. On your Windows 10 device, open the Windows Security app.

2. Select Virus & threat protection.

3. Under Ransomware protection, select Manage ransomware protection.

4. If controlled folder access is turned off, you'll need to turn it on.

5. Select protected folders. Do one of the following steps:

To add a folder, select + Add a protected folder.
To remove a folder, select it, and then select Remove.

Some of your third party (non Microsoft) programs might now trigger a notification, if you follow the prompts you should only need to add the program to the allowed list once.

More details from Microsoft's website here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/security/defender-endpoint/controlled-folders

Windows 11 will be available later in the year and the upgrade should be free. As things stand it appears the general layout and start menu will be subject to an overhaul, and it should be easier to organise running programs on the screen. Microsoft’s conference meeting software Teams is under review and there appears an update to their widgets (smaller apps with tailored information such as weather etc.).

There was a compatibility checker on the Microsoft website to see if your current hardware met the required minimum specifications, but this has been temporarily removed. Despite the free upgrade offer there has been some concern that Microsoft will only allow the software to be installed on computers with the very latest generation processors. If this is the case, it may not be a viable option to many, but it remains to be seen if this requirement is implemented.

Any qualifying PC would also need Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology as well as a UEFI, Secure Boot capable BIOS. Other minimum requirements should be easily met by most computers as things stand.

The exact details remain to be seen and all of the above may change by the time the latest operating system is ready for general release later in the year. Windows 10 will still be supported until at least 2025 and jumping to the latest operating system, in its infancy, isn’t a step we’d always recommend anyway.

More details can be found here: https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows/windows-11

Recent Windows major upgrade versions have had a noticeable effect on the performance of desktops and laptops. It may be tempting to avoid updating systems to prevent any such issues, but it should be remembered that updates often fix known exploits that can lead to even more serious problems down the line if not patched. If you have a very old computer it simply may not be able to cope with the demands of a modern operating system and a new PC could be the only answer.

There is no doubt the price of new laptops, desktops and peripherals have risen sharply in recent times, due to Covid and the supply/demand forces at work, making replacement less of a straightforward decision. Furthermore, a new desktop or laptop is only one part of the equation as this will need updating and patching; you then have the issue of installing/transferring old data, programs and peripherals etc.

Every setup has a bottleneck at some point, this can typically be the processor, memory, hard drive, network interfaces or broadband input, the list goes on but you can often get very positive results by focusing in the hard drive and RAM area. Modern SSD (solid state hard drives) can make a significant difference to start-up times and improve general performance, an upgrade to the amount of available system RAM can improve things further.

The good news is to clone an older, disk based, hard drive to a modern SSD can be a relatively quick job, and something you could even achieve yourself using Acronis Disk Director or similar, see here: Acronis Website. Once cloned and installed your existing system carries on, albeit faster, as before.

In short, before you condemn your existing PC or laptop, it may well be worth considering an upgrade to the internal hardware which in turn may give you many more years of use. These upgrades can sometimes even outperform newer PCs with lower specifications.

Support for Office 2010 ended on October 13, 2020 so if you are running Word, Excel, Outlook etc. 2010, or earlier, you may see some issues, especially when it comes to sending and receiving email and attachments.

Your software will continue to work, but if you are experiencing any issues with your older Microsoft Office software you may want to consider upgrading to Office 365.

This can be bought online for £59.99 a year and you can use the subscription on up to 5 devices at the same time.

If you are keeping your PC up to date you may have noticed a new feature called "News and Interests" which Microsoft have deemed useful for all users running Windows 10 1909 and later, you may see it down on the taskbar near the clock.

If you like this new feature then you can ignore the following but like every add-on it can come with overhead and just be another nagging request for your attention when the PC starts.

The good news is that if you are not a fan of this feature, you can quickly turn it off. To disable this, right-click on an empty portion of your taskbar, select 'News and interests,' and then click on 'Turn off.'

It is quite common for Windows to hide all those little icons which indicate software running in the background on start-up. We'd always recommend keeping an eye on start-up programs as these can load every time your PC runs and slow things down (without ever being used).

Vendors will often add start-up processes to make their software load quicker with scant regard for the performance overhead these add. To see one area where start-up processes can be identified it's a good idea to show all icons in the taskbar area which can be done as follows:

1. Press and hold or right-click any empty space on the taskbar, tap or click Settings, and then go to Notification area or type Taskbar Settings in the search box near the start menu.

2. Scroll down and click Select which icons appear in the taskbar.

3. Select Always show all icons in the notification area.

You may now notice some new icons in the bottom right-hand side of your screen, near the clock. These show some of the extra software programs which load every time your PC starts and it might be worth doing some research as to their necessity.

Unwanted anti-virus and cloud-based services can have a serious impact on performance.

A very common issue we get asked about is broadband speeds, or lack of, and/or intermittent dropouts. Firstly, this shouldn't be confused with the strength, and stability, of the internal Wifi signal in your home or office. If your site is making the WiFi work particularly hard then this could be why internet connections aren't stable and your broadband supplier may not be at fault. WiFi connectivity can suffer for many reasons, the most common ones are as follows:

Poorly positioned routers/access points.
Heavy usage through gaming /TV/video applications and devices.
Interference from other Wifi networks on the same channel.
Old WiFi protocols being used.
Reliance on repeaters (these can extend the range but always come at a cost of throughput, rarely a good idea to implement).
Worth remembering that those unsightly network cables will always perform better than WiFi so always use ethernet cables, where you can, over WiFi.

A simple test is to unplug all devices, except for one, and cable this directly to the router to see if speeds improve, if things suddenly speed up dramatically it indicates a WiFi issue rather than a broadband problem. Once you've established that none of the above is causing the lethargy with your network it's time to look at the router and cabling. If both are in good order, then it's time to speak to your ISP (Internet Service Provider).

This is where the fun begins, but if you are to realise any improvements you will need to be persistent and get some proof that the fault lies with the broadband provider's connection which, to be fair, will normally be due to a cabling issue somewhere between your property and the nearest exchange. Even if you are on so-called fibre broadband, this still relies on good old BT cabling to get to the nearest cabinet.

Only two real options at this point, the first is to log in to your router and take a screenshot, or note, the up and down connection speeds which are normally in kbps (kilobits per second), divide this by 1000 which gives the Mbps figure. You can now compare this to the promised figure from your ISP. The second important route to take is to speak to a close neighbour and ask them if they can do the same, if they have a much better connection than you, and you have something to prove it, you are in a much stronger position to get a positive outcome.

Often an engineer will visit your property and do some tests which won't necessarily solve the problem, now is the time to produce some proof a close neighbour is getting a better service (assuming you have signed up for the same, or similar) and to ask the engineer to provide a valid reason as to why your connection is inferior. You may find BT will move you on to another connection at the exchange, or local cabinet, which makes things permanently better.

We appreciate this seems a chore but we had recent issues with broadband speeds at our own offices and it was only when we went to the lengths above we are able to get this actioned; our speeds doubled, up and down, once an engineer reluctantly moved our line.

After updates you may get notifications from time to time that you are not logged in to Microsoft as a general user and Microsoft doesn't recommended this. There's no reason you need to be logged in to a Microsoft account on your PC for you to use it and this message can be ignored.

Viruses, malware, ransomware, trojans, the list goes on and many software vendors will suggest they have the solution to preventing such intrusions. After many years of dealing with the fallout of such annoyances we have witnessed shortfalls in every piece of software which purports to keep you safe. Yes, some work better than others, but often at the expense of system resources which means your "protected" computer runs so slow, and has so many annoying pop up messages, the benefits are questionable.

Microsoft's operating systems historically came with no anti-virus but Security Essentials and Windows Defender have improved to the point they now offer an acceptable level of security for most instances (we've been using them for years without issue). The better approach, in our opinion, is to take a complete backup of all data on a daily basis or better still take a daily image of the workstation. This means that should your PC fall foul of one of these nasties, which aren't so common these days anyway, it's nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

Cloning, or imaging, can be done for free using the built in Windows backup tools but can take quite a while and is quite a manual operation. Acronis offer a more robust cloning solution for around £35.00 per workstation and well worth a look: https://www.acronis.com/en-gb/

All of this enables you to recover your data, or entire PC, to a previously working state, should you have an issue, and means you don't need to pay annual subscriptions for bloated, intrusive anti-virus and/or endpoint protection.

A question we are often asked when it comes to choosing a new or replacement PC so here’s a few pointers which may help in the decision process.

Probably the most important factors are space and portability. Obviously if you need to work on the move then laptops/tablets are the choice but you probably don’t need the burden of a laptop if you are only sending email and web browsing.

Tablets, such as Ipads and their Android counterparts, are generally much quicker to turn on, have longer battery life than laptops and, due to their operating systems, are less of a worry when it comes to viruses and malware. Unfortunately the very operating system that gives them those advantages also means you cannot always install the same software as on your desktop PC or laptop, so compatibility can be an issue. They are also a bit uncomfortable to work on for long periods due to their size and, whilst keyboard attachments are available, it’s not the same as working on a standard size keyboard. The other main reason to choose a laptop/tablet over a desktop would be if space is an issue as they obviously have a much smaller footprint and require less cabling.

All laptops running on Windows operating systems can generally operate in the same way as a desktop PC. Be aware though that if you buy a modern laptop it may not have a CD/DVD drive, something to consider if you have lots of software/music on CD’s/DVD’s. Also, laptops and tablets normally come complete with built in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and cameras, all of which are normally additional items to buy on desktops, if required.

So it sounds like the end of the road for the desktop PC but not so, there are a few areas where their lighter, skinnier cousins fall short. Firstly longevity, due to their size there is less room for cooling and the circulation of air on a laptop and the inbuilt nature of their construction, means repair is generally far more difficult, and costly.

Desktop PC’s are generally more ergonomically friendly and, with their full size keyboards and mice, it means longer periods of work are less of a chore. Component failure is less of a problem on a desktop PC and it’s much easier to configure multiple screens and other external devices. Upgrading the internals is less common these days, but still far easier on a desktop.

Whilst, the laptop/tablet may look like the obvious choice you may find the old desktop PC actually suits your needs better in the long run.

3 scams which are still quite prevalant at the moment to be aware of.

The first involves an email warning the recipient they have been looking at dubious websites and need to send money, via Bitcoin or similar, or have their activites advertised to the wider world. The clever aspect of this is the scammers reinforce the message by claiming they have the recipient's password on file to enable them to hack their social media accounts and notify friends and family.

What they actually have is an older password gleaned from a list which has been sold to them by hackers on criminal websites. These password lists are acquired, then redistributed, after serious data breaches of larger companies which are often reported on the news. If you get one of these emails, ignore it, but make sure you change, and are no longer using, any password the criminals clearly have access to.

The next is a TV Licensing email doing the rounds claiming you are behind on payments or similar. A series of hyperlinks then leads you off on a path which only ends in a potential loss of funds so ignore any such emails, more on this one here: TV licensing scam details

There's also been a rise in email scams coming from HMRC and Amazon so treat any emails, or text messages with links, with the utmost care. If in doubt always inspect the properties of any email sender, and links to any website addesses, very carefully for typos and accuracy.