Somewhat surprisingly, heating your room with a computer is as efficient, energy-wise, as heating it with a regular heater – that is to say, watt-for-watt, the computer delivers equivalent performance in terms of generating heat.

And while it’s heating your room it can be used by researchers to fight disease – like the coronavirus, Covid-19.

Who can you trust online?

In a recent expose, Vice, a prominent online lifestyle and technology magazine, showed that antivirus company Avast was collecting and selling all of its free users’ web browsing data to other companies such as Microsoft, Google and many others.

This means that the company had basically unlimited access to information about your online life.

What kind of computer do I need?

To answer that let’s start with what most computer-users use computers for.

The most common five activities are: editing documents, checking email, going to websites, looking at or storing their photos, and playing games.

Microsoft discontinues support for Windows 7 in January 2020, meaning that it will be unsafe to use on the internet due to a lack of security updates.

It’s unfortunate as many, including me, prefer Windows 7 to Windows 8 or 10, but there are worse problems in the world presently.

At this point you’ve got two choices if you’re on Windows 7: upgrade your computer to Windows 10 or buy a new computer with Windows 10 on it.

It occurred to me today that the number of additional pieces of software I use in Windows is quite staggering.

I rarely, if ever, use the built-in Windows apps (asides from maybe Calculator), as there’s almost always something better in the freeware world.

For those of you who don’t know, ‘freeware’ means free software, of which there is a ton on the Windows platform.

It surprises me how people with very tidy homes can often have quite disorganised computers.

One would think that the same principle would apply to both situations, but some people are, I think, less experienced at organising their digital lives than their real ones.

However organisation inside a computer has the same benefits as organisation in a home or business:

One of the problems of the internet is how difficult it is to advertise online.

So much of the web is funded by advertising that it’s hard to get away from it – unless you install an ad-blocker. So you might think, well, I’ll take advantage of that in my business, but unfortunately it’s not overly simple.

Unlike a regular newspaper or billboard, where you put the ad up and then you’re done, online advertising is much more complicated.

What constitutes a good email program?

Well, partially that it’s not made by Microsoft, for starters. I know a lot of people use Outlook, and I’m not against it, necessarily, but there are so many problems associated with that program I’d need an entire chapter of a book just to explain them.

Recently Apple made a bit of stir by releasing a $US5000 computer screen, then charging an extra $US1000 for the stand that the monitor required to stay upright.

The cynic in me thinks this is probably just a marketing stunt – they wanted to charge $6000, but knew they’d get more publicity if they got everybody riled up about how ridiculous this is, and keep themselves in the headlines for a lot longer than if they’d just, you know, sold the thing.

Windows 7 is expiring in January 2020; the only option is to upgrade to Windows 10, if you want to stay on that platform.

So what’s in a name? What’s better/worse about Windows 10?