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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby herbidacious » Sat Jun 27, 2020 11:49 pm

We had a very rigorous, quite convoluted and intimidating and not glitch-free, and thus quite stressful, set up period at the beginning of lockdown. I gather we were going to swtich to some of the cloud based systems anyway, but it was to have been done in 6 months rather than one.

However still not clear how protected we are from security breaches or viruses. Prior to lockdown we weren't permitted to use flash drives and had to have any CD we might used scanned by computer isiolated from the rest of the network first. Email is still set up to block all manner of things, and all attachments are converted into pdfs - you have to put in a request the original document if you want to edit it.

I wonder if our IT head guy is having nightmares. We were running Windows XP until recently because he didn't trust later versions.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Earthmaiden » Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:13 am

herbidacious wrote:I prefer Office, buyt it's what I am used to.

I guess it might depend on how much you use it. It's online only though? I resist cloud based things as much as possible for various reasons.


This is a very good point. I expect there's a way of moving smoothly to Google but it would be worth finding out how it is done if you still want to be able to access and work on your old Microsoft files easily - and without spoiling the format - and whether you could access and work on files if Wifi was down. I imagine files you wanted to keep would have been stored on a cloud or a separate hard drive ready to transfer when you wanted to.

I say this because I had my laptop reconditioned after it died, which meant losing the old Windows 7 and installing Windows 10. I expected to have it back with all the files and software I'd had before, reinstalled. I got in a terrible muddle with saving files until I discovered that he'd put my Word files onto Open Office and installed something called Microsoft Office 365 which is web based with a cloud for storage but is not Microsoft Office. It could only be used when WiFi was available which was more inconvenient than I could have imagined. I don't know if people manage to move their 'stuff' to other systems successfully without losing formatting but it's worth finding out if you'll be able to retrieve things you want satisfactorily. I installed the components of Microsoft Office that I wanted in the end and was able to open my files in Word etc with no problem. (it worries me that Microsoft Office won't be around forever and that I might have to reformat a couple of very large files completely on something else :evil:.). You will appreciate I am not a computer buff and that hopefully someone in the know will reassure!

I too worry about storing things on a cloud. I used to be able to access quite a few work systems from home, we had a special VPN connection. Certain things were (quite rightly) deemed too sensitive though.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby mistakened » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:22 am

Good Morning Campers. I would have been here earlier but for some reason I had no internet connection.

We both thought that we had eye problems last night. I could see square flashing lights on the far wall of the sitting room. It turned out to be disco lights from a party in a house on the other side of the valley, about half a mile away! We heard them setting up the sound system earlier. I wonder if they were joined by blue flashing lights?
Deb tells me that they were still at it at 5 00am

Moira

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Badger's Mate » Sun Jun 28, 2020 8:27 am

Hi
These days we've got windows 10, & newish laptop. the previous one packed up at the end of last year. That one was also post work, thus I haven't had office for about 5 or 6 years. If I need to edit a Word file, Excel spreadsheet or presentation I use Google docs. It works, that's all I need. Slightly more irritating was the loss of Picasa, my pictures were edited on it and slide shows set up. Life's too short for pixel peeping IMHO and if I were to use Lightroom or suchlike I would get dragged into the dark side, but most of my pictures could do with cropping, straightening and a hint of increased contrast, saturation or sharpening. None of the stuff I do is important, in the great scheme of things if it got lost only I would know or care. We don't bank online; my card details are keyed in for online purchases, so vulnerable I guess, but the card companies have to support their customers in the event of their being defrauded otherwise people would stop using cards and the system couldn't work.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Suffs » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:04 am

Good morning all :wave

We have a bright and breezy morning ...

We have a chicken to rub with lemon and rosemary and roast for supper. We’ll have it with new potatoes and Swiss chard from the garden today, and tomorrow it’ll be lovely with salad ... there may be enough for the next day too. The carcass will be used for stock and that may well be used with mushrooms for a risotto ... that’s half the week provided for :D

I have a new Dell laptop bought during last Black Friday sales from John Lewis who set it up for me with Windows 10. I decided I wanted Office as I’m so used to it, and have an annual subscription. I try to avoid cloud storage as much as possible; I already use it a bit of course for my iPhone. My all singing all dancing camera appears to have died so the next decision is about what to replace it with. Currently I use my iPhone camera and the plan is to transfer pics and documents I want to keep to my laptop and save them to memory sticks ... I need to get on with that. Current thinking re the camera is to get a secondhand iPad instead, as I would find that more useful in the studio ...

My laptop thinks I should download Edge ... shall I?
Last edited by Suffs on Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:15 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby icelesley » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:12 am

Good Morning campers. Suffs I have edge but it was already installed when I bought the computer. If it's free why not install it, but be careful, if it's a trial they will charge you for it after so long. Well it poured down all day and night, it doesn't look very promising now either :roll:

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby northleedsbhoy » Sun Jun 28, 2020 9:30 am

Morning all. Blowing a hooley here at the moment and 40+ winds forecast. Had a couple of bursts of torrential rain yesterday with showers in between so I didn’t even venture outside. I probably won’t bother going out today either as it’s meant to rain all day.

I’ve got an appointment for a haircut on the 7th but I do know that some have been working nonstop as enquires keep coming up on local sites, there have even been a couple asking for DJs!! Now to me it just seems plain bonkers to ask those questions because it’s obvious they’re going to break the law and they’re giving their name, it’s like a burglar robbing your home and leaving their calling card!! If it wasn’t so serious it would be farcical :(

Cheers
NLB :thumbsup

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby PatsyMFagan » Sun Jun 28, 2020 10:34 am

northleedsbhoy wrote:I’ve got an appointment for a haircut on the 7th but I do know that some have been working nonstop as enquires keep coming up on local sites, there have even been a couple asking for DJs!! Now to me it just seems plain bonkers to ask those questions because it’s obvious they’re going to break the law and they’re giving their name, it’s like a burglar robbing your home and leaving their calling card!! If it wasn’t so serious it would be farcical


Exactly the same here ... it's barbers rather than (lady's) hairdressers ... I can't understand why getting a hair cut is considered so essential. :roll:

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby herbidacious » Sun Jun 28, 2020 11:59 am

I have office 365 but don't save things on the cloud with it. That's optional.
Our shared desktop PC has One Drive and tries to store everything on it and it drives me nuts. When it was on my laptop, I disabled it but not got round to doing so upstairs as I don't use it often and it's a shared computer. Maybe 365 uses One Drive too and I disabled it but have forgotten?
I can still log on to my actual computer in the office remotely but we are discouraged from doing so unless it's to work on a book that's nearing its repro date (none of mine are) but the connection is very slow, I can't print anything (except on the printer in the office!) and everything looks smaller. We are using Dropbox instead now and are discouraged from saving things on our own (home) computers.

Everything is cloud orientated these days which explains why hard drives are so small (imo) by default on modern laptops. I don't want to admit that I don't trust it - either in terms of security or preservation - but I just did. But also I handle very big files (personal use, not work), which means I'd end up having to spend even more money on storage, plus I imagine it takes longer to upload things.
It would also be highly problematic if there was a broadband failure and I couldn't access things.
Cloud storage is great for back up (I back up jpegs on google images and my iPhone photos automatically back up on there), but not for me as a main place to keep things.
I do periodically get a bit nervous that most of my genealogy research is effectively on the cloud - Ancestry - apart from my every now and again downloading gedcom files from it (which do not store images).
You don't need Edge, Suffs. I wouldn't bother if you can avoid it. Although if MS wants you to upload something, it may start sulking in other areas until you do. The latest general update involved compulsory installation of their latest version of Edge. I rather object to this. I don't use it and have unpinned it. I hope it's not taking up too much disc space. It is sometimes useful to have an alternative browser though. I have an ad block on google chrome which means that sometimes I can't see websites. In such cases I use windows explorer (which I used to have to have to connect to my work computer) or Firefox.


I am not liking this wind. I am worrying about my plants and I don't feel like going outside and doing anything. But then I don't feel like doing anything anyway, inside or out... I need to sort out the kitchen but feel overwhelmed by it. It was cluttered before the cupboard incident, but now it's worse of course. I cleared out a small cupboard yesterday to put what little crockery and glassware we have left in, for everyday use, but not sure what to do with other things. We have taken things off the tops of the other cupboards too. In another life I would suggest to OH that went out to lunch to avoid it all.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Stokey Sue » Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:12 pm

Suffs wrote:My laptop thinks I should download Edge ... shall I?

I am really surprised that a laptop set up with Windows 10 in the last year would not already have the Edge browser installed, in my case it just came with Windows 10

I used it for quite a long time, as the accessibility options in Chrome and Windows used to fight, but since the last massive update to Windows 10 they sorted out the bugs in accessibility (hurrah!) and I marginally prefer Chrome which seems slightly simpler and more intuitive to use and which doesn’t keep switching the search to Bing which I dislike

Worth a try

Cool enough to do stuff here today so I’d better get on
Have a good day everyone

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby liketocook » Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:39 pm

Good morning everyone,
Wet and wild here today, my garden chairs were all blown about the place this morning so the wind must have been pretty fierce during the night!
My new laptop bought in January came with Windows Edge and I'm finding it okay so far. Storage wise I use a mix of on the hard drive, cloud and stashed in email which I feel covers most eventualities for what I need.
A day for gentle pottering about and a bit of cooking I think. I'm going to braise some ribs ready to roast later and make ratatouille for later in the week.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby KeenCook2 » Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:13 pm

Morning / afternoon (!) all,

Thank you so, so much for taking the time to share your experiences - as well as being incredibly helpful, it just reinforces my conviction that this is all anything but straightforward .... :? :?

This was quite a good article I came across on Good Housekeeping that confirmed a lot of what you've all said: https://bit.ly/2ZfGq7J

Arghhhhh ......

I've still got a CD of MS Office, can't remember which version, but of course CD drives are not generally installed on new laptops. It may be that it's so old it wouldn't be compatible with Windows 10 anyway.

I think that one of my concerns with Google docs is the internet connection, which is by no means infallible here and quite often drops out, meaning I have to reconnect.

EEK, I just thought I'd try opening a Google docs doc and maybe trying to edit one of my exisiting Word docs (probably a recipe!) to see what happens and I've found loads of docs already there ... some dating back several years to when I was working in recruitment and including job ads and a few candidate CVs ...

I had simply not realised how immense one's Google footprint is :o

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Pampy » Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:38 pm

I have my pc set up for automatic updates and lo and behold, Edge appeared the other day. It seems that Microsoft has made it backwardly compatible. I've used it in the past and don't like it so have unpinned it. Whilst I much prefer to have already-installed software updated automatically, I think it's a bit of a cheek to install something completely new, especially if it's resource hungry and so will degrade the performance of my already struggling pc. Like IBM in years past, much of Microsoft's updates and new products need more processing power.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Renee » Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:43 pm

I really liked Windows 7, but when i bought a new Dell desktop computer it came with windows 10 and Microsoft Edge, which I promptly changed. I also had the update for Microsoft Edge the other day which has had changes made and improvements, but once again I got rid of it and am staying with Google Chrome.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Pampy » Sun Jun 28, 2020 1:52 pm

Mine was a full install of Edge - its never been available for Windows 7 before. Every new version of Windows always seems to lose some useful functionality of the previous version. I'm old enough to have used Windows 3.1 (and 3.11 for business use) and still miss some of it's features!

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Earthmaiden » Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:00 pm

Afternoon all! :wave.
KeenCook2 wrote:had simply not realised how immense one's Google footprint is
You only have to breathe for Google to find out somehow - I have resisted using their email and diary systems so far but expect they know anyway.

Badger's Mate wrote: If I need to edit a Word file, Excel spreadsheet or presentation I use Google docs. It works
Does it really work without any loss of format? That's really worth knowing if so. If, for instance, I had a Word document with carefully placed headings, spaces, typeface, photos etc. Would it open in Google docs and look the same?

A showery day, during the night we had half an hour of heavy rain and some of the strongest wind I have ever heard here, I watched from the window and wondered which way the huge tree down the road would fall if it blew over :?. Pleased to say it seems pretty sturdy. Getting on well with the house blitz - just a bit left for this afternoon and a walk after 6pm when the showers are supposed to leave. I've got cold sticky chicken and salad for later.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Stokey Sue » Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:04 pm

I predate Windows! But started at 3.1

The trouble is that every Microsoft update makes it more of a monolith and less modular, I was having issues with Outlook 2016 but you can no longer remove and reinstall it as a stand-alone module so I let it rest, the massive Windows 10 update didn’t fix it - but guess what? The patch to fine tune the update fixed most of the problems though it still marks unread mail as read. But MS Suport (sic) had been telling me the problem was mine not theirs

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Pampy » Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:10 pm

A mere youngster - I pre-date PCs! :lol: :lol:

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby Renee » Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:17 pm

Me too!!!

Those were the days when people used to speak to each other, but I rarely met anyone who had similar interests such as food and cooking! I wouldn't want to go back to those days.

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Re: Wildfood campsite

Postby janetmw » Sun Jun 28, 2020 2:47 pm

Pampy wrote:A mere youngster - I pre-date PCs! :lol: :lol:


Same here!

We upgraded our creaking PC ( Windows Vista :oops: ) and laptop about a year ago. We were concerned about the cost of having to upgrade MS Office. I had been running MSOffice Professional on the PC so was used to all the features.

We took a leap of faith and installed https://www.libreoffice.org/ and haven't looked back. It is a completely free development of Open Office and has all the modules found in Office: word processor, spreadsheets, databases, drawing, presentations, maths formula editor.
It will open a vast array of formats including Office and will save in many formats compatible with different versions of Office and other programs. We have not found any problems with formatting across different platforms. There is just a small learning curve finding out where the different features are in the menus.

Badger's Mate wrote:Slightly more irritating was the loss of Picasa, my pictures were edited on it and slide shows set up. Life's too short for pixel peeping IMHO and if I were to use Lightroom or suchlike I would get dragged into the dark side, but most of my pictures could do with cropping, straightening and a hint of increased contrast, saturation or sharpening. None of the stuff I do is important, in the great scheme of things if it got lost only I would know or care.


I too was dismayed to find that Picasa was no longer available in Windows 10. I used it a lot; mainly for scrolling through images stored on the computer to find the one thing I knew was there somewhere! It finds images from saved websites as well as photos. Then I found a download which works! It doesn't have the online connectivity of the previous incarnation but search and editing works in the same way. :thumbsup

Here's the link for Picasa: https://www.softpedia.com/get/Multimedia/Graphic/Graphic-Viewers/Picasa.shtml

Hope this helps

Janet
Janet

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