The world of Humphs & MFW-Services

The ramblings from my mad mind have been lacking for past few months due to things going on in my life, and these things meant my mind was (and still is to be honest) taken up with other things. A quick bit of background: My Mum was diagnosed with Lung Cancer back in August/September 2024 (not going to get into the ins & outs of smoking here - but smoking DOES NOT guarantee you will get cancer!). She had been ill for quite a while before the 'official diagnosis' and looking back we now know what was causing it. Forward to Christmas 2024, and whilst having good days and bad ones, it wasn't too bad for her. But after Christmas, things started to get worse for her, and we ended up having to have a hospital bed put in the sitting room of her little cottage and get carers involved (there is another story there, but that one isn't going to be aired other than to say that the teams of carers we got for mum we brilliant). On Saturday 22nd February 2025, myself and my wife (...

Is WiFi better than a Hard Wired connection? Yes and No 😀 If only it was that simple. It really depends on the device, the Wi-Fi version/speed, and the Ethernet speed. Not that long ago, Ethernet speeds were as low as 10Mbits per second, then we got a speed upgrade to 100Mbits per second and now the standard (though not the fastest) is 1000Mbits per second (also known as Gigabit). You can also get 2.5Gigabit which is becoming the new standard, with 5Gigabit, 10Gigabit and even faster available on high-end equipment. If you use a laptop or tablet (or anything that you move about with) then Wi-Fi is really the only option you have as you really don't want a cable holding you back. A desktop PC, or TV are normally in a single place, so you can run a wire from the router to the device (I know that sometimes it isn't that simple). As you can see in the chart above, the theoretical maximum data rate for Wi-Fi is getting very high (with Wi-Fi 7 saying 46Gbps which is more than 40x th...

I was trawling YouTube earlier (as you do lol), and came across and interview with a businessman that I follow and he was asked if we are becoming a cashless society - this made me think. So are we coming a cashless society? This is a very hard question to answer simply, and to be honest it's also a Yes and No answer. In the past, it was simpler in the fact that if your business was a cash based business then you could take your cash and pay it into the bank .... now this is just not possible in a lot of towns. If you take payment by card (debit or credit), you don't need to pay it in at the bank, but you do not get the full amount that you are paid as the card processing company take a small percentage. If you do take cash in your business, and then when you pay it into bank, they will charge you for doing this (they also charge you for taking cash out as well!). In a lot of towns (like Halesworth) you don't have any banks so paying it in is even harder. You do have the op...

So you just turn on your computer and it tells you that it's preparing to configure windows updates.... how long is it going to take? The answer to that really is how long is a piece of string. It really depends on so many things. Some updates are quite quick to sort, others, like major changes to the operating system can take a while (in some cases if your computer isn't the fastest may even take an hour or longer). I've just had a customer on the phone asking just this question. It turns out that the computer hasn't been used for nearly two months, and it's now going through all the updates that Microsoft has released in that time. I know that in an ideal world, all updates would take seconds and the computer would just do all the major updates when you turn it off, but we don't live in an ideal world, and we don't really use computers like that. I know I only restart one of my computers when it tells me that it needs to restart to do updates other than th...

 This is a brilliant little video from a retired Microsoft engineer who worked on Windows, so knows a thing or two. It's less than 15 minutes long, but does explain a lot. And an update with more information.

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...