Computer running slow?
Has your machine somehow acquired a life of its own?
Or do you simply desire a deeper and more meaningful connection?
Be one with your operating system.
It's Arizona's computer guru, Mike Swanson, and his show starts now.
Listen in, chat in, and watch live streaming at gurushow.com.
Want your voice to be heard?
Call in with your questions and riddles.
The number is 520-790-2040.
This is the Computer Guru Show on AM1030.
KVOI, The Voice.
Hello and welcome to the Computer Guru Show.
My name is Mike, here to deal with your technology needs and treat you like a person in the process.
790-2040.
That's 520-790-2040 if you want to be part of the show.
This is your free tech support for the weekend.
All you got to do is give us a call, let us know what's going on, and we can help you out.
I've got Rob here.
I am here this week.
Tara is MIA.
She's out of here.
Seems like I'm always covering for her.
Always.
Yeah.
Apparently she just doesn't know when to show up to the show.
No, it's just coincidence.
She's not here and I am.
Yep.
She's, uh, what's she doing?
She's, like, on a beach somewhere sipping Mai Tais, something like that.
Man.
Must be nice.
She's probably listening right now and laughing because she's not here.
Yep.
She's probably just being like, man, look at all this sand and not 117 degree weather that I'm experiencing.
Yeah.
Let's just say that, uh, here in Tucson, we need to spend this weekend indoors.
Yeah.
You're not supposed to talk about the weather on radio, but holy moly, it's hot.
It's not weather anymore.
That's like a hazard.
It's some sort of, there's a natural disaster created by the sun happening here this weekend.
It's, uh, it is unpleasant.
I have to go buy some sunscreen or something today.
Like at some point in the future, they're going to show clips from this weekend in IMAX theaters with Kevin Bacon talking over it.
I saw some picture.
Uh, I don't know where it was.
I don't know where it was at, but apparently they made their light posts on a pier out of some type of plastic and they were just all melted and leaning over.
Yeah.
I've seen, uh, I've seen like pictures where it's like, you know, you're in Arizona when, and it's just a dumpster that is melted.
It's like a puddle.
Pretty, pretty warm.
All right.
790-2040 if you want to be part of the show.
Uh, let's take a moment to mention net neutrality.
Yeah.
And, and for once it might be like a good.
Good conversation.
Yeah.
Because normally when I talk about net neutrality, it's me.
There's scorn and, and fury and just come on.
Uh, but, uh, maybe some good news potentially in the net neutrality world.
The, uh, the internet services are now classified as a utility.
Yeah.
And that's, that's what we've been trying to get done for quite a while now.
Right.
So we, I did a bunch of rants on, uh, net neutrality.
We'll probably throw one up in the.
There's already one up there.
Rants in the YouTube section.
Um, which Rob manages that.
So, uh, you know, golf clap to Rob for, you know, making sure that the, uh, the, uh, YouTube
channel is, is doing what it's supposed to be doing.
By the way, if you have an opportunity to go over there and subscribe to us, cause it
helps us out.
Then you get to hear, uh, Mike's, you know, furious rants about net neutrality and other
stuff.
Yeah.
You know, and I listened to the Verizon one and, um, that was the second Verizon rant
that I've had.
We got to go find the first one.
Cause that's like season four or something.
We're gonna have to go dig that up.
That one is where I just exploded on air.
It's really not, not cool.
Uh, we'll have to find one of those.
Um, but yeah, the net neutrality one from, uh, last season, last year is up there right
now.
So go check it out on our YouTube channel.
Right.
Then you can get sort of a background on what net neutrality is or is not, uh, at least
from the perspective of people in technology.
Uh, I, there was a whole bunch of political spin.
On it, uh, when it was actually happening.
Oh, and then, uh, that reminds me just to preview for you guys.
Next, next, the next excerpt that we're putting on YouTube is a throwback to act.
I remember act.
Yeah.
It's you talking about act in 2010.
Oh, I think it was more vitriolic, but in 2010, it's a good one.
So that was a little more angry.
I'm trying to, I'm trying to give some color, you know, to the net neutrality stuff that
we talk about.
So that's why I've been picking a few of those types of rants to put on there.
Right on.
Yeah.
Check out the YouTube channel.
You can listen to the net neutrality rant, but now it is finally classified as utility,
which is, uh, which is great because it allows for, uh, well, I guess the bigger, better
way of putting it is, is it disallows for the ISPs to prioritize packets based on pay.
Yeah.
And it makes it to where everyone has equal access to internet the same way that people
have access to indoor plumbing and electricity and, you know, those types of things.
Right.
Um, and that's a, that's a good thing in my opinion.
Now, the, the, of course with, as with everything, there are some drawbacks to it.
Um, but, uh, for right now, I'm pretty happy with the outcome and perhaps in a couple of
episodes, maybe two weeks from now, we can talk a little bit more about what that really
means and explore the pros and the cons of net neutrality because it isn't a one-sided
issue.
It's not like the encryption debate, which is very, very one-sided.
Uh, it's, it's very much a, well, you know, there are some, some drawbacks to it.
And yeah, I mean, like you're saying, uh, it's very politicized, but there really are
a couple of things that, I mean, the other side makes good points on, on a couple of
things.
Overall, though, net neutrality, I think will be a benefit.
That's the goal.
Let's go ahead and talk to Dave.
Hello, Dave.
How are you?
Okay.
Um, I have a Windows 7 desktop and when I hit the button that says check for updates,
it just looks for updates and never, never gets anything done.
Okay.
And then I went to the troubleshooting computer problems.
Okay.
And it's got a button that says fix problems with Windows update.
And that just goes out there and never does it.
It looks for stuff on the internet and it just keeps, you know, scrolling or whatever
and it never finishes.
Do you have the little Windows 10 update logo down in the lower right-hand corner?
I, I knew you'd say that first answer, but is there a possibility that I can fix the
Windows 7 or is it, you're just going to make me go to 10?
No, what I'm saying is that the reason you're not getting updates is because it's waiting
for the 10 because that's installed.
Well, the end, what I mean is waiting for the 10.
So if you have the little flag icon down by your clock, that, that's like.
Well, I have a little thing down there that says get Windows 10.
Right.
All other updates are paused until you decide on that one.
It's basically saying you're going to get Windows 10 anyway, so there's no point in
installing these other upgrades.
So what do I have to do then?
So you either uninstall the 303 update that we've talked about in previous episodes.
Okay.
I don't know what that is, but.
Okay.
So if you go to the Windows 10, you're going to get Windows 10.
If you go to add and remove programs, there is a button on the left where you can choose
to view installed updates.
Right.
One of them is KB303, I think.
Yeah, it's 303 something.
It's the only 303 update that you'll have.
And if you uninstall that, that makes the Windows 10 upgrade icon go away and your updates
will resume as normal.
But just know that as soon as you update, that 303 is going to go away.
It's coming back.
So you'll get one round of updates, and then it's going to be like, hey, it's time to get
Windows 10.
So they're making it harder for us to do this, is what you're saying.
They do not at all want you in Windows 7 anymore.
Well, for a guy who's been using the Windows menu ever since Windows came out, what's the
bad stuff about going to 10?
Because I'm used to Windows 7 and its previous versions.
So...
There's not a huge difference.
There's not a huge difference between 7 and 10.
Because for an old guy like me who's been using 7 and it's, like I say, forever, is it going
to be a big difference?
No.
The difference is relatively minor.
Now, it's not like going to Windows 8, which was a huge change for the interface.
Right.
So I think they heard a little bit of the feedback there and decided that they'll go
back to an interface that's more similar to 7.
And I think that's a lot of the confusion that people have, and that's why they don't
want to go to 10.
That's because they think it's Windows 10.
It's Windows 8.
But it's not.
Well, will all my programs still work on 10, or is there something that's not going to
work?
As with any upgrade, there is the opportunity for things to not work.
Right.
But I have not seen any problems that I have found to be...
I haven't found any insurmountable problems.
Okay.
All the software that I've run across so far, we've either been able to make it work, or
it might require an update of some type.
Okay.
But don't fear that part of it.
The only thing that you really have to fear is, as usual with all versions of Windows
for upgrades, is scanners and printers.
Right.
So if you have a really old printer or a really old scanner, it's very likely that those won't
work.
But there will be a new driver out there somewhere to make it work?
Sometimes.
Right.
A lot of times, though, whenever you do major Windows version updates, you get a new printer
is how that works.
Right.
So if I have all my internet stuff, that'll still all work.
All that stuff's going to work.
Okay.
Yeah.
So don't sweat that part a whole lot.
Well, like I say, I've feared the unknown for too long.
Maybe I should go to 10.
Well, you don't have a choice.
You're going to 10 whether you like it or not.
Yeah.
So, I mean, you can delay it for right now.
You can uninstall that 303 update, get the latest round of critical updates, but it's
going to push you into 10.
And by the end of July, that's the deadline.
They're going to keep pushing harder.
It's going to get harder and harder until that point.
Now, if you decide to hold out past the end of July, so let's say that August 1st shows
up and you have not upgraded to 10, that upgrade window goes away.
You'll start getting regular critical updates, but you'll no longer get optional updates
of any type.
And you get to stay.
You get to hang out in Windows 7 for as long as you like.
But just know that the opportunity to upgrade for free ends at the end of July.
Right.
Okay.
Well, I guess I have to think about that.
What do I want to do here then?
All right.
Well, thanks for the call, Dave.
Well, thank you.
Have a nice day.
Bye.
Let's take a moment to mention our sponsor.
That would be Perfection Auto Works.
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Yeah, assuming that your tires don't literally melt off of your car.
Take it down to Perfection Auto Works.
The temperature is too darn high.
It's hot.
Holy moly.
We'll be right back.
Listen to their ad coming up next, and we will listen to your phone calls right after this break.
790-2040.
We'll be right back.
Your computer guru, Mike Swanson, is here to help you tame that beast of a machine.
Join the chat right now at gurushow.com or call in.
This is the Computer Guru Show on KVOY, The Voice.
I'm dirty and the extreme and lighter than sour cream.
I was in a B-Club and Glee Club and even the chess team.
Only question I ever thought was hard.
What do I like, Kirk, or do I like Picard?
Spend every weekend at the Renaissance Fair.
Got my name on my underwear.
Wow, that's a trip down memory lane.
To like the other day when I was just playing that in my house.
No, I know.
I'm talking about how...
Using that as bumper music.
Yeah, I miss those days.
It hasn't been on the show in years.
In yas, I tell ya.
Yas.
Yes, eons and stuff.
All right, if you'd like to be a part of the show, 790-2040, give us a call.
Let's go ahead and talk to Charles.
Hello, Charles.
Hello.
Boy, I love that Batman spot with Kazachik in the trunk.
What?
Oh, yeah, during the commercial break?
Yeah.
Anyway, I still laugh.
I'm looking for a machine.
I'm not saying this to irritate you.
I'm looking for a machine that runs XP because I don't...
I like the way it's far more user-friendly than Windows 7,
which I just spent $200 getting my computer back from service fixing.
And I'm betting that an XP machine will be cheap to buy if I could find one.
It's not going on the Internet, so I'm not worried about all the vulnerabilities on it.
And it's going to be used almost solely...
It's going to be used solely for production in Adobe Audition for things actually just
like that Batman spot, which was made on an XP machine.
Okay.
So can you direct me to a place?
Or do you have one that's like sitting in the back with dust on it?
I was going to say, you might start checking like dumpsters and those kinds of things.
Doorstops.
Well, there's always the swap shop, but I mean, you know, which I may do.
But the point of the matter is, is that I'm looking for...
One that maybe you used as a test bed for something, or it's been sitting indoors, not outdoors.
You know, because it's expired technology.
I get it.
But I like...
Or is there a way to make Windows 7 work and look more like XP so that it's more user-friendly?
I mean, for instance, you go to save something in Word and you have to save it to your computer.
It won't even let you open it without saving it first to your computer.
There's dumb stuff like that in 7 that was never true in XP.
Actually, that's still true.
That's always true.
The whole, you know, you can't open something unless it exists.
So it does save it to your computer first before it opens it.
Oh, it just did it in the background before.
It puts it in a temp folder.
And 7 does the same thing.
So there's...
I think there's a whole lot of like, we should just sit down sometime and I can just show you that it works the way that XP does.
The only difference is they added a security layer that doesn't allow you to save to the root.
Right?
So...
But for the most part...
XP and 7 are very, very similar.
Okay.
Well, but the thing about it is if I have a machine, if I buy a machine that has expired technology, it costs a lot less.
I like to buy the things that other people don't want.
That was probably true maybe five years ago.
But right now there's a premium on XP machines because if you're buying an XP machine, it's because you need an XP machine.
And they know it.
However, they are available out there on like eBay.
Craigslist.
I wouldn't...
I don't like buying computers off Craigslist, but eBay is okay.
I like buying it from somebody I know, like, and trust, like yourself.
And so if you've got one or someone you know of that you trust that has machines like that, I'd be open to that.
You know, because I'm...
I'd much rather buy that locally than...
And again, from somebody that I know, like, and trust.
I know somebody has a good...
You'll have to call the office down at 304-8300 because I don't keep track of the old machine inventory.
Right.
I'm out fixing things.
Right.
But, you know, you can talk to Howard or Carl and they can let you know what they've got there.
You could also potentially explore an XP virtual machine.
Right.
You could virtualize a machine.
Okay.
Right.
But basically, I want a computer that's kept off the Internet.
It's just used for mostly one purpose, making radio commercials.
And, you know, and then the sneaker drive.
Take the USB thing and stick it in.
Take it in the other machine and archive it.
So that...
And that's the machine that gets on the Internet.
That, I have, you know, the most current stuff on.
Right.
So you could do something similar with, like, if you have a nice newer computer.
Yeah.
You could virtualize a copy of XP that would be its own standalone machine inside the other one,
which doesn't get on the Internet.
And you guys would be willing to build one of those for me?
Of course.
Okay.
Maybe we should talk.
Of course we should talk.
I don't know where you took your computer to get it fixed before, but I'm offended.
Well, somebody who has, who about six generations ago had the computer show on the station.
Oh, okay.
It's a trusted guy.
All right.
You want me to say his name?
I don't care.
Go for it, Todd.
Dave Mason.
Oh.
Yeah, I like Dave.
Dave is a friend, and so, and I've done business with him for years, so I just, and again,
I know, like, and trust him.
Tell Dave to give me a call sometime.
And give the shop a call.
They can get you set up with a virtual machine.
Yeah.
I will.
All right.
Thanks for the call, Charles.
That's what I should.
You do a wonderful show.
You should expand it.
I should, huh?
Yeah, you should.
You should really think about it.
I might.
I'll think about it.
I'll let you know.
All right.
See you.
Bye.
Do you want to take this other call?
Yeah, let's go ahead and take it.
Let's go ahead and talk to Tom.
Hello, Tom.
How are you?
Hi.
Thanks for taking my call.
Hey, I'm getting ready to upgrade to 10, and I'm looking at my uninstall a change program
area.
Right.
There's a couple programs I wanted to ask you about, if I should remove them before
I do that.
All right.
Yes.
Okay.
How about like Pulse Secure Setup Client?
I don't think that'll matter.
Do you know what that is?
Not off the top of my head, no.
But I haven't heard anything about anything like that.
The stuff that's important is, do you have the NVIDIA Experience software installed?
No.
It basically comes down to antivirus and NVIDIA software and things like firewalls.
Does the ATI equivalent make any difference?
Yeah.
I would pull that off, too.
Crossfire, all that.
Yeah.
So if you have ATI software on there for your video card, anything that's video card related,
just pull it.
Okay.
How about Malwarebytes?
Malwarebytes can stay.
Okay.
And Google Chrome and-
Yeah.
That's all fine.
Chromecraft.
Okay.
Great.
Yeah.
Mostly the stuff that we're concerned about is if it directly interfaces with hardware,
like antivirus directly interfaces with your network card, and your video software directly
interfaces with your video card.
Yeah.
So we're looking for things that directly interface with hardware that should be removed.
That way, when it does the upgrade, it finds the proper versions, puts them on itself during
the upgrade, and then you can reinstall whatever you took off.
So my printer driver then, take that off?
Now most printer drivers are not a problem.
What kind of printer do you have?
HP.
Yeah.
HPs aren't going to be an issue.
We've seen some issues with Epson's, because the Epson's are ... Those are some crazy drivers
they put on those things.
But the HP ones seem to be fine.
Okay.
Great.
Thanks a lot.
All right.
Thanks for the call, Tom.
Yeah.
Just be careful when you're doing your upgrade.
You know, I can't wait until it's like a year from now and Windows 10 has been embraced
and everybody's fine with it again.
Yeah.
Well, this is the last version, according to Microsoft.
Yeah.
It's the final version.
All right.
And people have been asking me that, and I guess we should probably cover it.
They're like, so I'll just wait for the next one.
I'm like, there is no next one.
Yeah.
I mean, in a manner of speaking.
Ten years from now, it's going to be way different than Windows 10.
Right.
But they're going the Mac route, which is sort of the evolution of a singular platform.
I hope they give them better names than Mac does, though.
Yeah.
I don't know.
El Capitan and Yosemite.
Well, the new one is called Sierra.
Sierra.
Which is kind of a nice name.
That's not bad, I guess.
Yeah.
But Snow Leopard?
Come on.
Anyway, so there is no next version, in a manner of speaking.
Yeah.
So, just like Mac OS X, which came out 12 years ago, is still sort of the thing, even
though they refuse to call it OS X now.
Yeah.
It's been effectively a slow, gradual, minor upgrade process over the number of years.
And that's what Microsoft is planning to do now, is that they're going to get everybody
on 10.
Yeah.
And then they're going to do like, you know, 10 point whatever.
Right?
There should not be an 11 in the future.
And ultimately, you know, I know that a lot of people are hostile to the Windows 10 upgrade,
and it's kind of, you know, it's bad how they're forcing it on people.
But it's because of security concerns.
You know, 7 is very old at this point.
Yep.
Everybody's like, but I love me some 7.
Or in Charles' case, I love me some XP.
I can't wait until there's some guy who calls in and is like, I'm trying to run a Windows
3 machine.
I need a machine that only runs DOS.
We've got to get it.
We had one of those that came into the shop recently where the newest software he could
run on there was 98.
I think I remember that because I really wanted to, I was like, can we just take an extra
day so I can put Doom 98 on this and play it?
The techs were like, no, go away.
And see, this is one of those problems.
We tell people, you don't do the bleeding edge upgrades.
Don't do the like, upgrade immediately as soon as it's out there because you're going
to hurt yourself.
Right?
So at the same time, if you wait too long, if you get to the point where Windows XP is
still on your machine and it's been completely unserviceable by Microsoft for seven years,
you've painted yourself into an upgrade corner.
You can't upgrade at that point.
So before your upgrade ability expires, you should upgrade.
Not to mention that the upgrade shock that people get where they're like, Windows 10
is just so much different.
That happens because you don't upgrade.
If you're on XP and then you jump to Windows 10, yeah, it's way different.
Right.
It's a huge difference if you're going from XP.
However, if you did like most of us did, which is you went to seven, then you went to eight,
and then you went back to seven, then you went to 10, yeah, it's not that big of a deal.
You forgot Vista and that whole thing.
We shall not name it.
We don't speak that name here.
There's two operating systems we don't say, Vista and Millennium.
Yeah, I was going to say.
Yeah, those don't exist.
Yeah.
There's just terrible, terrible pieces of software.
Oh, that's just gross.
I can't believe you mentioned that on the show.
Vista made us appreciate seven even more.
Is that what it is?
Yeah.
Give us a call, 790-2040.
We'll be right back.
Whether you're dealing with hardware installation or heaven forbid, a virus.
Oh.
I'm sorry.
No.
Mike Swanson is answering all your questions one by one.
So call in or chat in with yours.
The website gurushow.com.
Tune in, click in and kick back.
This is the Computer Guru Show on AM1030 KVOY The Voice.
Mike Swanson, your computer guru, is just a click away.
Listen and watch at gurushow.com.
This is the Computer Guru Show.
Welcome to my world.
Welcome back to the Computer Guru Show.
My name's Mike, here to deal with your technology needs and treat you like a person in the process.
790-2040 if you want to be a part of the show.
What do you think?
Calls first or?
Yeah, I might as well.
Yeah.
All right.
Let's go ahead and talk to Dave.
Hey, Dave.
How are you?
Okay.
How are you?
Lovely.
Well, a few months ago or like three months ago or so, I upgraded from 8.1 to 1.2.
I'm using Windows 10.
Okay.
And it is awful.
How so?
Everything is so unbelievably slow.
I click onto a browser window, it takes like a minute or two to even open it.
It just sits there and you look at the screen, nothing happens.
Which antivirus do you have on there?
My browser's always crashing, everything.
What's that?
Which antivirus do you have on there?
Kaspersky.
Okay.
That's your answer.
So you upgraded with the antivirus on there already.
Yeah.
I have that already I imagine.
Not to mention that first of all, don't upgrade with your antivirus installed because it causes
major problems.
I got it uninstalled before the upgrade.
Secondly.
Oh, I did that.
I did that.
Secondly, Kaspersky.
Because it says that on the install.
You have to disable it.
So I disabled it.
I upgraded it and then I re-enabled it.
This is not disable.
This is uninstall.
Like take it completely off the computer before you upgrade.
Now, second part of this.
Kaspersky is a dog.
Okay.
It's a great antivirus, don't get me wrong.
It's a fantastic antivirus.
But it makes everything slow.
Now, I think that yours is mostly slow because it got broken during the upgrade.
So if you were to completely uninstall Kaspersky, use a utility like Revo or something to help you uninstall that.
And then reinstall Kaspersky, it will probably be considerably better.
Second, what kind of machine is this?
It's a Toshiba.
How old is it?
Laptop, two years old.
Like two? Okay.
So if it is less than two years old or less than three years old, then you should be fine as far as hard drive and all of that is concerned.
So I'd imagine completely uninstall any antivirus apps that you have.
And here's the reason why it jacks things up.
When you do the upgrade, Windows is sort of blind to your antivirus setup.
So it assumes that it needs to enable its built-in antivirus.
It's called Defender.
Defender.
Okay.
And so whenever you have two antiviruses on a machine, oh, believe me, they don't get along.
And so everything gets very, very slow.
So uninstall the antivirus.
And when you do that, it's going to say, hey, guess what?
We've turned on Defender.
Defender's all happy.
Everything's great.
Then you install Kaspersky, and Kaspersky will disable Defender.
And everything should be better.
Okay.
Now, you could choose a lighter antivirus.
We don't particularly care for the sort of heavy, slow, basically the antiviruses that you have to pay for that just slow your machine down.
So you could pick something lighter if you want.
But if you're happy with Kaspersky and that's what you want to use, then by all means continue to do so.
But use something like Revo to utterly annihilate Kaspersky off the machine.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, we have Kaspersky on all of our.
So we got like a.
Yeah, everybody usually gets the home pack, and they put it on everything.
You will notice a dramatic difference in speed just by uninstalling Kaspersky.
Okay.
So give that a shot and let me know.
Thank you.
All right.
Let's go ahead and talk to Tom.
Tom, how are you?
Hi.
Hey.
I got a question regarding viruses upgrading to 10 virus protectors.
Yep.
What about Microsoft Security Essentials?
All antivirus.
If it's antivirus, uninstall it.
Okay.
So uninstall it.
Uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials.
Yep.
Because Essentials is actually a dead product as of Windows 7.
It's the last version it works on.
Uh-huh.
So, yeah, uninstall it.
Do your upgrade.
You don't have to reinstall Essentials because Defender's built in, which is the replacement
for Essentials.
The new version.
Okay.
So uninstall Microsoft Security Essentials first, and we'll get Defender when we upgrade.
Correct.
Thank you very much.
My pleasure.
That was quick and easy.
That's a lot of Windows 10 questions today.
Yeah.
Well, you know, the deadline is coming up.
We need to just start telling people, switch to Linux.
That won't confuse anyone at all.
We did that for a while, though.
When the 8 upgrade, when 8 first came out, we were like, you know what?
Screw this.
Let's go to Linux.
Everybody use Linux now.
Nah.
Real power users just code their own operating systems, Mike.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Real power users.
Yep.
Manipulate the hard drive with magnets.
Right.
You know, rather than actually writing any code.
Right.
You gotta open a port and just suck it.
Have you ever watched, Kent, have you ever watched 24, the Jack Bauer show?
Did you ever see that?
No, I have not.
It's worth it to watch just for the tech speak.
Yeah, just the way they talk about computers.
I'll check it out.
It's...
Open up a port on that firewall.
Patch me through.
That's right.
There's...
It's open up a socket.
My terminal needs a socket opened.
And...
It...
The stuff that really...
The stuff that really killed me about that show is that, you know, anytime that I watch
any show where there's technology involved, there's so much just like, oh, that's not how
that works.
You know?
And...
But, you know, I try to be good about it.
I'm quiet.
I don't say anything generally.
But that show just repeated basically two phrases throughout the whole thing, which
was, I'm going to need you to trust me.
Which was said like every other dialogue.
Every other dialogue sequence.
And then we're going to have to get them to open up a socket.
And first of all, you don't open sockets.
That's not how that works.
The best one of all time is on that show, NCIS, when the two people, to use the computer
faster, they're typing on the same keyboard at the same time.
It's so dumb.
Oh, man.
Everybody knows that, like, when we need to hack faster, we just get more people on the
same keyboard.
It's like 12 people.
Yep.
That's actually how all these hacks happen, is they have like 80 people typing on one
keyboard.
The speed, you can't even comprehend.
Speaking of hacks, did anybody hear that the DNC got hacked?
Big time.
Heard that.
Yeah.
That's a pretty interesting story.
There's a lot going on there.
And all of it is really, really quiet.
Imagine that.
Imagine the fact that the...
Basically, the highest...
The highest...
The echelons of the government are being really quiet about a gigantic hack.
And, of course, the government is blaming Russian spies, which is, I think, great that
they're blaming them, especially when the hacker came back and he's like, uh, no.
And he's not at all a Russian spy of any kind.
Yeah.
Not a Russian spy.
And then, of course, they said this, you know, they identified the...
This particular thing and, you know, the hack.
And they shut it down because, you know, because they're on top of things, technologically speaking.
And basically, the hacker came back and started taunting them.
And he's like, you didn't know I was in there.
And so they said, well, yeah, well, we know that he only had access to a couple of things.
And so he came back and he said, I was in your system for a year.
You think I downloaded two things?
Do you really think that?
Is that what you think?
And, yeah, it's pretty gnarly.
Some pretty crazy stuff has come out as a result of this hack.
Yeah, like a list of mega donors to the DNC, a...
Complete strategy for their campaign.
Right.
And the most interesting part is, at least to me, and this is definitely not a regular
show topic here, is that there sure is a lot of...
There's a lot of collusion going on behind the scenes.
There's a lot ofSure.
There's a lot of collaboration between different sides of the conversation.
And I think that's part of the reward of the investigation.
I've not run into an instance where I think something about one candidate that
undoubtedly isn't true about another.
So it's very interesting to me that there's an active push years in advance for who's
going to be the next president of the United States.
And the thing that really kills me about this that I've mentioned a couple of
times now is that how are we supposed to trust these people to protect our security and our
privacy when they can't even protect their own right and they're the ones calling for weaker
you know encryption they're like yeah that's the ironic thing is that if they had had strong
encryption on their own equipment this could not have happened yeah who knows man they're just
oh they're just dumb this is you know it's like when when a kid puts his hand on the stove and
then gets a burn on his hand and you go do you see why you don't do that now yeah so yeah maybe
maybe we should call for you know they're going to turn into something else though
right it's still going to be a weak a push for weaker encryption because now they want to find
the guy that's actually hidden behind encryption yeah you can't find him because he has the
encryption right so yeah let's let's just burn the whole thing down you know don't worry about
making things better right let's just let's just get angry about it and
it's
dumb all right so yeah there's a whole lot going on with the this DNC hack and it's one of those
things where you know you've got the two faces of the government right or where the government
is speaking out of both sides of its face right so to speak you know with the whole weaker encryption
bit and the all these laws that are put in place to make things more secure because they don't want
hackers they don't want any of these hackers in there
um but they are and they want basically to be in control they're like let us control your
infrastructure because you security guys don't know what you're doing with the threat of throwing
security guys in jail for not allowing the federal government to dictate how security is supposed to
happen in an IT environment however they're not setting the highest you know the bar very high
here well it all goes back to the idea that you know essentially these people are legislating
things that they don't understand you know when when you're in a situation where you're not able to
do anything you have when they're setting up laws that are just so comically bad when it comes to
stuff like encryption the people who actually know what they're doing it's like it's like child's play
to get into their their equipment and their servers this guy was in there for a year and
nobody knew he was there yep just making copies to everything and he uh he sent it all off to
to wikileaks so according to wikileaks they basically say they're they're going to be
dumping tons of information
uh and they're already some of it's already out there but apparently there's a whole lot more
and uh i don't know you know what what clinton did to piss off julian assange but uh he says
there's enough there to indict her and he wants to put it out there in the world okay julian do
what you do you know you have to on some level admire the tenacity of wikileaks yeah in this in
the face of like extreme odds against them
because they're targeting some of the most powerful people in the world
yeah and and when you get even when you even get edward snowden to start tweeting
oh this got interesting you know that's that yeah there's something going on there and
everyone's very tight-lipped about it there's not a whole lot being said but i'm sure just like with
the the panama papers and stuff like that there's going to be there's going to be some stuff out
there yeah i was a little shocked at first to see that this wasn't like headline news and then i was
like oh wait actually yeah of course it's not going to be like headline news and then i was like oh
wait actually yeah of course it's not going to be like headline news and then i was like oh
it's not of course it's not all right let's let's let's chew through some culture let's talk to
mark hello mark hold on hold on a second my windows populating with text anyway um it's done so when i
go to update 10 again another 10 update uh-huh i'm looking at my list to uninstall stuff do i
uninstall windows live essentials 2011 no essentials can stay
okay i thought i had defender but i don't see it in here
well great then it's not there i guess not would it be under microsoft defender or what it was called
that's called microsoft security essentials if you're in seven i am in seven and uh it's not
there all right that for sure i had it so anyway i have um avira i'll take that out good and then
when i put in a new antivirus what would i be just reactivating avira again
Sure, if that's what you want to do.
Well, what's the better one?
What's your choice of the week?
The choice of the week?
We're using Bitdefender right now at the shop.
Is that what they're recommending now?
Yeah.
Bitdefender.
Bitdefender, yeah.
Okay.
Talk to Howard, 304-8300.
He'll tell you everything.
The boy has some strong feelings and opinions about antivirus.
In fact, everybody just call Howard right now.
Yeah, just call Howard.
Everyone.
Just even to say hi.
Okay.
What's the shop number again?
304-8300.
If I get to the shop, though, and Howard burned it down because he got tired of all the phone calls,
that'll be interesting.
He's like, all the phones broke simultaneously.
I don't know what happened.
Don't know.
Anyway, he can talk to you about antivirus and what's recommended there.
Okay.
Okay, great.
I guess that was it.
I'm getting about ready to pull the trigger today.
Yeah, that's what I hear everybody say.
We'll see.
As soon as I back up some stuff that I'm not sure it's done.
Call me next week and you let me know.
Yeah.
Thanks, Mark.
All right, thanks.
All right, Shane, how are you?
How can I help you?
I'm doing great, Mike.
Great show.
Okay, so I'm going to go the full tinfoil hat conspiracy theory nut on you.
So I'm looking at the possibility of trying to get less trackable and less everything basically on the Internet.
I am a supporter of this view.
Okay.
So I've been reading all this stuff about...
I'm possibly instituting, you know, Internet...
What is it?
Internet user IDs?
You know, Europe's real big on it right now.
And I say we're in America to do it so they can track people.
Oh, yeah.
Believe me, that's an upcoming episode.
Oh, I will be listening intently.
I've looked at IPVanish.
I've looked at a bunch of different VPNs and what countries they're based out of.
I tried setting one up and I ran into the...
And I'm sure you remember the terminology better than me.
But, like, I use one of them, you know, CenturyLink, the non-Internet.
Like you said.
Right.
And for some reason, it was putting the servers in Phoenix in between.
Even though it said I was logged on, even though it said I was...
That I was on IPVanish and that everything's working great.
When I ran their testing tools, it said, oh, no, you're not anonymous because they've inserted their servers.
Right.
In the loop.
So I'm like, okay, so for us non-computer efficient Americans that want to be anonymous and be able to do stuff and not have the government track us, what's a good program to set up?
Well, that's not about a program.
This is something that's completely outside of your control.
So when you're using the CenturyLink, at least CenturyLink locally, you are not actually getting out to the quote-unquote Internet until it hits Phoenix.
Right.
So you can't do anything to circumvent that on that particular connection.
Well, I guess what happened was they had me run the test tools.
Mm-hmm.
And basically, if it came back and showed...
Well, they're doing something called packet inspection.
Okay.
And that packet inspection is what's tagging it with the geolocation.
So...
And that's a CenturyLink thing.
You can complain all you want to CenturyLink and they're going to be like, yeah, that's just sort of the way it is.
Deal with it.
So part of the problem is CenturyLink.
You could switch to a different provider and that goes away.
I know that on...
On Cox, at least locally, you can do fully end-to-end encrypted communications and you won't get any of that geotagging in the services there.
Okay.
So that's a CenturyLink issue.
Gotcha.
Unfortunately.
Comcast also, same thing.
You can use Comcast for that as well.
Otherwise, you're going to have to get something like a Tor router.
All right.
You can get it like a WRT router.
Any older Linksys router will work for this.
You can...
There's some software updates you can put on there which anonymizes your connection and makes you part of the Tor network.
And that anonymizes your end-to-end anonymous.
Just be careful with that stuff.
It's hard to do.
Yeah.
But if you're feeling like you want to be anonymous, that's the way to do it, man.
Okay.
Well, I really appreciate that.
And I'll definitely...
Do you know, like, which episode upcoming you're going to be talking about all that and the privacy and stuff?
Maybe next weekend.
Okay.
I need to do a little more research on what Europe's doing with the whole...
Okay.
...hard ID access thing.
But I've seen a few people talk about it, and so I want to get to the bottom of it and figure out how long that's going to take to get here.
But, yeah, well, probably next week or the week after.
And just on a side note, if you...
Because I know you can understand all the gobbledygooks better than I could reading it.
I chose IPVanish because it was Italy.
I think they said they were based out of Italy, and it had something to do with basically...
Yeah.
Even if somebody gives them a court order and says, hey, we need to find out what this person's doing, they said, okay,
we set it up impossibly so nobody can.
You can't track what people are doing on the system.
Sort of.
And we'll cover that when it comes to it.
Great.
There's a certain amount of hopeful optimism there.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, great show, and I will definitely keep listening.
Thank you.
Thanks, Shane.
Bye-bye.
We're going to take a quick break, and when we get back, I guess we'll be out of time.
Yeah.
That's how that's going to work.
So listen up.
We have some specials, some deals we want to talk with you about.
We'll be right back.
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And, yeah, thanks for listening very much to The Computer Guru Show.
Oh, by the way, we'll be back in about six minutes.
Welcome back to The Computer Guru Show, hour number two.
What?
I know.
That's right.
Wait, what?
It's been years since we've had a two-hour show.
Yeah.
And here we are.
That's crazy.
And if you want to give us a call, 790-2040.
That's what you should do.
You can talk to us on our all-new shiny second hour.
Right.
Is it shinier in here?
It is.
It looks a little brighter.
It looks a little bit brighter, yeah.
I think it's because that light bulb came back on.
But nevertheless, second hour.
Second hour.
So 790-2040 if you want to be part of the show.
Give us a call.
We're going to talk a lot in this particular, the second hour here, about privacy.
And censorship.
And how those two kind of correlate with one another.
And it really came to light because of a less than wonderful event that happened.
We'll say a tragedy.
So as you may know, you should know by now, the Orlando shooting caused a very interesting
set of things to happen on the internet.
As far as...
There are places that tout themselves to be...
What's their slogan?
The front page of the internet.
Now, we've talked about Reddit before on this show.
And, you know, over the last couple of years, our views on Reddit have changed for sure.
Because it used to be, when Reddit first started and we were first on it, it was like awesome
and we're all for it.
But as they've grown and evolved, it's been leading inevitably to something like what
just happened.
Right.
So over the last couple of years...
Right.
There's been a few management shakeups over at Reddit.
And it's very interesting because it's sort of a...
At least in the beginning, it was very much a self-policing thing, right?
Where there are moderators of each of the particular subreddits or boards that are on
there.
And it was a rather democratic process for the most part as far as, you know, people
could put up their ideas.
And those ideas...
And those ideas would then be either upvoted or downvoted by the community.
And you can say, well, either I support this or I think this is terrible.
And, of course, the more that it has upvotes, the higher visibility it has on the site.
And then the more downvotes it has, the less visibility it has on the site.
And even that, even though that particular segment of the population, right, the entire
site has a definite political leaning.
And it's pretty obvious in the stuff that you see.
And that part was bothersome for us, you know, the last time we talked about Reddit was more
than a year ago as far as the problems seen there.
But the Orlando shooting brought something else completely to light.
There's a subreddit on there called News.
And there's some other ones on there like World News and there's...
News is one of the default subreddits.
So when you first create an account, you're already subscribed to it.
Right.
Same with World News.
Yeah.
And it's designed so that the community can take things that it thinks are newsworthy,
put them, submit them to Reddit, and then Reddit will either upvote them or downvote
them for visibility.
So if it's something that is getting a lot of coverage, it should very rapidly make it
to the front page where that's what you see as soon as you log into Reddit.
And in the past, many news stories have actually broken on Reddit first.
Even before the news, the real news sites picked them up, people were reporting them
on Reddit.
Right.
They were posting them.
They had mega threads and live threads regarding the discussion of those events.
Boston bombing comes to mind there.
So when the Boston Marathon bombing happened, it happened first on Reddit as far as a large
scale noteworthiness.
Yeah.
People who were there were taking pictures and posting them on Reddit.
Yeah.
It's a big deal.
Now, what happened during the Orlando shooting was really depressing.
It was that the officials, the moderators of Reddit were straight up deleting entries,
just censorship, just like you've been banned and banned people because someone made the
association between Omar the shooter and ISIS because of the 911 call.
They called it hate speech and banned the entire thread.
Yeah.
They were just immediately deleting anything that made a reference to that.
So if they made a, even if somebody asked, you know, oh my, oh my, is this another, another
terrorist attack?
Bam, got deleted.
It was to the tune of, you know, thousands of comments were deleted.
Dozens and dozens of posts that were made were deleted.
There was just entire threads where every comment was marked as removed.
Yeah.
It's pretty.
And this is one of those things is that, you know, more and more people these days, they
do not, especially in the younger generation, right?
They don't, they don't look to TV for news.
They don't look to the normal news outlets that nobody trusts in, in the younger demographics.
Nobody trusts Fox news or CNN or MSNBC.
We don't care.
We don't trust them at all.
Because they're sort of led by their own agenda.
And for a long time, Reddit could be looked at as, as something where it's obviously community
powered, community fueled, and it's what the world is talking about at that moment.
So why, it basically seemed to be a more fair place to look for information.
Yeah.
It was supposed to be this platform where anyone could share anything without the fear
of censorship.
You know?
Like you could discuss a newsworthy event that was happening.
Yeah.
And not worry about the government or mainstream media slanting it.
But I mean, it's, I think people quickly forget that Reddit is a company.
Right.
They're a business.
And more importantly though, is there's a certain mob mentality that happens on Reddit
and it's unfortunate, right?
That, that voices can be silenced effectively, not only by the community itself, but at the
moderator level.
And they came back with a couple of excuses about, well, I'm not going to do this.
I'm going to do this.
And so, you know, there's a, there's a bot, an auto moderator that saw these as duplicates
and was deleting everything.
But under any level of scrutiny, this argument doesn't hit, you know, it doesn't stand up.
Yeah.
I mean, they, they did remove one moderator.
But I couldn't see that as anything other than a scapegoat tactic personally.
Yeah.
And to be fair, that moderator was telling people to go kill themselves.
So you probably shouldn't be in that position anyway.
But there were also things like you said, when it came to the, the, the, the, the, the, the,
the only language that couldn't be seeded from the seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed seed
And we don't like the idea that the Internet can be silenced or moderated as a whole, especially at the state level.
Because there are people who their only way of communicating with the world is through the Internet.
And in some cases, there are places like in the Middle East that we've talked about where the only outlet that people have to say, hey, this is what's going on here, help, is potentially silenced.
And, you know, China is a great issue of how the world can be manipulated.
And same with North Korea, right, where you look at how the worldview can be manipulated just by changing the content or censoring the content that's on the Internet.
And we don't like that.
And I think that as Americans, we like to believe that we're exempt from that type of thing to some extent because we have freedom of speech here in the United States.
But examples like what happened with Reddit are proof that that is not necessarily.
The case all the time, if you trust one entity too much for your news, something like this is bound to happen.
And the same thing with Facebook, right, where Facebook was basically accused of censoring the trending news topics and saying, well, this is a little too right leaning for us.
So we're not going to post it as a as a trending topic.
Now, the Young Turks did an interesting video on this and not.
But I at all want people to watch the Young Turks.
But they're an Internet news organization, is that what they call themselves?
And their explanation was, well, you can't trust sources like Breitbart and you can't trust sources like Drudge Report.
So you have to give it a little more time.
You have to find other sources before they'll put it up in trending.
But if Huffington Post put something up, you know, they put it up rather.
I mean.
Without the secondary looks, without the backup sources.
Basically, if you were you can't.
I think you can't unless you are a news organization that you shouldn't be trying to moderate the news.
You shouldn't be determining for yourself what's important, especially like with the Facebook thing.
It's like if there's a certain number of people saying it, it's trending.
Right.
It doesn't matter whether it's true or not.
Right.
The trend is, is that people are talking about this.
So in order to to vet things for truthfulness on a trending list seems wrong, especially if you're not applying to the same rules to both sides of that spectrum.
Now, don't get me wrong.
You know, the as far as I'm concerned, the the news sources on the left and the right are both crazy.
All right.
It's there's a certain amount of centrism that I long for.
I want Walter Cronkite to come back.
I want to be told news with without any type of commentary.
I want to know the details without any of the slant one way or the other opinion that is associated with it.
I just want to be told the facts.
Just the facts, man.
That's it.
And it's to me to have an organization like Reddit.
Say, well, we don't think that this is news.
So we're going to kill this, even though there are hundreds of submissions or thousands of comments on that particular thread to just kill that thread because they don't like the way it works.
It bothers me.
And where do you draw the line between when something becomes for the greater good?
Or is it is it really the policing of thought?
Right.
And I think that the important thing.
I remember here is that the only evidence that we have that a company like Reddit or any type of alternative news organization on the Internet, the only evidence we have that they are trying to uphold the ideals of, you know, open press and free speech is that they tell us that they are.
You know, there's they're under no obligation as a company.
They can delete whatever they want.
You know, they're under no right.
Yeah.
They don't have to do that at all.
They could have just said, yep, we deleted it.
You know, but they know that because they are ultimately they have to answer to their users.
They had to come out and say, well, yeah, it was a mistake, you know, and we're taking steps to undo it.
But I have to wonder if they hadn't gotten caught.
Of course, that, you know, that wouldn't have happened.
They wouldn't have come forth.
So in opposition to this, I would say that you have the opportunity to to choose other sources on the Internet to get your information from.
Now, as with anything, there's always a there's always a flip side.
There's always a side B.
And so like to MSNBC, you end up with Fox News and to Huffington Post, you end up with Drudge Report.
So you end up with these sort of left and right spectrum, I guess, A and B spectrum alternatives.
The alternative to Reddit is Vote, which is V-O-A-T.
Dot C-O.
And that that's an interesting site.
I mean, they're very similar.
In appearance and how they work, but very different as far as content and how they deal with content.
And as far as we can tell right now, at least looking when I looked on on Sunday and Monday last week at the differences between the Reddit news and the vote news, they were radically different.
Yeah.
And it's actually kind of funny because in direct as a direct result of this whole situation with Reddit vote has experienced what they call.
Almost a doubling of traffic that weekend as people leave Reddit and go to vote because people were looking for information that couldn't find that was being deleted or censored at the other site.
And and great.
At least there is an alternative for now.
Yeah.
I mean, the future will show if if vote remains to be this bastion of free speech like they claim.
But for now, it's a great site.
Yeah.
So we're going to talk a little bit more about how the Internet kind of forms the way that we.
Put information out there and a little bit more about who's policing your thoughts online.
We'll be right back.
Your computer guru, Mike Swanson, is here to help you tame that beast of a machine.
Join the chat right now at Guru show dot com or call in.
This is a computer guru show on KV.
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This is a computer guru show.
Welcome back to the computer guru show.
Seven nine zero twenty forty.
If you want to be part of the show.
Five two zero seven nine zero twenty forty.
Let's go and take Ingrid.
Hello, Ingrid.
How are you?
Hi.
I'd like to say, first of all, that I know virtually nothing about computers except the keyboard.
And.
But this business of.
What's available to us and what kind of information is being given is really.
This is a fabulous subject.
Very important.
Glad that you brought it up.
Some days ago, there was discussion about Hillary Clinton's name being entered into various sites and different kinds of information coming up about her.
Some was very bland, fluffy, inconsequential.
And other stuff was of more substance.
And of the things that, you know, people who are.
Disappointed in her.
Want to talk about.
You mentioned Walter Cronkite.
Who knows if he was giving us everything that was available?
Who knows who is in the pool of people who have information, who will give it out or won't give it out or give out false information?
Everything is really quite unknown.
It's a matter of trusting people.
Who do you trust?
And the Internet is so big.
And you talked about people in parts of the world where that's literally all they have available to them.
It has made things very, very dangerous.
And people are influenced and can be pitted against each other.
Look what they're doing now with the terrorist attacks.
They're looking at it from this direction, from that direction, manipulating everything.
We're being.
We're being ripped apart.
Well, I guess that's sort of the point I was trying to get at is that information should be out there in the world for all of us to see and for all of us to make our own opinion about.
And I think that if someone takes it upon themselves to censor that information for the masses, what right do they have to censor that information?
The part that bothers me is not necessarily that there are there is misinformation out there.
The part that bothers me is that someone has taken it upon themselves.
And I think that's the part that bothers me.
We have no way of knowing if he was giving us the truth.
Well, now we have potentially a million new sources at our fingertips at any given moment.
So we don't have to live in the forced echo chamber.
You know, we can always go to a different source and fact check and verify.
That doesn't mean that people do.
But we have the ability to for the potentially the first time in human history.
The thing is to go to all kinds of sources constantly.
Listen to Canadian news.
I used to do that some years ago.
And I would listen to Canadian and American news and see what I was missing.
And now, of course, I'm at this border and I like to hear both sides of things.
And we listen to the national news at night.
And that's one of what we're just saying is that now you have the opportunity to listen to news from all over the world to get a different perspective to different geographical areas within the United States.
You get to listen to or have access to information from everywhere and from every site.
And that's a double edged sword, right?
Where you've got all this information and all of these opinions and viewpoints that sort of don't necessarily match up with one another.
And then somebody is going to be offended and say, well, that's hate speech or that is this is totally offensive.
I feel completely triggered or whatever.
But that information needs to remain there because it is information from which you can form an opinion.
Well, it's not.
The young people need to have it drilled into their heads that they have to look everywhere for information.
And when it's found out that somebody is censoring, that entity needs to be.
And that's that's the thing with the whole journalistic integrity thing.
All right.
Where you have large news organizations like, you know, you had ABC News that had a big thing with Brian Williams and some of these other.
What's a Tom Brokaw before that?
You had these large news scandals.
And the reason they were scandals were because.
Because there was an implicit implied trust.
Yeah.
People trusted those people like Brian Williams.
You know, it's a household name.
Right.
So there is an implied trust that goes along with saying I am the news.
Whereas with these other sources, you know, when you're dealing with the Internet, it's not.
But there there are people like Huffington Post, like even in some respects a drudge.
Right.
That are are trading in on the name.
Right.
They're saying I am a news source.
Well, not.
Really.
Right.
Because you you have your own slant.
And what I'm looking for when I'm looking for a news source is someone is going to give me raw sort of unfiltered thought.
Yeah.
And I mean, even just in terms of this show, when we're doing research on a topic for that, we're going to talk about on the show.
Like, for instance, I've got three articles on this one subject that we're going to maybe talk about in a little bit.
And I'm checking each of those articles as we're doing the show to make sure that all the facts are straight.
And that we're going to be giving accurate information.
You can't just go to one source and then be like, I know everything about the story now.
Right.
And you almost have to make a last minute check to find out if something new didn't pop up.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thank you.
I'll hang up and stop talking.
Thanks for the call.
Yeah, there's there's a certain amount of I give out information on the show that is occasionally wrong.
Right.
Sometimes it's just my opinion that's wrong.
Sometimes the actual fact I give out is wrong.
Right.
And it happens.
Right.
So occasionally I get something wrong, or sometimes I misinterpret the question or whatever,
and I feel bad about this every time that that happens.
But there are people out there that are willing to put misinformation into the world,
and the bigger problem for me isn't necessarily even the journalistic integrity.
It's the idea that because someone doesn't like another idea that they have the right to censor it,
and I think it's completely antithetical to the First Amendment.
It goes against the idea that we have a protection of speech in this country,
and at what point does your outrage, your ability to be offended,
outweigh my constitutional right to say whatever it is that I feel, or any other human for that matter?
We don't have the right to silence someone because we disagree with them,
because if they're not going to be able to say what they want to say,
if that's the case, you should just go to a regular college these days.
And not to mention that everyone disagrees with everyone on everything anyway.
Right.
There will always be some guy sitting there listening to us right now going,
these guys are totally wrong.
Right, and there's another part of this that is very much involved with technology.
I think that if you were to go back 50 years and wonder,
well, why didn't we have these types of safe spaces and all of this craziness that's out there
as far as...
people not getting along and wanting to censor each other.
If you were to look back 50 years ago, you didn't have the mashup of ideas that you have now.
You didn't have billions of people just on the other end of your screen
that could all communicate directly with one another in mass.
Before it was like you had a local newspaper, maybe one TV channel
that might have told you something interesting.
But now you have the entire...
You have the entire world at your fingertips.
You have everything in front of you and there's way more to disagree with.
Ultimately, I think that the only real reason anyone would have to censor another idea
is because they're afraid that they're wrong.
The safe space thing is they're afraid that they are wrong.
And whether that's because they know it or not, I think that's ultimately the cause.
You live in an echo chamber because you're afraid of what's on the outside of it.
This is very true.
All right, let's go ahead and talk to Mark real quick.
Hello, Mark. How are you?
Hey.
Hi, Mike.
I was pleasingly surprised to have you, hear you back on.
And I want to thank you for coming back on for a second hour,
which means I'm going to get less things done on this Saturday.
Because I'll be listening to you more than I would be, you know,
intently listening to the former pinko commie.
Our plan is finally coming together to make Saturdays more lazy.
Yes.
Well, yeah, well, not lazy because anyway.
So, yeah.
So I'm going to miss some of those call-ins from the...
from the other period.
But maybe Emil can take up the slack and actually have a two-way dialogue
instead of a socialistic public school perspective.
Right.
Well, you know, I don't know a whole lot about the show that was on during this hour.
I listened a couple of times and very nice people.
Yeah.
But, you know, I figured who doesn't want more guru?
That's correct.
We would do a 12-hour show if we could.
We want more guru.
I would not do a 12-hour show.
That's too much.
So more guru.
And so thanks for being on again.
That's really great.
Excellent.
Also, I forgot to mention when I talked to you earlier.
So I have two entries of Avera.
The one is, of course, the antivirus.
The other is the launcher.
Do I uninstall both of those?
Just the antivirus is the important one.
But I would...
The launcher is okay to leave in?
I'd get rid of them both.
Okay.
That's what I wanted to know.
So I'll get rid of them both.
Oh, you know, and thank you for the call.
I appreciate it, Mark.
Thanks for...
Thank you for the thank you.
Thank you.
Okay.
One of the other things that I forgot to mention,
that Computer Guru is in the Best of Tucson running.
Oh, yeah, we are.
Arizona Computer Guru is up for Best of Tucson in the finalists category.
Yeah, so you should take an opportunity to go over to the Tucson Weekly site
and vote for Arizona Computer Guru in the Best of Tucson.
We posted it on our Facebook and all of our social,
but if you just Google search Best of Tucson finalists,
you can go vote for us.
Yeah.
So we're going to take a quick break.
You can give us a call at 790-2040 if you want to be part of the show.
We'll be right back.
Whether you're dealing with hardware installation or, heaven forbid, a virus...
No!
Mike Swanson is answering all your questions one by one.
So call in or chat in with yours.
The website?
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Tune in, click in, and kick back.
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Guru Show on AM 1030, KVOI, The Voice.
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This is the Computer Guru Show on KVOI, The Voice.
Well, let's talk about Windows upgrades for a moment.
Again.
And the only reason is because I'm sitting here reading this subject here, right?
Because when you guys call in, I get,
generally, I get a name and three words about,
this is sort of what this is about.
And that's all I get, generally.
But this one has an LOL in it.
Is that yours, Kent, or his?
It's his.
Let's go ahead and bring him on here.
Let's talk to Aaron.
Hello, Aaron.
Well, hi.
Tell me about your issue.
As I mentioned to the screener,
I'm doing...
I'm doing Windows 10 upgrades with only CenturyLink type of downloads.
Yeah, that definitely requires an LOL.
That's where the LOL comes in.
Yeah, it's just not cutting it.
You're right.
I mean, I'm sorry.
I'm shocked.
I'm surprised.
CenturyLink isn't amazingly fast.
No.
No, it's not.
Okay, so how many machines do you have?
Two.
Two of them, okay.
Okay.
And are...
Are they both desktops, or is one of them a laptop?
They're both desktops.
Okay.
But I can bring them...
I can take them to any place, even down to your store...
Starbucks or something.
...and have you guys work on them.
Yeah, we can do the upgrade for you, because we have really, really fast internet at the
shop.
Yeah.
We can do that for you, or you can take one of them somewhere and download Windows 10,
and it'll share it with the other one, just so you know.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I've done...
I've done the upgrades.
It's just getting the...
It's the...
You know, periodically, you have to do a Windows upgrade.
That's when the problem begins.
So, let's talk about, like, do you have other options as far as internet where you're at?
Well, yeah.
But the white boss, only what she wants to do is do Amazons and Zappos.
That's all she wants to do, and she's very happy with cutting corners on everything else,
except when the operating system's at...
It comes into play, but she doesn't understand.
So, let me put my marriage counselor hat on for a minute, and I'm going to go ahead and
say, you can tell your wife that the guru says that you need better internet, because
that's ridiculous.
What are you guys paying for internet?
Do you know?
Mm-hmm.
Do you know how much you're paying for internet?
Oh, maybe right now it's sub-40.
All right.
By baud rate.
By baud rate on the...
On the Speakeasy, it's like 15.
All right.
So, if you can measure it in baud, that's really nice.
All right.
So, you're getting, like, 15 megabit?
Yeah.
Or 1.5?
Because I think you're getting 1.5.
Oh, no.
15.
Now, 15's not bad.
I mean, for Centrelink.
For Centrelink, that's not bad.
Right.
But it needs to get up to around 50.
It'd be nice to get to 75.
Okay.
For downspeed, right?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah.
You're not doing that with Centrelink.
What area of town are you in?
Northwest.
Orange Grove Oracle.
All right.
So, you're looking at Comcast.
And Comcast does offer a...
What is that?
$45 plan?
Yeah.
I'll tell you that I lived almost exactly where you're talking about not too long ago.
I had Comcast.
I paid 50 bucks a month, and I got over 40 megs.
So, yeah.
You add another $10 or $15 a month, and you get a lot more go.
And Centrelink is...
Hold on.
What's the disclaimer?
Everything that I say is my opinion.
It does not necessarily represent this radio station or computer guru.
God, they're terrible.
Yeah.
I was going to say, you know, you asked him if he had any other options.
I was like, clearly not.
He's on Centrelink.
It's just I have never had good experience with Centrelink Internet.
Okay.
I try to get everybody off of it.
Could I...
If I needed to, could I just pop up a Yagi?
Yeah.
Could I find a Comcast Wi-Fi system?
Like a hotspot?
Problem?
Yes, a hotspot.
Well, Comcast does that.
Yeah.
You could probably do that.
Okay.
And they make directional antennas for Wi-Fi, for sure.
Yeah.
And if I need to, could I...
Probably it would be easier just for me to bring the desktops down to you guys to do all the important upgrades.
Right.
Yeah.
The problem is right now, at least at the current cycle,
where you're at with Windows 10,
is that there are large critical updates happening about every week.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
That'll calm down eventually, but...
But will their servers pick up the speed enough to where it'll do the job?
Well, luckily they're doing something called...
It's like torrenting.
They're doing peer-to-peer with the Windows 10 upgrades or updates.
Mm-hmm.
So those updates are available all over the place.
And so it's pretty quick.
And I've never had a problem with slow updates.
But anyway.
Got it.
So if you want to bring it down, we can do the upgrades for you.
That's not a big deal.
I would suggest that you guys switch over to Comcast if possible.
You could go the other route of building a crazy antenna,
but I think that you will have paid for the difference in cost
just by getting a nice directional Wi-Fi antenna for a year.
So just get off CenturyLink, man.
Come on.
Okay.
Will do.
All right.
I'll talk to you later.
You know, that poses a very important question, though.
What is it?
If you start your Windows 10 download and it doesn't finish until after the free date ends,
is it still free?
I believe that it is.
CenturyLink takes a month to download it.
I believe that it is.
I think all you have to do is start the process.
Yeah, I was just joking.
I mean, it's a valid question.
For some users, apparently it is.
You know, for some users.
CenturyLink users.
You know, you got to know.
You got to wonder.
We got to open up a guru internet cafe where people can just come and download Windows 10.
I thought about doing that.
I thought maybe we'd talk with Black Crown
and see if we can do like a joint venture for coffee shop slash...
Guru internet.
Yeah, basically.
If Google Fiber ever comes to Tucson.
Yeah, there's not a whole lot of hope for that.
It just depresses me every time I hear Google Fiber.
What's the limit on Ethernet viability?
Is it 100 miles?
Can we drag a cable down from Phoenix?
No, no.
It's 300 feet, which is terrible.
It's not going to work.
That's not even close to long enough.
All right.
So there's a question in the chat.
And by the way, if you want to go to the chat, you can go to gurushow.com slash chat.
And they're asking, what effect will net neutrality have on the mom and pop ISPs here, like SimplyBits and stuff like that?
He heard that it would put stress on them because they're not big enough to compete with the utilities.
Is this true?
Well, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most of those mom and pop ISPs, as that person put it, they're just reselling other ISPs, right?
Well, yeah.
I mean, everybody resells the backbone.
Yeah.
But as an example, SimplyBits uses both the Comcast network, or I'm sorry, the Cox network and the Centrelink network to do their thing.
And depending on where their towers are at, those also have to connect to a larger network.
Like Verizon, as an example.
Verizon has towers all over Tucson.
And those Verizon towers are connected not only amongst each other, right, directly, but they also have, like, Cox connections going into them to help provide bandwidth for your 4G.
So there's an interconnectedness that goes on with all of the ISPs.
Now, luckily, I know some people who happen to own a mom and pop.
And rather than me kind of talking out of my butt on this one, I will set up a meeting to go talk to them and ask them what they think and what their struggles are, and I'll get back to you.
Maybe we can get one of them on the show.
That'd be cool.
That would be nice.
All right.
Do we want to take some calls here, or do we want to do a break?
They're stacking up.
All right.
You pick one.
Put it on there.
All right.
Luxanne.
Hello, Luxanne.
How are you?
I'm good.
Thank you for the tip.
It's on getting my speed faster after converting to Windows 10.
Getting rid of the combating spyware really helped.
Excellent.
Glad to hear it.
I have a new question.
I recently retired, and my $29.99 DirecTV and CenturyNet interlink now is almost $120 a month.
And with my retirement, that would equal about 10% of my retirement.
So I wanted to find out if there is a low-cost Internet service, and I'm going to...
I have a converter box in a Roku.
I can live without TV, but I desperately need to have some sort of Internet, primarily to
do email and a little Facebook here and there.
I'm not somebody who streams videos on my computer, but I'm looking for something that's
reasonable and reliable.
Okay.
Just for my own personal use.
I would say that, speaking of the mom-and-pop ISPs, depending on where you're at, what area
of town are you in?
I am right across from Flowing Wells High School.
Okay.
So CenturyLink does offer sort of the cheapest Internet in town, because they have to, right?
As far as...
Yeah, they just have to, right?
It's the cheapest Internet out there is CenturyLink.
But because of your previous bundling packages, and they keep raising the rates all the time.
Yeah.
So...
Yeah.
That's what I mentioned.
Look at SimplyBits.
They offer a residential package, which I think is, it's like 1.5 meg or 3 meg, and
it's $20 a month.
Wow.
That's incredible.
The downside is that there's an upfront cost to them, because they have to put an antenna
up at your house.
So you're looking at it like a $300 investment, but it's a one-time, you never pay anything
like that again, and then it's $20 a month from there to, as far as I know, the end of
eternity.
Yeah.
That's incredible.
That's incredible, because that's less than three months of my Cox, I mean, my CenturyLink
and DirecTV, and I've been putting it off, but I need to downprice myself.
So are they open on Saturdays?
I don't know.
I don't know if they're open on Saturdays.
545-0400 is their phone number, I think.
545-0400.
Hopefully I got that right.
You can also just go to SimplyBits.com.
Yeah, SimplyBits.com is also the alternative there.
Okay.
Well, thank you so much.
You have a good weekend.
You too.
Thank you for the call.
Happy Father's Day.
Oh, there's a Happy Father's Day in there.
I wonder how she knew.
All right.
We'll be right back after these messages.
Your computer guru, Mike Swanson.
. . .
Right now at gurushow.com or call in.
This is the Computer Guru Show on KVOY, The Voice.
Mike Swanson, your computer guru, is just a click away.
Listen and watch at gurushow.com.
This is the Computer Guru Show.
Welcome back to the Computer Guru Show 7902040.
If you want to be part of the show, let's talk to Ron, who's been waiting very patiently.
Hello, Ron. How are you?
Hey, hope you're doing okay.
I'm doing lovely.
On Windows 10, I have a whole heck of a lot of programs and games that work on 7.
So would that be a problem if I changed?
Depends on the games.
Games?
Most of the time, no.
We haven't seen too many problems with...
There are issues with video drivers and the way video behaves between 7 and 10,
depending on your card.
Specifically with the high-end NVIDIA cards, I've seen some issues.
What kind of video card do you have?
It's a high-end NVIDIA card.
Right, so if you have the GeForce experience on your machine, that should go.
I personally, right as you're about to do the upgrade,
I found it worked out a whole lot better for me
that right when I told it to go ahead and do the upgrade,
I also uninstalled the video driver.
And then it reinstalled it upon reboot after doing the Windows 10 upgrade,
and everything worked fine.
I'll say that as far as gaming goes, because of that exact issue,
what worked for me was just doing a fresh install.
Because if you're using Steam games, you can reassociate them after the install.
You don't have to re-download them.
Okay, do you mean NVIDIA reinstalled?
It reinstalls the driver for the game or Windows 10?
So Windows 10 will install its own NVIDIA driver after you do an upgrade.
And then from there, you can go ahead and put on any,
like if you're using a beta driver or using the experience driver,
you can put that back on yourself.
However, the experience driver, we have seen lots of problems
where if it's installed prior to upgrade,
it breaks the crap out of the video settings after the upgrade.
What's the experience driver?
Well, if you're not using it, then that's good.
That means you don't have to uninstall it.
But it's sort of like a universal driver for NVIDIA.
Okay.
So Windows 10 knows which driver goes to my NVIDIA card?
There is a basic NVIDIA WHQL driver that Microsoft definitely knows about.
It's a GeForce driver, so that wouldn't be a problem?
No.
Well, you'll still want to get your NVIDIA update for your card specifically,
after the install, because your performance on your NVIDIA card
could be affected if you don't.
But as far as that goes, if you're upgrading, just get rid of it for now,
and then you can fix it after the install.
Okay.
But does Windows 10 use more RAM than 7?
In my experience, it's about the same.
Now, I mean, I've got sort of like a video editing rig that I did the upgrade on,
and it's got 32 gigs of RAM on it, so I didn't really notice any difference at all.
Okay.
Because the Windows, like my laptop here is Windows 10,
and I noticed that Chrome uses more RAM after the upgrade than it did before,
and more CPU for that matter, too.
So there is some sort of a penalty, a tradeoff there,
but I don't think it's enough that it needs to be warned about, like in the Vista era.
So you're saying certain programs, it differs by the program?
It appears to be differing by the program.
Do you know what, like the official?
The official usage is per each OS?
Off the top of my head, no.
I'm sorry.
Okay.
But I don't think that, I mean, if you get a reasonable machine and you're playing games on it now,
you're probably not going to notice any performance impact
as long as you don't have your antivirus on there during the upgrade
and you deal with the video stuff beforehand.
Yeah, you said Conspiracy uses a lot of resources.
Resources help out.
Panda.
Panda's not, my biggest problem with Panda is that it was irritating.
But it's a decent antivirus, and it's nice and lightweight, and it's fast.
So I have no issue with Panda as long as you go in and put it in, like, gaming mode
so it doesn't give you a million updates every second.
Yeah, it's trying to sell you something.
The reason why it's lighter is because it's more web-based, isn't it?
Well, sort of.
That's sort of a misnomer with all those web-based ones.
They, they, it does.
It does less as far as, like, Kaspersky is concerned, or compared to Kaspersky.
So.
It does less, you mean, on your machine as far as.
Yeah, I mean, it's monitoring less things.
It's, it's checking less things, and it uses a smaller database than Kaspersky
because of that online feature.
That's not necessarily bad.
I think that, I think that if you're going to do something, you should do it well, right?
Right.
And what I like about the antivirus-only antiviruses is that they do one thing,
and they hopefully should.
They strive to do that well.
Whereas Kaspersky and Norton and McAfee and these other larger suites,
even Avast to a certain extent these days, they want to do all these things.
They want to check your spam and your email, and they want to,
they want to look for your privacy information.
Too many features.
Right, and all these features have a cost.
Jack of all trades, but master of none.
Right, so I just, I just want a good antivirus.
That's it.
So, so you're saying Penn is more specialized on that one purpose?
Well, I hope so.
Otherwise.
Because it has no purpose on the machine at all, because they purport to only be an antivirus.
Now, they do offer a firewall add-on in their paid version, but who needs that?
Right.
Okay.
Yeah, because Windows has its own, its own firewall, right?
Windows does have a firewall, and it is very configurable,
especially if you go into the advanced version.
So, yeah, you've got lots of options.
But.
Okay.
I appreciate the call, Ron.
Cool, thanks.
It turns out that we ran out of time in our second hour.
What's up with that?
We're out of time.
Out of time.
All right.
So, let's mention our sponsor that we didn't mention last time, which is Desert Pro Commercial Cleaners.
They are a Patreon sponsor, and you can be too.
You can even make Tara say whatever you want.
Right.
Or me.
The rule is, is that if you donated a certain amount, Tara has to say whatever it is that you want her to say,
providing it's FCC friendly and won't get us in trouble.
We're really hoping that somebody is going to just have something hilarious for her to say.
I would love that.
But.
But take an opportunity to support the show.
Now that the show is even longer.
Yep.
It costs a little bit more, so we're going to need your help to keep it on the air.
Go to gurushow.com slash Patreon or patreon.com slash gurushow.
Works either way.
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Thanks.
We'll see you next week.
I'm going to go to bed.