Allan Levy, Technical Director

Computer Booters will take a short computer break and will see you in September. Computer Booters has moved its meeting day. Due to unexpected conflicts, we had to move to the first Wednesday of each month from September through May. At 6:00 p.m. we have cookies and coffee. At 6:00 p.m., our technical director, Allan Levy, runs a free one-on-one computer clinic. Come and get your computer questions answered. Meetings begin at 6:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at the Sun Lakes Country Club Navajo Room, 25601 Sun Lakes Blvd.

Computer Booters has several volunteer positions. Give us a call if interested. Volunteers are what make our organization possible.

At our May meeting, Office Depot visited. The topic was Smart Home – Security, Entertainment & Automation.

One of the newest technologies that has begun to invade our homes, “Smart Home” devices tie computers and networking into our homes, providing physical security, entertainment and automation, not to mention virtual assistants like Alexa or Siri.

Aaron Neal, Office Depot, spoke. Aaron is the store manager for our local OfficeMax store. Aaron and his team provided an overview of this technology and the devices you can install to operate it in your own home.

Important information: If you use a Dell computer, then beware — hackers could compromise your system remotely.

Bill Demirkapi, a 17-year-old independent security researcher, has discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the Dell SupportAssist utility that comes pre-installed on most Dell computers.

Dell SupportAssist, formerly known as Dell System Detect, checks the health of your computer system’s hardware and software.

The utility has been designed to interact with the Dell Support website and automatically detect Service Tag or Express Service Code of your Dell product, scan the existing device drivers and install missing or available driver updates, as well as perform hardware diagnostic tests.

Dell users are advised to either install the updated Dell SupportAssist 3.2.0.90 or later or simply uninstall the application altogether, if not required, before hackers try to exploit the weaknesses to take full control over their computer systems.

If you are on Windows 10, Microsoft has issued a major update, and you will automatically get it. It will fix a large number of bugs. The next version of Windows 10 is coming soon. It will incorporate some new features. Of great interest is the ability to delay updates. The reason is stability. The September 2018 version is just now becoming stable with the April Update.

Windows 7 has one year left of support. What does that mean? There will be no more security updates for Windows 7 in one year. Computer Booters will have classes and discussions on what users should do.

The next version of Office, Office 2019, will not run on Windows 7. Office 365 will stop working on Windows 7. Other versions, previous versions of Office (2016, 2013, 2010, etc.) will run on Windows 7.

A new update to Windows 7 is coming. It will include nagging to go to Windows 10.

Come Join In – Become a Member – All are Welcome.