The world of Humphs & MFW-Services

What is Bitlocker? It's a drive encryption program that makes the data on your drive 'secure'. Is it good? Yes, and no. Yes because your data is more secure, however unless you have the recovery key, you won't be able to access your data - even taking the drive out of your PC and connecting it to another one won't be able to get your data off. How do I keep my recovery key safe? Ideally, Microsoft would like you to keep the recovery key linked to your Microsoft Account. This is all well and good if you have (or want) a Microsoft account, but not everyone wants one. You can store a file on your PC with the recovery key, but this is NOT recommended as if you ever are unable to boot your computer and access the drive then you are not going to able to get to the file! You can write down the recovery key, but if you do this, store it somewhere safe. You can store the file on a USB pen drive. Again store this safely as if you loose it, you'll not be able to access the

Cloud storage .... what is it? First things first, it's not actually up in the sky 😀 It is just stored in one of many datacentres across the world. Whether it's the Microsoft OneDrive, Google-Drive, Dropbox or any other cloud storage you may have heard of or used, it's just data stored on a server in a datacentre somewhere in the world. The concept of it is brilliant in that you can send a file from your work PC, and by logging into the account on your home PC you are able to get the file. However, there is a big downside to this. And it's that you need to be connected (or online) to be able to do this. For documents, storing them on the cloud doesn't take much data, so timewise, it's not too bad. Photographs and pictures on the other hand, do have lots of data, and therefore can be slow to send to receive. I was speaking to a customer, and he moved all his photographs to the cloud and was saying that it took 10 days for them to move from his PC to his cloud st

If you see (Not Responding) pop up in the title bar of a program you are using, it doesn't mean that the program has crashed, it's the computer saying this it is busy doing something else, so has just paused the program you are currently using. This normally happens during update downloads or installs. Windows 10 and 11, have a habit of just doing the download and then installing it without showing or telling you that this is what it is doing.  You do have the option of pausing updates, but to be honest it's not something I would recommend as the updates can include security tweaks to Windows, and even include Firmware updates for your PC, so should be done (as should be updates to your Anti-Virus and Anti-Malware programs). Updates are normally released by Microsoft on 2nd or 3rd Tuesday of the month, but it can take a few days (or longer) before your PC will download them (unless you have paused updates!), so don't expect your PC to always do the updates as soon as th

 A customer asked me the other day if I knew anything about Cyber Essentials. It rang a bell, but I couldn't really think why. A quick search online and found it.... What is Cyber Essentials? It is an effective, Government backed scheme that will help you to protect your organisation, whatever its size, against a whole range of the most common cyber attacks. Cyber attacks come in many shapes and sizes, but the vast majority are very basic in nature, carried out by relatively unskilled individuals. They're the digital equivalent of a thief trying your front door to see if it's unlocked. There are two levels of certification: Cyber Essentials and Cyber Essentials Plus. So, what does this mean? Well I went through the questionnaire to find out, and after answering all the questions and in the end got a readiness report with 15 pages giving me an outline on what I should do to become certified.  Does it cost anything? Yes! Anything from £300+VAT to £500+VAT (depending on the si

 Not my normal computer related post, but hey 😐 As some of you may know, together with my wife Michelle, we had a rescue German Shepherd called Cela - her name was in honour of Michelle's Dad Alec who passed away 14 years ago, and when we were on the way to go and collect Cela (or Fanta as she was named then) it was on an anniversary of his passing, and the name just came to Michelle as it's Alec backwards. Well, just short of 9 years later, and I'm sad to say that Cela has passed over Rainbow Bridge. She was just short of her 12th birthday. She had a quite large episode (it was a 'brain fart' to be honest) over the weekend and unusually for Cela this meant that she didn't want her tea and it took quite a while for her to come back to normal. She was a little bit under the weather on the Sunday, but ate breakfast and tea as normal. She ran around chasing 'nothing' while barking in the garden and generally wasn't too bad. Monday, she came to work wit

  That’s a mouthful… but here we go with another Laptop review. This time it’s a Dynabook (Toshiba) 14” lightweight laptop. Again, this is one of my laptops, and it’s one that I carry around with me in my backpack in case I am onsite, or out, and need a laptop for any reason. It’s a small and light laptop is perfect for light use surfing the ‘net, dealing with emails and the odd bit of word processing, etc. It comes with an Intel Celeron dual core CPU running at 1.9Ghz, together with 4Gb ram (that is expandable), and a 128Gb SSD, loaded with Windows 10 Pro (Education edition). As stated, the ram is expandable and I’ve already upgraded it to 8Gb as Windows runs much happier with 8Gb – the only downside is that to upgrade the ram, you must remove the case bottom, and replace the single ram module with a larger capacity one. In general use, the laptop is fast enough, but not something that I would want to try and game on as the CPU is of an older design and only has 2 cores. It takes