A reader told us she got a call from a guy saying that her Windows computer was about to crash. She took it seriously because he claimed to be from Microsoft. This is a scam and not a rare one.
The thing to remember is Microsoft never calls you; you call them. To get their phone number, go to Microsoft.com and click "support." Don't Google it, as we once did, or you might click on an ad from a scammer and find yourself relinquishing control of your computer over the Internet. Joy's computer was wiped out that way once. Naturally she was given a stern lecture and demoted two grades.
If you have a problem you suspect came from the bad guys, try "system restore." This will take your computer back to an earlier time. It can go back a day or two or a few weeks. (You do not go back with it. Darn.) This works with some viruses, but not all. If in doubt, do a so-called "factory reset." It takes your computer back to the day you bought it. If you Google "factory reset" and add the model of your computer, such as "HP Pavilion 23," you get instructions. This is handy for phones too.
What's New in Electric Cars
Electric cars are hot, so to speak, and the latest entry comes from the Morgan Motor Company in Malvern Link, Wales. Bob drove a Morgan for more than 20 years and it remains his all-time favorite car. It's very British: They made one car a day.
Every once in a while he would get a letter from Peter Morgan, the owner of the Morgan Motor, and it would have pertinent information on company advances. For example, one letter informed the customers that production might be brought up to six cars a week, if the "sewing ladies" would come in on Saturdays. They stitched the upholstery, you see. Another letter informed us that the workers had recently noticed that the production line ran slightly uphill and they were thinking of reversing it. Good job.
The car came with a crank. If the battery went dead, you could hand crank the engine to get it started. Presumably, the electric models won't need that. The first ones will have only three wheels. Well, there's no point in rushing into things. It will have a top speed of 80 mph. Bob's old four-wheel Morgan was faster than a Porsche.
By the way, one of the many advantages of electric cars is they need no transmission, no gears to shift. Also no carburetor, no spark plugs, no radiator, no fuel pump, no starter motor, no oil lubrication system, no finely machined engine, etc. A lot of people are going to be out of work.
Buying a New Computer
When we buy a new Windows 10 computer this summer, we'll be asking ourselves: Should we get one with a traditional hard disk drive or one of the new solid state drives?
Hard disk drives have been around for 60 years. They were a tremendous advance over floppy disks. They were invented by IBM and were originally called Winchester Drives, because they were as fast as a rifle bullet, they said. The name may have been influenced by the fact that the IBM lab that designed the drive was across the street from the Winchester mansion in San Jose, Calif.
Solid state drives have no moving parts, they're all chips. But even if you buy a computer with one of these, you can still add external old-style hard drives; we saw one from Toshiba that could hold a terabyte and was $56. A terabyte can hold 17,000 hours of music, 40 days of standard movies recorded around the clock, or 500 hours of high definition movies.
Free Games. Really.
Many computers come with a "games" file on board from their first startup; our Hewlett Packard has at least a couple hundred.
Google, Yahoo and AOL also have tons of free games and the nice thing about those and any games that come with your computer is you don't have to worry about viruses or hacking attacks. At least we've never had any problems with these games. They run from card games to adventures, action, role playing and imitations of famous games that are expensive, but of course much larger and more complex.
One of Bob's favorites is Brickies, a free game for iPad/iPhone/Android phones. This is much like Little Brick-Out, a classic computer game that goes back to the very earliest days, when Pong introduced to the world a little moving rectangle of light on a black screen; it could be bounced around using a short line that acted like a paddle.
Little Brick Out was also a favorite of Steve Wozniak, designer and builder of the first Apple computer. In fact, therein lies an interesting footnote to computer history. The original Apple design had a black and white screen display. But Wozniak wanted to play Little Brick Out, which is in color (just basic colors), so he added a chip that would show a color screen.
Internuts
• "What's Really Warming the World?" Search on that phrase and you'll come up with an interactive chart put together by Bloomberg Business. It's a view of temperature changes in air and water over the last 135 years, plotted against things like volcanic activity, deforestation, changes in solar radiation, etc. The strongest correlation is seen with so-called greenhouse gases.
• "40 Maps That Will Help You Make Sense of the World." The 22 countries that Great Britain never invaded. The only countries that don't use the metric system are Liberia, Myanmar and, of course, us. McDonald's restaurants around the world. (The busiest is in Moscow.)
• "101 Amazing Facts," pulled together by the folks at the magazine Mental Floss. They're not all that amazing but there are some curiosities. Like: In Japan, it's considered good luck to let a Sumo wrestler make your baby cry.
Bob and Joy Schwabach can be reached by email at bobschwa@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
SundayMonday Business on 07/13/2015