SeniorNet Eastern Bays News

June

Greetings everyone

This is my last message as chair-person, as I step down from office at the AGM. It has been an eventful year. We look forward to a good attendance at the AGM, which will be followed by a finger-food morning tea. This is probably going to be our concession to a 10th birthday party!

There are vacancies on the committee, as apart from myself, three other people have resigned. Please make yourself available for nomination. Those of us who feel we want to “give something back” to an organisation to which belong, find it trying and unfair when, after a reasonable stint, that there are not others prepared to take over and do likewise.

Having said that I feel that SNEB is in good heart, and that with strong leadership from an enthusiastic committee, and loyal and hard-working tutors, the organisation should continue to serve the members well.

I do not wish to end on a negative note – so enjoy your computer and all the fun you can have with it. There is no end to what else you can learn to do – so explore! – take a course – PARTICIPATE!

Take care

Jay

Recent e-Newsletters have not reached everybody on our list. There are a number of reasons for that and I'll go into the main one below. However, it should serve as a reminder never to rely on just the e-Newsletter (for this an other sites, generally). This website is always the most up-to-date and comprehensive guide for what's happening and you should get into the habit of checking it regularly.

One reason that many of you did not receive the last newsletter and perhaps several before that is also the same reason you might not have received quite a number of important emails from old friends and business sources: - they are being wrongly tagged as spam by your ISP and trapped in a folder at their end. If you fail to visit your webmail box within a month of this happening, they get deleted and you'll never know they were ever there. Yes, really!

One way around it is to get into the habit of visiting your webmail box on a regular basis. It's good practice for when you might be on holiday and need to use that method to see your email. But you shouldn't really need to do this when you're at home. Its much simpler and surer to have that faulty ISP spam filter removed. Each ISP has its own particular "click recipe" for doing this but why not just phone them up an tell them to do it for you. Note that you should still keep their **Malware** filter going. That's the one which intercepts the viruses, Trojan Horses and other truly dangerous stuff.

Consider the analogy of the traditional post office "snail mail" system. You'd want them to intercept letter bombs but you wouldn't want them to open all your letters, read them and decide which ones you need to see. Big Brother? Straight out of Orwell? But this is exactly what **does** happen to your email!!

Yes, you'll pay a penalty for claiming back your freedom and privacy. You'll receive a continuous stream of Viagra and similar adverts. However, each only takes a second (literally) to delete and, in any case, you can set your own local spam filter to intercept them. The big difference from your ISP's Orwellian spam filter is that you can easily see exactly what your local one is doing and immediately rescue and read any wrongly binned emails.

I've said and written all this before ...

Wayne Power

Latest DVD from Graham McLeod

As in the past with XP, Vista and Picasa, retired tutor Liz Watson has available some new tutorials on “Looking into Windows 7” (the XP, Vista and Picasa tutorials are also still available).

These are produced by Graham McLeod in Australia. Anyone interested in purchasing the tutorials should email Liz on skipliz@xtra.co.nz. The price is $20.00 for each tutorial. Please include your name, address and phone number in the email and the number of tutorials required.

Note: these DVDs can only be played on a computer DVD player and cannot be played on any other DVD player.

Neither Liz nor SeniorNet Eastern Bays makes any profit from the sale of these DVDs.

XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) support will end on July 13th

For everyone running Windows XP: Right click on My Computer and select Properties. Ensure that the General (default) tab is showing and look for the reference to Service Pack. If you've been allowing for automatic updates it should be showing Service Pack 3. If it shows Service Pack 2, you'll need to upgrade. Click here.

Note that XP, even with SP3, won't last forever and we'd all be best to migrate to Windows 7. The full story is here.