Windows 7 – Disable and Clear Taskbar Jump History
Computer Business Services has recently started installing Windows 7 on it’s computers. We have come across a number of quirks, problems and differencences fom Vista and XP systems.
I’ve never been a fan of history always being displayed especially on a computer used for business so I was not happy when recent application file history appeared with a right mouse click of the minimised application in the task-bar. Here is a Windows 7 tip that tells you how to disable the Taskbar Application jump history from appearing;
- Right-Click a clear area of the task-bar and then Click Properties.
- In the dialog box that appears Click the Start Menu tab, and then Uncheck the box for’ Store and display recently opened items in the Start menu and the taskbar’.
- Once you Click ‘Apply’ ALL jump list recent history will be erased.
It’s as simple as that when you know how. This is a Windows 7 tip supplied by Computer Business Services.
Do You Still Have Too Much Spam?
Do you feel that you are still receiving too much spam?
The first action to take is to review your spam filtering.
Let Your Mail Provider do the Work
A large number of people still have their main spam filter operating on their PC in conjuction with their mail client, eg. Outlook. This is now not usually the best approach. Most Mail Providers (usually your website hosting company) can apply a spam filter and virus check any mail attachments before the mail ever reaches you. Each day you will receive a single email detailing any spam which has been detected and quaranteened. There is usually enough info there for you to assess if it is indeed spam. If you see a mail which has been wrongly classed as spam you can retrieve it into your normal mail box.
White Lists and Black Lists
In conjuction with the above you should be be able to create ‘White Lists’ and ‘Black Lists’. If the spam system incorrectly traps a ligitimate email you simply enter the senders email address in the ‘White List’ and it will never be treated as spam again. Similarly if you consistantly receive spam from the same sender you can add their email address to the ‘Black List’ which will ensure it is always blocked. Note, seasoned spammers continually change their ‘email’ address so this can have limited effect. Your Mail Server Host uses additional advanced techniques to detect spam.
How to Set This Up
So, log on to your ISP account and go to your email settings. Note that you may not be able to adjust these settings from your web-mail console where you can view/collect your mail. You may have to log on to your general hosting account.
Important Tip – Unsubscribe
Try unsubscribing if you are given the option. Check the bottom of a spam email and if there is an option to un-susbscribe try it. Although many spam email sources use somewhat questionable means to obtain your email address many of them also realise that if you are not interested you will simply block it so do provide a ligitimate means of unsubscribing. (it is often said that by doing this you are confirming a ligitimate email address but seasoned spammers don’t care about this they will keep bombarding you anyway so always best to try and unsubscribe if you can).
Further Steps to Minimise Spam
In addition there are a number of steps you can take to minimise spam going forward;
- Only give out your personal business email address to clients and people you wish to contact. Eg your.name@mycompany.co.uk
- Have a seperate general email address for your company. Eg info or enquiries@mycompany.co.uk
- You need to decide whither you put your personal or general email address on your personal business card
- Have a non-personal email address which you use to subscribe to websites etc. Eg isubs1@mycompany.co.uk
- Have a 2nd non-personal email address which you give to sources that you may have misgivings about but you still want give them an address, perhaps a mailing list that you have not heard of before but looks interesting. Eg isubs2@mycompany.co.uk
- If possible keep a note of what people/organisations/websites you give out the email to on a spreadsheet. You can also combine this with a note of associated website password and user names.
In practice you arrange to have all the mail addresses re-directed to your main email address (but the sender will never know this). Why do this? If spam becocomes a problem on a partivular address you can cancel it without affecting the others. It also lets you know which address has been passed to the spammers. Note – sometimes websites get hacked for the sole purpose of ‘stealing’ the subscriber list so your email address may not have been deliberately passed on
If you want to find out more or need any help with the above contact Computer Business Services who will be only too happy to advise.
Problems With E-mail And Microsoft Outlook
A common problem for Small Businesses is configuring e-mail and making the best use of Microsoft Outlook.
There are a number of ways of configuring Outlook to fetch your mail. If you have multiple mail addresses, perhaps used by different people, how best to work together?
And the biggest confusion of all, Outlook’s attempt to automatically archive your mail. In many cases it is best to disable Outlook’s automatic archiving. Archiving can be switched on for individual folders as required.
A then there’s spam. You don’t have to put up with high levels of spam. This can reduced this to a trickle rather than a deluge.
Tip: Create your own Archive folders, for for each quarter, year or whatever is approprite for you and drag your older files as a group into the appropriate.
Tip: If there is more than one person dealing with emails arriving to multiple email addresses a good solution is to designate one of the PCs as the master and use synchronising software to duplicate the incoming email to the other PCs. Mail can be sent from any of the PCs. Sent mail from any one of the PCs are atomatically transferred to the other computers.
Crippling Viruses
Do you have crippling viruses on your PC?
There has been a recent increase in the number of customers and people we know who have had viruses cripple their PCs and laptops.
Even though they have well known and generally reliable Anti-Virus protection on their PCs, their PCs will not connect to the Internet nor will they allow themselves to be AV scanned. In some severe cases the PCs are almost useless and won’t even allow themselves to booted in Safe Mode.
Well, we have a suggestion; TrendMicro SysClean.
As agents for TrendMicro we recommend this one-off solution to crippling viruses.
It’s a little tricky for most people but you can download the program and the latest ‘pattern files’ and run it in ‘Command Mode’ – if you PC will allow. For more severe infestations you may need to create a boot-able USB memory stick with SysClean on it. You then re-boot your PC which boots up from the USB memory stick and SysClean will remove the viruses. This is a bit more technical and in this case we would suggest you ask an expert to do this for you.
Contact us and we’ll give you free advice on removing crippling viruses from your PCs and laptops.