The world of Humphs & MFW-Services

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...