By admin / Uncategorized / 0 Comments

Windows 10 support ending in October 2025

October 14th 2025 is the official date that Microsoft will stop supporting or providing free updates to Windows 10 and are recommending that users upgrade to Windows 11.

However Windows 11 requires the existence of something called a TPM 2.0 module on your PC and without it, Windows 11 won’t install or run (not without some hacking about).

What is a TPM 2.0?

TPM 2.0, or Trusted Platform Module version 2.0, is a hardware-based security feature that provides a range of cryptographic functions and security services. It’s designed to enhance the security of devices by offering secure generation and storage of cryptographic keys, ensuring device integrity, and supporting secure boot processes.

You can buy TPM modules that will plug into specific TPM headers on your computers motherboard (if it has one) but if your PC is older that 5 years you may be out of luck and may need to shell out on a new computer costing many £100s, not to mention the process of migrating everything over.

Are there alternatives?

Thankfully yes. There are third party tools that aim to remove the TPM 2.0 (and other limitations) that Windows 11 imposes. However, these are unofficial and you may find that when your PC received a Windows 11 update, that it may break the hack, so not an ideal solution.

If you want to keep your perfectly serviceable hardware going for years to come but you want to retain some level of security online, then you may wish to consider Linux, a freely available alternative to Microsoft Windows and one that provides many of the same sorts of tools that you’re likely to be using such as an Email client, a web browser, Word and Excel alternatives, even a Photoshop alternative called GIMP!

Linux tends to demand less from your PC meaning that it may give your ageing hardware a new lease of life, but be aware that there is a learning curve associated with Linux as it’s not Windows. Having said that, you can tailor the Linux desktop to look and work very much like Windows.

For many of my customers, they typically need email, web browsing, Excel and Word type tools and I feel that Linux fill this gap admirably. I’ve been daily driving a Linux distribution called POP!_OS for over 4 years now and can confidently say that for these tasks, it performs incredibly well.

telegraph pole
By admin / Uncategorized / 0 Comments

Is Trooli full fibre broadband really here and is there an alternative?

I’m a self confessed geek and I’ve been religiously checking on the trooli.com website for a while, hoping that my address will magically appear and I can order what is now potentially the fastest broadband product so far at 2Gb/2Gb. That’s to say 2 Gigabits up and down!

Sadly my property doesn’t seem to be on their list. despite my immediate neighbours being on there and us both currently using the same pole for our telephone services. Perhaps because I’m at the end of the road? I’ve tried to reach out to Trooli to get a formal reason as to why but answers seem unforthcoming so far.

It seems that quite a few properties down our street have whats called a JUP or “Joint User Pole” and whilst Trooli are allowed to use them, they have to apply for usage. The process seems a little confusing as Trooli are suggesting that there may be an additional cost if your property uses a JUP as Trooli have to carry out an assessment and then potentially pass on some/all of the licence fees associated with that JUP. It’s unclear at this point as to what these costs will be but they do say that they will let you know before you proceed with your order.

One thing that’s not clear is whether you’re footing much/all of the assessment/licence fee for the JUP which in turn then allows Trooli to sell services to other users of that pole without charging them a fee. I guess that the price you pay for wanting something sooner.

Wessex Internet

At present there’s not much competition for full fibre, but Wessex Internet have been making progress coming down the Everton Road through Hordle to Sky End Lane.

I bumped into an engineer the other day and asked if he had any information on whether Wessex Internet were coming to Everton. His reply was probably not this year but they would likely be starting in Milford and moving north anyway, not south from Hordle.

On paper Troolis product is cheaper and faster with their fastest 2000Mb/2000Mb residential service costing a penny under £50.00 per month, whereas Wessex Internet are quite a bit more expensive at £79 per month for a 900Mb/450Mb service. So it seems that at present, Trooli are the go to choice in terms of speed and price.

This may be because Trooli may be hanging their cables from existing poles for much of their installation whereas Wessex may be digging, which I suspect is a much more costly option and that cost is passed on to the customer.

BT/Openreach

So where is Openreach? As you may know, BT was broken up into a two parts, BT and Openreach to try to release their monopoly on the communications infrastructure and provide more competition. When you buy a broadband service, you don’t buy from Openreach, but it is they that provide and maintain a high percentage of the national infrastructure. If you visit this page you’ll be able to see what their plans are for the future and whether your area is planned for a full fibre upgrade.

Many companies use the Openreach network to sell their own products on, so when this becomes available, you may quickly find many more companies are able to provide Ultrafast broadband in your area too.

If anyone from either company wishes to reach out and let me know, I’d love to hear from you.

cloud backup solution
By admin / Backup and data recovery / 0 Comments

Whats the difference between backup and archive

It’s been a while since I’ve discussed backup solutions on this site, but it’s always worth refreshing our memories as to the importance of having a backup of anything important on your devices. One of the most common problems I see is not that someone doesn’t have a backup solution, but that they haven’t run a backup in a while because their process is a manual one and the user has forgotten or put it off in favour of more important tasks.

One important distinction to make is the difference between backup and archive. Whilst they do overlap, they are not the same thing.

An archive is typically a long term storage (potentially over many years) of information that perhaps is not needed from day to day, but you want to keep it just in case. An archive keeps growing and growing as more data is added. An archive is also typically stored on media that is not volatile and is designed to last the test of time. Most CDs/DVDs/USB or HDDs degrade over time, so finding the right media to store those precious memories is crucial.

A backup is typically used in disaster recovery cases such as a corrupt disk drive or a lost or stolen laptop.

There’s no reason why you cannot backup an archive too just in case one copy of those scanned photos from 1965 is not enough.

In my experience EVERYONE should run an automated backup of some kind and there are so many options available now that it’s easier than ever to have some kind of automated backup solution.

Self hosted solutions

You could consider a USB drive or perhaps a NAS to automate your backups. A NAS is typically a small, low powered, self contained disk storage computer, capable of providing many terabytes of storage and you would plug one of these into your router or switch. Today a NAS can be much more than just a backup device too. With solutions to stream movies to all your devices, including your TV, provide a fileserver to your PCs and Macs, even act as a CCTV security camera recorder. You can even run websites from many.

However, a self hosted solution is no good on its own if you wanted protection from a fire or flood in your home.

Cloud backup solution

Maybe delegate the responsibility to a cloud provider such as Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive or Dropbox. These solutions offload the responsibility of storage to servers elsewhere on the internet (that’s all the cloud really is). They can be easy and quick to set up and typically you pay by the Gigabyte for storage.

The downside is that you’ll likely pay a monthly fee which after a time can add up, plus it’s very likely that firms offering these services may not allow you to upload and store certain file types or sizes and may even use the data you upload for marketing purposes.

Why not drop us a line to discuss options and what you’re looking to achieve.

 

 

 

Trooli gigabit
By admin / Internet / 0 Comments

Gigabit internet is coming to Everton, Lymington and surrounding areas

It looks like by the end of 2022 we may have an option for up to 1Gbit Fibre To The Home (FTTH) internet in Everton and the surrounding area.

A company called Trooli have started running fibre and I passed a Trooli van today on the side of the road near Fox Pond.

This is great news as we seem to be sandwiched between New Milton who have at least 1 provider of 1GBit internet supplied by CityFibre and Southampton who have a few options, most notably Toob for their extremely aggressive pricing.

Toob in Southampton are offering a 900Mbit up/900Mbit down service for £25 per month. Troolis pricing for a similar product (900Mbit down/300Mbit up) is a hefty £68 with the first month free. So almost 3 times the price for what seems like a lower tier of service.

Nonetheless, I see this as a good sign as competition in the shape of Openreach will almost definitely be coming down here too at some point in the future and we may then have a few options to choose from at last.

By admin / Uncategorized / 0 Comments

How to tell if an email is spam?

It’s an inevitable fact of life that spam exists and that it can sometimes become a major annoyance and sometimes really embarrassing too. There are so many email schemes going on right now and I wanted to write an article covering some of the ways to identify if the email is genuine or not.

Many spam emails have something in common; they want you to carry out an action, whether that be to click on a link, to open an attachment, to view an image, to call a number or perhaps to send a payment via Bitcoin.

If you’re in any doubt as to where the email has come from DO NOT display any embedded images, open any attachments, click on any embedded links, ring any numbers or send any online payments.

If you receive spam from what seems to be a genuine company such as Vodafone or perhaps Plus.net or BT.com, the first thing to consider is do you have an account with them already? If the answer is “yes” then we can move on to the next step. If the answer is “no” then its likely that you can ignore the message and delete it if its not useful to you.

Look at the FROM address and see if it looks familiar or that the bit after the @ sign is genuine. So for example, you might get an email from sales@vodafone.co.uk. If your Vodafone email comes from anyone other than a Vodafone address, then its likely going to be some kind of spam.  I say likely as some legitimate companies will use a third party to deliver their marketing email. If in doubt, delete it.

If the FROM address looks correct then look at the copy of the email and see if there are any links present. If there are, don’t click on them, but if you hover your mouse cursor over the link, in many email programs it will show you the real address that you’ll be visiting and if this looks dodgy, don’t click on it! On a mobile device its a little different as you cannot hover your mouse, but I’ve founds that if you press and hold on a link on an Android or iOS device, it will give you options such as how you wish to open the link. Its at this stage that you can look at the link before really “clicking” on it to determine if it looks legitimate or not. If it looks dodgy, close the window and delete the email.

Are there any obvious grammatical or spelling errors? If there are then this should be ringing alarm bells. Any legitimate company should be spell and grammar checking their emails before they are sent out to 100,000s of people.

Heres a good example. I recently received an email allegedly from Gov.uk regarding an unsuccessful tax submission. The email below itself looks quite professional, but the FROM address (marked with a red box) is not an address I’d expect this email to come from so my spidey sense is tingling. On closer inspection, when I hover (not click) on the blue text link, the address (marked in a green box at the bottom) is certainly not an address I’d expect a valid gov.uk email to use.

The more astute among you will also notice some other interesting things in the image, namely that theres a bar running along the top (marked with a yellow box) mentioning “Paris”. This is displayed as I have a plugin which aims to tell me whereabouts an email has come from based on some invisible data within the email. Whilst this is not 100% accurate all the time, it does help with flagging emails that may not be genuine. This plugin is called “MailHops” for Mozilla Thunderbird, a really good email program from the same people who make the Firefox browser.

So adding all the evidence up, its incredibly likely that even if I would expect to get an email from gov.uk regarding the submission of taxes, this specific email is not genuine and it can been sent to the bin.

By admin / Gaming / / 0 Comments

Retro Gaming

I recall with fondness the very first time me and my sister received our first computer one Christmas Day in 1983. It was a Commodore 64 which came with one game called Cybertron Mission.

within 10 minutes we had the computer all set up on the TV and were playing the game.

When I reminisce about playing Cybertron Mission, a warm, vague mist descends and my memory tells me that the game was amazing with full colour graphics and 3 channel sound.

That feeling, more than the actual game itself is why I love retro games, after all many retro games let’s be honest are actually truly awful by today’s standards.

In the case of the Commodore 64, there was the delicious but agonising wait to save up enough pocket money to buy a new cassette from the local store. Then when you had the game in your possession it may have still taken many minutes to finally load into the computers memory. Ah the good old Commodore Datasette.

These days you can now emulate many old computer systems, such as the Commodore 64, Spectrum 48k, Amiga, Atari, even some of the more modern consoles such as the Wii and N64 can be readily emulated on modest modern computer hardware.

If the thought of retro games still gives you goosebumps, take a look at a project called retropie which uses a relatively inexpensive raspberry pi computer to emulate a whole range of old computer and gaming systems. Relive your mis-spent youth waggling your joystick to Daily Thompson’s Decathlon, or smashing the fire buttons on Galaga knowing that you’ll never need to insert an old 10p into the slot ever again.

Watch out for a future article where we will look into retropie in more depth, go through the install process and set up a retro arcade cabinet.

By admin / Hardware / / 0 Comments

What is a NAS drive?

NAS stands for Network Attached Storage. In other words some storage that is connected to your wired or WiFi network at home or in the office.

A NAS device is a dedicated mini computer consisting of one or more hard drives which are then set up so that your PCs, Apple Macs, iPhones and Android devices can see the space, save stuff to them and also pull stuff from them.

NAS devices for the home tend to be relatively small and quiet devices that sip power and are designed to run 24 hours a day, whereas large offices might have bigger devices mounted in specialist racks.

NAS devices can store any kind of file that you might store on a computer or mobile device and are ideal for use as backup devices when set up correctly, offering peace of mind if something goes wrong with your computer.

There are many makes and model size of NAS to fit all budgets. The Synology devices are some of our favourites as they tend to come with lots of additional software that you can install, much of it is free to enhance the capabilities of the NAS from a simple storage device to a complex security camera recording system for example.

There is another device type called SAN which might seem the same as a NAS at first glance, however SANs tend to be used in enterprise environments and operate in a different way.

By admin / Hardware / 0 Comments

Repurposing your old computer

You’re sat waiting for your ageing PC or Apple Mac to boot, thinking “maybe its time to buy another one?”. You can pick up a new PC for less than £200… with an operating system, which seems crazy cheap but in this age of throw away tech, it seems to be the way that most manufacturers are moving. Even the high end MacBook Pro laptops are not built as well as you might think, but their price point suggests otherwise.

What if you could repurpose your old laptop, PC or Apple Mac to be as fast as the day it were born? There is no special magic or sauce here. No clever dongle that promises to boost the speed of all the components on board. The potential solution comes from something called Linux.

You may have heard of Linux or perhaps Ubuntu. Linux is another Operating system, just like Mac OS or Windows. The difference is that most Linux distributions (we call them distros) are free to download and install. They come with a raft of tools to rival many Microsoft or Apple software and if installed correctly, Linux can provide a boost of speed and give new purpose to an otherwise perfectly good but ageing computer.

Now, lets be clear, you’re not going to get Microsoft Internet Explorer or Edge. Your not going to get Word, Excel, Powerpoint or Outlook on Linux (at least not yet), but you can get some very good alternatives such as Libre Office for your Office siute replacement, Mozilla Firefox or Chromium to replace Internet Explorer/Edge and Mozilla Thunderbird to replace Outlook for email, making this a perfectly useable internet ready PC once more.

If you’re confident to have a go at installing Linux yourself, then head over to https://www.ubuntu.com/#download and download the desktop version yourself. However if you would like to discuss this further, drop us a line and we can provide a personalised quotation for installing a new Linux operating system and all the software you may need.