Thanks to deoetdoctrinae for the ping!
Posted on 06/29/2019 10:06:40 AM PDT by Chickensoup
Chickensoup had a computer crash this spring. The beloved WIN7 and Outlook 2003 died a horrible death on the trusty Acer.
Heartbroken the soup discovered there was no replacing this faithful companion.
Soup needed a computer quickly and purchased a temporary HP from Staples. Win10 in all its gory. Also purchased a yearly MS package that includes Outlook, since this is to be a temporary computer.
All of the businesses that the soup have have been run sucessfully on Outlook for many years.
Outlook has been a centerpiece along with the trusty 11 year old LG Envy3 with customer lists.
Verizon is not going to continue to support the EV3 in the near future.
The Outlook connects to a Time warner Roadrunner account that soup has had since 1987. This is legacy stuff here.
Spectrum has taken over time warner and email is a red-headed stepchild. It doesn't really work. It takes half hour to many hours to receive emails sent to the accounts.
Soup has just discovered not only doesn't it work, but this version of outlook does not download the email files but instead works with them in the cloud. Bad stuff here.
Chickensoup is thinking that this is time for a complete overhaul of devices.
Chickensoup would like a private email that downloads onto the computer.
Chickensoup would like a computer that works well and fast. And is durable, this computer is cheesy. The soup actually takes the computer to work and other places. It has a 17 inch screen.
Chickensoup suspects she is going to have to find a Smart phone and have it all work togehter.
Privately.
Chickensoup is anti-google and anti-cloud.
Chickensoup would be happy to pay a place of her own.
Questions are 1) who do I hire to help me with this, I need someone with telephony skills and computer knowlege, and email skills. If that someone could set up a VPN I would be happy, God knows, I couldnt do it.
and 2) How can I get privacy and independence yet have them tie together.
Am I asking for too much?
Gratefully,
chickensoup
It was totally intentional.
You know for years I misread dayglored to dagored which is an old nickname for cheap guinea wine. I use the word guinea, because if you were saying dago-red, you would say guinea.
I second the idea already mentioned of getting a trusted local computer expert to help. Remote advice is difficult. Well, -GOOD- remote advice is difficult. Both to give, and to use.
One man called when I used the home advisors site. He said he could do everything and that he was old.
He talked aobut his relaionshps with his clients how he has watched his clients kids grow up.
IDK
“Dayglored” is a multi-level pun. “Dago red” (cheap Italian wine), I love bright dayglo colors (hippie after-effect). And my first car was a little red Italian number, in the days of CB radio, and I chose “dayglored” as my CB handle. It stuck. :-)
grateful thanks to you.
I do need someone local. but someone that can do it all?
talk later.
I would start by deleting all the bloatware that came with the new pc. Then do a recovery disk. Then do updates.
That’s should take a couple of hours/. Then start personalizing.
Thanks to deoetdoctrinae for the ping!
As to the original question, I'm all MAC, not because I love MAC, but because it's a PITA to try to synch all the other stuff through Windows. While part of Mac is cloud based, it keeps copies of everything on your local computer. If you want to synch across devices, you have to be at least partially cloud based.
As far as email accounts, I've got Gmail, Apple, and custom email through my ISP. I keep going back to the Apple email because of the reliability.
I have to use Outlook with my work account, and we were recently told that the current version of Outlook would be the last application release, and future versions would be cloud based. Outlook still has the most annoying contacts setup of any system I've tried.
There are certainly annoyances with Mac, like don't even get me started on trying to do form letters in Pages, but I find their annoyances to be easier to get around.
Change from IMAP to POP3. Email will do what you are wanting.
pop-server.dc.rr.com
Install OpenShell and you wont mind windows 10. Will be almost like Win 7.
https://github.com/Open-Shell/Open-Shell-Menu/releases/download/v4.4.131/OpenShellSetup_4_4_131.exe
I hate outlook. It is a finicky b!tch. Consider Thunderbird and Opencard. Much more stable IMHO. Will import everything from Outlook and wasn’t written by a bunch of guys passing around a bong and saying I have a great idea, ribbons.
https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/
You might end up liking that “temp” computer.
i hate thunderbird- We have to use it- but what i don’t like is how dang slow their downloading of emails with photos in them is, and how it just hangs whenever we send out email- I have to click cancel several items when it tries to ‘save to saved folder’ to shut it down- If family sens us an email with small photos or videos- it takes forever to download it- our outlook express used to be lightening quick downloading even large photos- not sure why Thunderbird is so slow- I’m talking several minutes- and we have a very fast internet too- 100 mbs
I’ve triedc several version of thunderbird, all are the same-
Brian Pagliano probably has some spare time but may be getting subpoenas soon. You do have a spare bathroom, don't you?
I would not do Geek Squad, if at all possible.
But, configuring these things will take anyone a bit of time.
Win 7 is EOL (End of life)
Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows 7 on January 13, 2015, but extended support won’t end until January 14, 2020.
Not a good solution.
You have a slow email server issue. It isn’t thunderbird and isnt your connection.
Folks, Windows 7 support ends next year.
No more security patches.
I can’t recommend any Win 7 system in good conscience. You will have to go through the Win 10 upgrade very soon.
I just replaced my phone, some kind of android.
It’ll be easy they said, do it from home they said,
won’t take long at all they said. What a nightmare!
Finally was advised by tech support to take it to the
store. The store had wifi running at around 3megs and it was
going to take 4 FOUR hours to transfer everything so they
did a partial job and it only took an hour and a half but
now I have to reload my apps and reset my email and on
top of that now I have some kind of ghost shadow moving
around on my PC’s monitor. AAArrrrrrrgh!!!
Soup needs to stop referring to itself in the third person. It’s creepy.
Sounds like a good time to switch to linux. FREE
Thunderbird is a good email client aka replacement for Outlook. Runs on windows, mac or linux. Thunderbird is made by Mozilla, same people as firefox so I don’t know if they steal data or not. There’s a few different email clients specifically for linux too. FREE
I use PIA (private internet access) for a VPN. I pay annually which works out to $3.50/mth.
I run used Thinkpads. Many of their models/series are designed and built for large corporate leases and they’re very reliable. I’m running a Thinkpad W530 right now. It has an Intel Core i7 - 2.70GHz processor and 16gb of ram and I haven’t been able to bog it down, even with graphics editing programs. It came with two 128GB SSD hard drives and win7 Pro preinstalled. I installed linux next to windows and can choose which one I want to start during computer startup. I paid $255.00 for it. It’s only got a 15.4 inch display. Something with a 17 inch would probably cost $300-350. T series, W series and P series, oldest to newest, are all “business class”. I opted for a high performance W series instead of going with the newer P series, mainly because I would have paid a higher price for the equivalent performance in a P series and the W530 I got originally came with Win7 so I knew it would run 7 well and I have no intention of running Win 8 or 10.
I use pretty much only linux on this particular laptop, I never get on windows. On another laptop and also a tablet I have, I run windows for a couple of programs that don’t have a linux equivalent. The windows side never connects to the internet though. All that gets done on the linux side as it’s safer. The viruses, malware, spyware etc are all written to attack windows machines as that’s what most people are running.
I’m running Linux Mint KDE Edition which sadly, they won’t be building anymore. Support runs out in 2021 but I could run it for a few years after that as updates will still be available. KDE has a program called KDE Connect for connecting to a smart phone and some other distrobutions aka flavors of linux have the same. FREE.
Another FREEper uses Zorin operating system which is linux made to look like windows.
For a new smart phone, you pretty much have two choices. Apple iPhone or an Android (made by google) based phone.
All phone apps want too many permissions to access different features of the phone(camera, microphone, etc and your personal data. No such thing as privacy with a smart phone but I think the iPhone is better about it than Andriod phones. The iPhone is pricey though.
I buy all my laptops used from ebay.
RE: IMAP vs POP email. Some email services only provide IMAP but even though the default is for the emails to be kept on a server somewhere, you can set it up to download them.
IF you really want privacy for email, you could get a domain name, like mychickensoupemail.com and set up an email address like soup@mychickensoupemail.com
At any rate, you can only encrypt outgoing email. You can’t encrypt an email that someone else is sending you, naturally. Even with that protonmail, both parties have to be using protonmail for emails back and forth to be encrypted. You can set up thunderbird or most any email client to send encrypted but it does take some setting up.
For all you want, you’re either going to have to have someone come to you or bring/send your computer to them as a lot of it needs to be done on the machine.
Linux also has MS Office compatible programs FREE. Equivalents of MS Word, MS Access, MS Excel etc. FREE
did I mention linux is FREE
Oh, you can put ubuntu touch(mobile aka phone OS) on a Nexus 5 phone but it’s a pretty techie thing to do.
https://ubports.com/devices/nexus5-convergence
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