Comments by "David M" (@DavidM2002) on "Ask Leo!" channel.

  1. And, in a somewhat related thought, why do Windows apps have to store program files in different places ? Program Files, Program Files (x86), ProgramData, AppData, etc ? I'm not sure that I would call the DOS days as the "good old days", but if you wanted to move your program files, you just moved them. Today, if you even think about it, something will break. The worst part is that some, such as certain email programs, will store part of your data in one location, and other parts elsewhere. I don't always want to backup my entire drive, but if I don't, I might miss something important like my contacts which might be in Appdata.
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  2. One thing that has become more common is that, even with spelling and grammar checkers, more and more people display completely pathetic writing skills.
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  3. The finest quality in a person is the willingness to say "I don't know".
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  4. Silence is Golden
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  5. I have Windows 10 and Windows 11 installed on a couple of machines each and use them all quite regularly but for different purposes. But, for the most part, there is very little difference. Once I get settled in with my apps installed and configured, day to day, I see almost no difference. I also run one of each as a virtual machine on my NAS. Same thing over there.
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  6. I would argue that if your computers are connected via Onedrive then that constant updating of files between locations is not a backup. If you corrupt a file in one place, it will copy that corrupt file to the others and overwrite the good copies. That's a sync and I would not rely on syncing files to be my backup.
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  7. One of the worst offenders is Youtube. Some content providers now have their own embedded ads, which is ok. But, so often, once the embedded ad ends, the video is interrupted by the Youtube inserted ad. And then there are the ads with all of the motion. I can live with static ads but the ones that seem to jump around to grad the viewers attention are just too much. And the ad to content ratio is often way too lopsided.
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  8. A masterful description Leo. I've always used POP3 with the various iteration of Outlook 365 and it's predecessors. When I bought my laptop, I set it up as IMAP for exactly the reasons that you state. Thunderbird, which I experimented with, seems to be far more flexible with its options of using IMAP but with the download option.
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  9. I use SMS for everything possible. But, for texting friends out of my home country, I used WA. But after a few months, I switched from WA to Signal because I didn't want anything to do with Facebook. I used Signal for a year or so and really like it but, almost none of my friends used it. So I went back to WA for out of country recipient texts. I don't like it in any way still.
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  10. I don't use Gmail and don't use my Google ID to sign in to 3rd party web sites. However, I do use Google Sheets extensively and your video really made me think about backups. I will occasionally create copies of my most important Sheets but, of course, they are just saved to the same Google account. But, is there any way to save or export Sheets to another location or Google account ?
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  11. It would be nice to see how you would recover from a crashed, unbootable HDD. Great video Leo.
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  12. And, more recently, companies like Microsoft need to realize that we are not all corporate users who need to share everything. The amount of fluff that's in apps like Office 365 is astonishing. Even Windows itself isn't any different. Have you ever changed something which then has unintended, negative, consequences ? But then you couldn't remember how or where you made that change so you can undo it ?
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  13. What comes to mind after watching this is to go back and re-learn how to write batch files like we did with DOS and put them on the desktop to be run regularly. Thanks once again Leo.
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  14. A friend told me that that's pretty much how it is in Spain as well. Not sure about the rest of Europe.
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  15. Run down to your local computer or photography shop and buy a can of compressed air. Take the sides off your (desktop) computer, and blow out the dust. Pay particular attention to the fans and the heat sinks. I do this about once each year.
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  16. I print out all of my user names and passwords and keep a copy in a sealed envelope with my will. As an executor who has been on the receiving end of such a list, please don't just print or save as you wish, but test them to ensure that they are current. Many web sites require that passwords be changed occasionally for a variety of reasons. I got handed a pretty nasty mess that my now deceased friend swore was the perfect list.
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  17. I mostly use Excel and made these changes some time ago. But, the Co Pilot menu choice in the right click menu ( or whatever it's called ) is still there. It would be nice to see that go away too. Thanks as always Leo.
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  18. It's actually about more than just recovering a blocked or lost account access. I do a lot of cross country motorcycle trips and am in a new motel almost every night. When I log in to Google, it notes that I'm in a new location and requires me to go through a recovery procedure. I was one of the resisters until quite recently. It was possible, but a hassle, to do the recovery without my cell number but it did still require using my phone. I just gave up; gave them my number and have a far cleaner and far less frustrating experience logging in when I'm on the road now.
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  19. After 30+ years in an accounting public practice, I wince when I listen to the news and other "experts" throw around financial and tax terms and their implications. Spot on Leo.
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  20. Start by never providing your Social Security number unless legally required. In Canada, we are not legally required to provide our Social Insurance number to anyone except employers, banks, investment brokers, or anyone who might be paying us a wage, dividends, interest, etc. There are a few government exceptions. But, many organizations continue to use it as a form of identification. I just refuse. I also, whenever possible, do not provide my date of birth. And, if I need to provide my DOB in order to complete an online form, I enter January 1, 1900 and have never been challenged. Obscure what you can so you cannot be easily cross referenced.
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  21. I have more than one email address. One is personal and the others are for commercial and hobby stuff. The latter, once they start getting hit with too much spam, I delete them and create a new one but I don't have to notify all of my family and friends that I have a new address.
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  22. When you do the followup video Leo, please show the writer how you could have resized D to be smaller and then resized C to be larger. I use a 3rd party app ( free ) that will do that as I'm sure you do as well. I like to have my discs partitioned so that I can create an image of the operating system drive without the data which is backed up in a different way to different places. Thanks as always and I'm sure the writer was thrilled with your response here.
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  23. Sorry, but I would disagree. Just because you have the passwords does not give you the legal right to use them. That only comes after the probate process and only gives that right to the executor.
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  24. With a recent crash of my Windows 10 computer and the purchase of a new system, I learned a very valuable lesson. Either partition your main hard drive into C: and D: or install a second hard drive. And then install Windows and its apps on C: and save your data on D: . You will have vastly more flexibility and speed in creating and restoring backups from images. If you created your image a day, a week, or a month ago, and you now have to restore it, you may be also restoring month old data. And then you have to restore your data again from a more recent backup. Before my old Windows machine crashed, the image that I created was about 450 Gb which included the data. Now, the Windows and apps on my now segregated drive C: are about 80 Gb ; far more manageable.
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  25. And what if, all of those 100 people in your contacts list forwarded all of that garbage to you ? And, when you forward that garbage, does it go out as cc or bcc ? Most people do not know the difference. What I really hate is being cc'd on an email with 100 other people that I don't know who now all have my email address. I'm glad that you mentioned Snopes. For the uninformed, just copy and paste a pertinent passage out of the email and paste it into google search along with "snopes" and your eyes may be opened for you. I've had the above discussion with a few friends and they are all pretty much clueless about any of it.
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  26. Leo, when I bought a new desktop recently, I had a second SSD installed. The idea at the time was that, once I had all of my apps installed, I would clone C:\ to the second SSD so that if C: ever became unbootable or corrupt, I would go into the BIOS and boot from that second SSD. Periodically I would update the clone from C: so that all of the app settings were updated as well. I thought this small additional cost would avoid creating an external recovery drive and would be much faster to get back up and running. Do you see any problem with that ? (P.S., I partition both SSD's so that the O/S is on one partition and data on the other. )
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  27. One more preventative approach is, once your computer is properly setup with all of your apps, use a utility like Macrium to create an image file. With that image file, you will be able to create a virtual machine (VM) later if needed. This does get a bit technical but it is getting easier and, you can create a VM on a Window machine using Microsoft's included Hyper-V Manager. This is not a perfect solution but, if you have that special piece of software that you absolutely must have, this can save you. Additionally, VM's are portable so you can move them from machine to machine or even to a NAS ( I store my VM's on my NAS so I can use them from almost anywhere.) To keep your VM image files small, partition your hard drive so that Windows and its apps are are drive C and your data is on Drive D ; I learned the hard way not doing this recently. And finally, I found that my old Microsoft mapping program has a limit of 3 installations and no amount of messing about would get it to work again and no way to get a new installation code. Even having it on the VM that I created from a machine with that app installed did not work. I suspect the installation recognized something on my hardware that was now missing on the VM.
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  28.  @johnhpalmer6098  Now we just need to explain the proper use of "literally"... and that exclamation marks are not the new period.
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  29. 2:30 but, don't forget to scroll through your spam folder to check for false positives - good email marked as spam. I find that email from my domain are constantly marked as spam by my friends that have gmail. Also, learn to create email filters.
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  30. Onedrive can be great but these little quirks finally drove me away. I now use Syncthing to sync my desktop and my laptop to my NAS, with the NAS being the hub and is always on. Now, the problem that you illustrate here simply doesn't exist any more. A really well explained video Leo. Thanks.
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  31. I am becoming less and less sympathetic to people, especially experienced users, who lose all of their data because they didn't have at least one backup. These warning videos are everywhere and this advice has been around for decades. This is not rocket science. And, backup systems, whether they be external drives, cloud accounts or NAS's, they are just not that expensive compared to the value that most of us put on our data. And many are or can be automated so it's not like it takes a lot of effort or memory cells to run them.
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  32. Were it not for the versioning, I would call this a sync and not a backup. After 30 days, it's not a backup for older files. I would not rely on Onedrive for my backups. I do think that the Office 365 annual subscription is great value though. I get to share with 5 other people and each of us gets 1 Tb of Onedrive storage.
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  33. Thanks again Leo. No changes needed here but the video is a great checklist and reminder of what to stay cognizant of.
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  34. Leo, would you consider doing a followup video on making a bootable copy of a Windows drive ? I've become a believer in installing a second bootable drive in my computers. I've had boot drives go south on me and cost me endless hours fixing problems ( that I typically created myself). I now have second drives installed that, with a reordering of the BIOS, I can boot from in just a couple of minutes. I used a free app and it managed to clone from a 1Tb drive to a 500 Gb drive which I didn't think was possible. ( I won't leave the name of the app here as my posts get deleted if I do that. ) Thanks as always Leo.
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  35.  @askleonotenboom  Sounds like someone touching up the X-rays.
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  36. You took the words right out of my mouth. Except that I use SyncThing instead of Synology Drive so that I can use my own folder structure instead of Home / Homes, etc. And you're right, it's very straight forward and we get to control the sync. Well done.
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  37.  @bikeny  Thank you.
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  38. There are a number of free partition utilities like Niubi with which you simply shrink D: and enlarge C:
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  39. OT : Leo, here's an idea for a video - the AppData folder. I back mine up occasionally but there seems be be dozens of folders and hundreds, if not thousands, of files that constantly change. I think some apps put important files in here unfortunately. I say "unfortunately" because, so many of the files would be pretty useless if trying to recover from a crash. An explanation of this folder along with some ideas on which folders and files ( yes, it will be app dependent ) are worth backing up, if any.
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  40. I remember a story from many years ago... one morning a fellow booted up his office computer but none of his desktop icons would open any of his apps. It turned out that one of his colleagues had taken a screenshot of his computer's desktop, deleted all of his desktop icons, and then made that screenshot his desktop wallpaper. So, while everything looked normal, the "icons" were just part of the wallpaper. IIRC, this was back in the Windows 98 or XP days.
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  41. One more thought if I may. To Microsoft : please be consistent with your settings interfaces. For Off or On settings, please use something like sliders. Very simple. If you go to Windows 10 / 11 for network setting, you use the up / down to expand / contract. Why ? The settings are few enough that they will all fit on a single screen. These are just a couple of examples of the inconsistencies that are all over Windows.
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  42. Leo, is it possible to use EaseUS to create an image to then deploy as a virtual machine ? ( I'm thinking of buying Macrium based on one of your prior videos. Would this be a better choice ? )
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  43. I would get spam call recordings showing up in my voice mail inbox. On my home answering machine, I can create different Inboxes for each member of the household. Then, the answering machine requests that you "Press 1 for...", "Press 2 for..." . The robo calls don't have the ability to "press" anything so nothing gets recorded.
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  44. Your point about backing up ALL partitions of a particular drive really hit home for me. Thanks for that. Over the past year or so, I've been messing about with virtual machines both from ISO files for fresh Windows and Linux installs and also from existing machines that I have. It's the latter that interests me here. If I use Macrium to create an image of my drive, can that image be used to deploy as a virtual machine on a NAS for example. My QNAP uses IMG files for its VM's. One reason that I find this of interest is that, with an IMG of my daily driver computer, if I had a hardware failure, a VM could be deployed on my NAS. ( Notwithstanding licencing, how current the IMG file is, data location, etc.)
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  45. Whenever I hear stories like this, I ask to anyone who will listen : "What is your data worth to you ? How much would you pay to recover it ?" A simple 2 bay NAS ( I have both Synology and QNAP ) that will do automatic daily backups and create periodic snapshots of those backups, will cost less than $1,000. Maybe a lot less than $1,000. In Synology's case, it will create Immutable Snapshots. That is, snapshots that cannot be lost to ransomware. On a home or small office network, that NAS will, depending on the size of the HDD's, easily backup every PC on your network.
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  46. I have had apps running in the background on a virtual machine running on my NAS downloading files and when they are really busy, that slows down almost any internet activity because the VM shares the connection. That is also perceived as a general slowdown of my computer. So, check to see what those other apps on your machine or others on the network are doing because RAM overload may not be the problem at all. Thanks as always Leo.
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  47.  @er...  Do you mean that literally or virtually ?
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  48. Spot on. And you have to wonder how many people really think that their data is being backed up. When it hits the fan, some of those same people are going to get a really bad surprise.
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  49. The trick is that it's not always easy getting the photos off the phone without going through some sort of cloud service. But, I do agree with you 100%. That is my preferred choice.
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  50. Leo, the most difficult discussion that I used to have in my professional life was making my clients face their own mortality. Young or old. Getting people to plan for the inevitable is extremely difficult. I think you handled it beautifully. Now, if only people will take it to heart. More recently, I am currently executor for an old friend. She knew that her illness was terminal and I spent plenty of time with her counselling her on various matters including giving her a method to give me a list of all of her user ID's and passwords. She kept telling me how organized she was but never showed me the product of that work; I found it after she was gone. One person's best state of organization can be another person's total mess. This was somewhere in between. The one thing that I told her was to not only compile the password list but to test them. I think her idea of testing was her browser's internal database of user names and passwords because "they always worked in the past." Well, then didn't all work and I spent hours combing through some large inconsistent lists of passwords. For some, I never was able to find the correct login details. It could have been so much easier. So, make that list, test them, keep it updated, and review it with your executor. And, wouldn't it be great if browsers had a method of printing out a hard copy or PDF of that detail.
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