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Cloudeight InfoAve Weekly Issue #1016 Volume 20 Number 22 March 31, 2023 Dear Friends, Welcome to Cloudeight InfoAve Weekly Issue #1016. Thank you very much for subscribing and for being a part of our Cloudeight family. We appreciate your friendship and support very much! Please share our newsletters and our website with your friends and family. If you're not getting our InfoAve Daily newsletter, you're missing out on a lot of good stuff! It's free and it only takes a few seconds to sign up. We'd love to have you with us. Visit this page to sign up for our Cloudeight InfoAve Daily Newsletter.
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Cheryl wants to get rid of the Bing
button on the taskbar search box (Windows 11)
How do I get rid of it? I do NOT use Bing, nor do I want to use it for any reason. Please advise. Thank you. Cheryl. Our answer 1. Right-click on an empty space on your taskbar.
The search will still use AI-powered Bing (as of now Windows 11 users who've updated are stuck with it) but at least you won't see the Bing icon on the taskbar. We hope this helps you, Cheryl.
Diane S. wants to know if we think she
should upgrade to Windows 11 Our answer Now on to your question... Unless you have some overriding need for some of the unique features of Windows 11, we would advise you to stay with Windows 10 Not that there is anything wrong with Windows 11, but there's nothing wrong with Windows 10 either. You can use Windows 10 with full support from Microsoft until October 14, 2025 - well over two years from now. I would especially advise you to stick with Windows 10 if your computer is running well and you can do all the things you want to do with it. We hope this helps you make a wise choice, Diane.
Jen has Windows 10 and wants to
make a screenshot and then send it by email Our answer
Dave wonders if it's better to
leave a computer running all the time or to shut it down daily Our answer We have had this discussion ourselves many times. But we came to the same conclusion and we both leave our computers running 24/7. We've done that since the days of Windows XP. The only time we reboot is when it's necessary - for instance when a Windows update requires it. The only time we shut down our computers is if we're going to be away for more than a day or two, or in the event of a severe electrical storm. Here is an article we wrote a long time ago - but we still follow our own advice. We have had computers that have lasted over ten years, so we must be doing something right, eh?
We gladly help everyone who writes every day by answering their questions and helping to solve their computer problems. Please help us continue to do that! Make a small donation and help us help you!If you don't need any of our products or services right now, please help us with a donation. Even the smallest gift is appreciated. Every donation helps us to provide useful information that helps you with your computer as well as helps us to keep you safe on the Internet. We offer free help to thousands of people every year... and we offer an honest and inexpensive computer repair service too. We do everything we can to help you with your computer and keep you safe too.So if you don't need any of our products or services right now, please help us by making a donation right now. Interested in making a monthly gift? Visit this page. Help us keep helping you! Thank you so much for your support! Jeanne is unable to turn on Voice
Recognition Our answer If you're having trouble turning on voice recognition in Windows 11, here are some things you can try: 1. Check if your microphone is connected and working properly. Make sure that it is not muted and that the volume is turned up. 2. Go to Settings > Privacy > Speech, in the Windows Settings app and ensure that the "Allow apps to use speech recognition" toggle is turned on. 3. Try resetting the speech recognition settings by going to Settings > Time & Language > Speech and selecting "Speech recognition" under "Related settings". Then, select "Reset voice recognition" and follow the prompts. 4. Make sure that your Windows 11 is up-to-date. You can check for updates by going to Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update. We hope this helps you, Jeanne.
Dianne wants to know how to download
files from Amazon Drive Our answer 1. Go to Amazon Drive and log in to your account. 2. Select any files, folders, albums, photos, or videos you want to download. *Note: You can select up to 1,000 files or up to 5 GB total at a time) 3. Click Download on the top bar. 4. The files you selected will be downloaded to your computer's default download location (usually "Downloads"). We hope this helps you, Dianne.
Our answer If you have any more questions, just let us know. We gladly help everyone who writes every day by answering their questions and helping to solve their computer problems. Please help us continue to do that! Make a small donation and help us help you!If you don't need any of our products or services right now, please help us with a donation. Even the smallest gift is appreciated. Every donation helps us to provide useful information that helps you with your computer as well as helps us to keep you safe on the Internet. We offer free help to thousands of people every year... and we offer an honest and inexpensive computer repair service too. We do everything we can to help you with your computer and keep you safe too.So if you don't need any of our products or services right now, please help us by making a donation right now. Interested in making a monthly gift? Visit this page. Help us keep helping you! Thank you so much for your support!
Typing with Your Voice is Easy Typing with your voice (“voice recognition”) has come a long way in just a few years. And though it’s still not 100% accurate, it’s accurate enough and reliable enough you can use it to dictate recipes, emails, reminders, notes, essays, short stories, journals, and even angry letters to the editor! Typing with Your Voice in Windows 10 Use the Windows key shortcut Windows key + H to begin. Click the “microphone” icon in the dictation bar.
When it’s done initializing, you’ll see “Listening” and then you can start talking. Here’s an example of Windows 10 Dictation being used with Notepad. (It works with almost any app including MS Word, Notepad, WordPad, Gmail, Outlook, Outlook.com, etc.)
As you can see above Windows 10 Dictation is “Listening…” and you can see what I’ve dictated so far. You can add punctuation by saying words like “comma”, “period”, “semi-colon”, “exclamation point”, etc. And if you want a new line, say, “new line”. If you want a new paragraph, say “new paragraph”. You get the idea. The more you use Windows Dictation, the better it gets at understanding your voice. When you’re done dictating say “Stop dictating”. Typing with Your Voice in Windows 11 Typing with your voice gets even better, more accurate, and more fluid in Windows 11. Dictation even gets a new name in Windows 11… it’s now called “Microsoft Speech Services”. However, it works the same way it works in Windows 10. You can open Windows Speech Services (Dictation) in Windows 11 by using the Windows key + H shortcut. With Windows Speech Services open in Windows 11, you can begin voice typing, by clicking on the microphone icon, or as Microsoft puts it the “mic button”.
I put Windows Speech Services in Windows 11 through a rather tricky test using a poem by A.E. Housman. I’ll give Windows Speech Service an A-minus, it only made one major mistake. Where it should have typed “rose lipt maids”, Windows Speech Services typed “rows left”. But “rose lipt” isn’t a common expression and I won’t be overly critical because Windows Speech Services worked very well. Even the spelling and grammar checker I’m using right now (Grammarly) does not like the word “lipt”.
And, like Windows 10’s Dictation feature, you can use Windows 11 Microsoft Voice Services to type reminders, notes, recipes, journals, essays, stories, lists, emails, and more. Here’s an email I wrote using Microsoft Speech Services…
Unfortunately (and predictably) Darcy ignored my email, and I didn’t get my raise. But I can’t blame that on Microsoft Speech Services! When you first start using Microsoft Speech Services in Windows 11, it will ask if you want to contribute your voice clips to “make Speech Services better”. You can choose “Yes” to contribute your voice clips – or “No” if you don’t want to contribute.
Now you know how to save yourself a lot of typing whether you’re using Windows 10 or 11.
Five Little Windows Tricks 1. Copying the content of a Windows dialog box. Do you want to copy the contents of a Windows dialog box? Just click anywhere inside the box, press Ctrl + C, open Notepad, and press Ctrl+V. 2. Navigate to your “home” folder in Windows. The Windows 10 and Windows 11 your home folder is the default folder for your username which contains folders like “Pictures”, “Music”, “Documents” etc. Would you like to get to your “home folder” fast? OK! Press the Windows Key + R and type “.” in the Run dialog and press Enter. That’s quotation mark, period, quotation mark – just to make it clear. This takes you right to your home folder – just like that. 3. Want to get the full scoop about your Windows system? Press the Windows Key + R In the run dialog type MSINFO32 Press Enter. There you go… everything you ever wanted to know and more! 4. Find out the date Windows was installed. Type CMD in the taskbar search and then press Enter to open the Command Prompt. At the prompt type: systeminfo | find /i “Original” Press Enter.
Above: Windows 11 was originally installed on this computer on 5/16/2022 or for those of you in other parts of the world on 16 MAY 2022. Please note: If you reinstalled Windows, then this will show you the date you reinstalled it, not the original date Windows was installed on your PC. But it’s still a great way to see how “old” your current Windows installation is. 5. A quick way to see all the programs starting with Windows. 1. Press the Windows key + R.
as well as their installation directories.
And that’s all there is to it! A little reminder! When typing any of the commands shown in this article please remember that they must be entered exactly as shown or, boo hoo, they won’t work. So please feel free to copy and paste any or all of the commands shown in the article above. Remember we tested this command on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 and they do work.
Spring Cleaning Time is Here It’s that time of year… dear! Spring arrived here in the northern hemisphere on March 20, 2023, at 5:24 PM U.S. EDT. And I’m not hemisphereocentric (I love making up words) either. I realize some of you live in that hemisphere down south where the water goes down the drain backward and where winter is summer and spring is autumn so this will be autumn cleaning for you. So, for those of you in Oz and Kiwi country (and other folks in the southern hemisphere) please substitute the word “autumn” for “spring” and keep on reading (and cleaning). You don’t need any special tools to do your spring cleaning, you can accomplish everything on this shortlist without downloading or installing anything. But we’re going to mention some tools that might make your job easier, but they are not necessary to accomplish your spring cleaning mission. We’ll assume most of you (hopefully all of you) have Emsisoft or some other good antivirus/anti-malware installed to help protect you from the ravages of malware and PUPs. If your security software does not have adequate malware / PUPs protection, all the spring cleanings in the world won’t help much. We’ll assume you have a good antivirus, anti-malware that protects you against malware and pups – if you don’t – you can read about Emsisoft here. OK let’s get cleaning! Step 1: Remove unused programs One of the things people ask us most when we’re doing Cloudeight Direct Computer Repair sessions is: “What programs should I remove? I don’t even know what half of them are or what they’re for!” We think this is pretty typical of everyone – including us. We all install programs that sound good or interesting at the time but then we never use them. We don’t know many who don’t do this – we’re especially guilty of cluttering things up with a bunch of programs that we never use. You don’t have to download anything or install anything to clean up those unwanted or unused programs. Windows 10 and Windows 11 allow you to remove programs right from the Start menu. Really! You didn’t know that? Sure you can. If you see something there you don’t recognize there’s a good bet you don’t use it and you don’t need it. If you don’t use it and don’t need it, why have it? So go through your start menu right now. If you see something you don’t use or even recognize then right-click it and choose “Uninstall”. If you’re geeky and want a more thorough cleaning experience you can use the uninstaller in Reg Organizer (not free) or HiBit Uninstaller (a Cloudeight freeware pick). And remember… removing unused programs isn’t going to speed up your computer or increase its performance (unless you’re running very low on hard drive space) or you are a believer in some of those other goofballs who write tech newsletters, who make almost everything sound like something that will make your computer run faster. Hey, they are trying to get readers! We are too, but we try to be very truthful with you – even if it means we go broke in the process. We’re darn near there now! Anyway, you should remove unused/unwanted
programs as a matter of good housekeeping. If you do a good job I’ll
send EB around with her Good Housekeeping Seal which you can proudly
display on your desktop – or not.
Step 2: Clean out your Documents and Downloads Folders Lots of things end up in your Documents folder. Go on and take a gander. What a mess, eh? If you don’t want to get rid of stuff at least organize it. My grandmother always told me to wear clean underwear in case I got hit by a car. It’s the same thing with your Documents folder…do you want people to think you’re a disorganized slob like me, do you? Of course, you don’t! So take some time to rummage through your Documents folder, delete what you don’t need, and organize the stuff you think you do need by making folders for similar types of documents. Your downloads folder is probably full of installers you’ve downloaded over time and have 1lready installed. Most of these installers are now useless since the program is probably installed, and most of these old installers are out-of-date anyway, so why not get rid of them? You can delete everything in the download folder without losing anything important – the only exception being if you have a portable app in your downloads folder that runs from that folder. If you do, and you remove it by mistake, big deal! You can re-download it in a minute or two anyway. There is no sense in hanging on to installers you’ve already used to install programs. Clean it up, I tells ya! Again, cleaning up your Documents and Downloads folders isn’t going to make your computer faster –it ain’t going to turn it into a screaming machine any more than wearing clean underwear is going to keep you from getting run over by a car, but it’s good housekeeping and you do what EB’s seal don’t you? Step 3: Optimize your Windows Start-up programs Everything you allow to start with Windows runs in the background sucking up your system resources like a sponge soaking up water. Programs often set themselves up to start with Windows because they think they’re so important. Do you use Skype or iTunes or Megan’s PDF Wonderbar all of the time? No, I tells ya! You don’t. You don’t need them running in the background all the time just in case you might want to use them once a day or once in a while or once in a blue moon. Windows 10 and Windows 11 have a startup manager, did you know that? They do. And the Windows startup manager does a decent job, too. If you can turn a switch on or off you can use the Windows 10 or Windows 11 startup manager.
If you can flip a switch you can use the Windows startup manager. You’ll also see under the switches, terms like High impact, Medium impact, Low impact, or Unknown. This shows you the level of impact these programs have on your Windows startup. High-impact items (apps) impact your startup times more than low-impact items. Another nice feature of the Windows startup manager is that it won’t let you turn off Windows startup items that you really need to startup. You still have to think a little before flipping the switch. For instance, you don’t want to turn off OneDrive if you use OneDrive to back up your computer. If you use any 3rd-party backup program – you won’t want to shut that off either. And don’t shut off your antivirus protection. I mean, that’s just common sense, right? If you want even more control over your startups (and you know pretty much what you’re doing, you can use the startup manager in Reg Organizer (not free), the startup manager in HiBit Uninstaller (free), or Sysinternals (Microsoft) AutoRuns. Here’s more about Sysinternals AutoRuns. Autoruns gives you a complete picture and description of what is starting with Windows and you’ll be able to disable unnecessary start-ups quickly and easily. But, here’s the thing, don’t go messing around with all those tabs you’ll see on AutoRuns. The only one you have to worry about is the “Logon” tab. See?
You just untick the box to the item you don’t want starting with Windows. If you right-click an item, AutoRuns tells you what it is and where it’s installed so you can make an informed decision about whether to allow something to start with Windows or not. When it doubt, leave it alone. As a general rule if it’s printer-related, antivirus/anti-malware related, or if it has the word Microsoft in it, follow Paul McCartney’s advice and Let It Be! “Oh let it be… speaking words of wisdom, let it be…” Now, of course, if you’re an advanced user or you’re crazy and love to see what will happen if you click this or that, AutoRuns is a great tool for tweaking things. If you’re not computer savvy, just stick with the Logon tab. Or better yet, just use the Windows startup manager. It’s better to be safe than sorry, my grandma always told me. You can download AutoRuns from here – it’s free and it’s by Microsoft’s TechNet people. Optimizing your Windows start-ups will increase your computer’s performance! Unlike the first two cleaning tips, optimizing your start-ups will make your computer start up and shut down faster. It may also increase your computer’s performance – since what starts with Windows, runs in the background eating up your valuable computer resources. I hope you all enjoyed this article and that every one of you will earn EB’s Seal of Good Housekeeping. She won’t give me one – she says I’m a slob. Takes one to know one, EB! Want more tips, tricks, and information? We have thousands of Windows tips, tricks, and more on our InfoAve website. Subscribe to our free InfoAve Daily newsletter.
Turn Text Into Images with Microsoft’s Image Creator Like many of you, we’re not sure what kind of changes to our world that AI (artificial intelligence) will bring with it. It’s only in its infancy and we can already see it’s beginning to change the world. It reminds us of the days when the internet was new and we were some of the first people to use it every day. We were almost addicted to it. Way back in 1995, we could see the potential the internet had to change the world – and it has changed the world far beyond what we ever could have imagined back then. It’s the same with AI. It’s only in its infancy, and it will have as big an impact on the world as the internet did, maybe more. And like the internet, it will be used for good and for bad, because it reflects human nature, human needs, and human greed as well as everything good about humanity. Where AI will lead, no one knows. But one thing we do know is that whether you are an artist with a lot of talent or just wish you could draw, paint, or create sketches and drawings, you will have fun with Microsoft’s Image Creator powered by DALL-E. How to use Microsoft’s Image Creator Powered by DALL-E If you’re using Windows 11, and you’re signed in with a Microsoft account you should be able to access DALL-E from your computer. Just press Windows Key + S to open the search box and click on the Bing icon in the top right corner.
Choose a chat style. If you want to create images from your text input, make sure you choose “More Creative”.
Enter as much descriptive text as you need to describe what you want DALL-E to create and then press the arrow >
It may take up to five minutes for DALL-E to create your image. If there is a delay, you’ll see the message below and after a few minutes, you’ll get a notice in Edge when the images are done.
You’ll have between two and four images to choose from.
You’ll also have a chance to add or subtract things from the images that were created by saying things like “less bird, more clouds, and make the sun smaller”. If you’re using Windows 10 (or if you are using Windows 11 and don’t see the Bing button at the top of the search box) you can still access the Microsoft Bing Image Creator by using Microsoft Edge (all Windows 10 and Windows 11 have Microsoft Edge installed) and going to https://bing.com/chat/ You’ll need to sign in with your Microsoft account (i.e. @outlook.com, @hotmail.com, @live.com, @msn.com) before you can use the DALL-E Image Creator. Here are a few images we created with Microsoft's Image Creator...
Don't have a Cloudeight SeniorPass? It's a great deal. Learn more here. Our Cloudeight SeniorPass is a great deal. You get unlimited support for one full year from the date you first use your SeniorPass. We can help keep your computer running well, fix all kinds of computer problems, clean up malware, and a whole lot more. Our SeniorPass is like having insurance for your computer. And it's only $99 for an entire year.Get your SeniorPass today for just $99. It's just like having insurance for your computer - only better! To learn more about our SeniorPass, please see this page. Close but No Cigar: My Defense of Cliches Some people mistakenly think cliches are so overused that they lose their original meaning or impact. They think only a bad writer would resort to using a bunch of cliches. Some think wannabe writers who use cliches are lazy, boring, or unimaginative. But today, I come to praise cliches, not to bury them! Cliches have many benefits, such as making communication easier, creating a sense of familiarity, or adding a bit of humor or irony. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Either you want something easy to read and informative or you want a writer to be original and use words like a sesquipedalian. In this essay, I will endeavor to explore the pros and cons of cliches and why we should not judge a person's speaking or writing skills by how many cliches they use. You can't judge a book by its cover! So let's get started... there's no time like the present! First of all, you might think wannabe writers like me are a dime a dozen. And I guess you're right. But maybe I'm a diamond in the rough. I like to go against the grain. So contrary to literary... Read the rest of this essay here..
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