wifi

When you connect to your home wifi on your laptop (or your desktop, for that matter), you usually only have to enter the password that first time. After that, you just get automatically connected without needing to type the password.

But what if you need that password later? For example, a friend comes over and wants to connect to your wifi. Or, you get a new computer and need to get it online. You will need to know your wifi password.

If you use a router that is property of your internet provider, in many cases, you can just look on the router for a label that identifies the network name and the password. That’s really the easiest way. Of course, if you have since changed the network name or password, the information on the label won’t help because it no longer applies.

But you can find the stored password in your computer – here’s how.

Click the Start button, then click on Settings.

Go to Network & Internet and click on Network and Sharing Center (it may instead say “Change adapter options”)

In the list of connections, choose your wifi network name.

Under Status, click Wireless Properties, and then click the Security tab.

Check “Show characters” in the “Network security key” field to reveal your wifi password.

In many cases, the client will immediately answer “Yes”. And I can tell by how quickly they answered, they didn’t actually check to SEE if they’re connected to the internet. They just assume they are (which may not be the case).

The other common answer is, “Well, I should be…”. And I guess we can agree that they “should be” connected to the internet, but that doesn’t mean that they actually are connected.

On a Windows computer, to check this, you just need to look in the lower right corner of your screen where all those little icons are (the same area where the date and time are displayed). The internet icon will look like a few radio waves (if you’re on wifi) or a small monitor (if you’re using an ethernet cable connection). When you put your cursor over that icon (without clicking on anything), you should see the name of your network and the words “internet access”.

Side note – another common misunderstanding is that “connecting to the internet” means opening your web browser, such as Chrome. These are two things that are related, but separate. Your browser just displays websites. If you’re connected to the internet (which is the same as being “online”), the browser will display a website. If you’re not online, you’ll get some type of error saying that the site cannot be displayed. But these two things are not the same.

When you’re moving the cursor around the screen, it probably looks like an arrow. But when you move it to be over a clickable link, it changes to an image of a little hand with the index finger pointing up. That means you can click on that link and something will happen. But you only need to do ONE click. With a clickable link, just a single click is all that’s needed.

It’s different if you’re trying to open a program from an icon on your desktop screen. When you put the cursor arrow over a desktop screen icon, you can see that it does not change into the hand with the finger pointing. For those things, it’s a double click (left button).

And if you’re not sure whether to left or right click, you can always try the right click – it will pop up a menu and give you options.

Also – even if you use a laptop touchpad, there is still the option to left click or right click. There may actually be a couple of buttons for left and right clicks, but if there are no visible buttons – the touchpad itself has these built in. If you put down on the bottom left corner or the bottom right corner, you should feel a click – that’s the left and right click on a touchpad.

The most common way to close a window on your PC is to just go up to the top right corner and click on the X. What happens at that point depends on what that window is.

If it’s a Word document that you haven’t recently saved, you’ll be asked if you want to save it before closing.

If it’s a File Explorer window, it will just close.

If it’s a program, it might present you with a dialogue box asking to save, or confirming that you really want to close it, or something else.

But what if, for some reason, you can’t see the X in the top right corner? There’s an alternative way to close a window or a program.

Just hold down the ALT key, and tap the F4 key.

You’ll be prompted (or not) just as if you had clicked on the X in the corner.

Bonus tip – if you have no windows open (just looking at the desktop screen) and you tap ALT + F4, you’ll see a dialogue box that gives you the options to shut down or restart your computer. This can come in handy if you’re in a situation where the cursor is frozen, or for some reason you don’t have control of the cursor. This alternative shut down/restart method only needs the keyboard.

“Screensaver” has sort of become a universal term that’s not always used accurately.

The original idea of a screensaver came about back in the days of the old CRT monitors (before flat screen monitors). When the screen would stay on one image for extended periods of time, those images would sort of get “burned in” to the screen and even show faintly when the computer was not even powered on. So screensavers were developed – after a period of inactivity, something different would appear on the screen (like the floating bubbles, or a slide show of pictures). Modern monitors don’t need this any more, but even new versions of Windows still have the screensaver option because people like them.

Wallpaper on the computer is a different thing. When you boot up your windows computer and you get to the screen that has all the icons on it, that screen is called the desktop screen. And if there’s an image on the screen behind your icons, that image is called the wallpaper.

So they are sort of similar (images that appear on the screen), but the words do refer to different functions of the computer.

For most people, if you’re using your phone and sending a text message or a FB messenger message, or an Instagram DM, inserting an emoji into the conversation is pretty much second nature. It’s just a seamless part of the process.

But what if you’re on your actual computer, and you want to insert an emoji into some text? Well – that’s easy too, if you know how to make it happen.

Windows actually has a whole selection of emojis to use. To see all of them and choose one, just hold down the Windows key on your keyboard, and tap the “.” key (the period). You’ll see this menu pop up with all kinds of options to choose from –

Windows emoji selection

You can see by that scroll bar on the right, there are a lot of emojis available, in a few different categories. And it’s always available – just hit the Windows key + .

This happens all the time, to just about everyone. Maybe you’re writing a paper in MS Word, and you accidentally highlight an entire paragraph and delete it. The first thought usually is, “What did I just do??” and then you wonder how to get that deleted text back. You just want to go back in time about 10 seconds and pretend the mistake never happened.

But there is a quick fix.

Just hold down the CTRL key, and tap the letter “z”. That deleted paragraph will pop right back into place exactly where it was before.

But here’s the nice thing – CTRL + Z isn’t just a function of MS Word. It’s actually almost universally recognized as the “undo” function in just about any software you’re working with.

So if you ever delete something that shouldn’t have been deleted, or change a font that needs to be changed back, or moved something in Photoshop that you should have just kept in the original place – CTRL + Z is your friend. Maybe even your lifesaver.

Your computer is a lot more interesting to look at when the background (also called wallpaper) is something that actually means something to you. It might mean a family photo,  or a picture of your grandkids at the beach, or the scenic view out your back door. Anything that can be photographed (or drawn) can be used as computer wallpaper.

Probably the pictures that are on your computer are saved in the Pictures folder. Click on the little folder icon at the bottom of your screen on the taskbar, then click on the Pictures folder. Find the one you want to use, and do a RIGHT click on it. In the menu that comes up, click on “Set as desktop background”. That’s it! Super easy.

Note: A lot of people, when talking about their background/wallpaper, call it their “screen saver”. But that’s a different thing completely.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say you travel on vacation to the Bahamas. While you’re there, you use your phone to take 300 pictures. You get back home and transfer the 300 pictures to a folder on your computer. Great!

But now you have a folder with a list of picture files that looks like:

fjkdjf.jpg
wvpopw.jpg
54jklfre.jpg

Those file names are pretty much useless because they don’t tell you anything about the content of the photo.

But there is one thing you can do, to “sort of” make the names more descriptive.

1. While viewing the folder of photos, hold down the Ctrl key and type the letter “a” – this highlights every photo in that folder
2. At the top of that window, click on “Rename”
3. For the name, type something descriptive that covers the whole group. In this example you could say “Bahamas”

Now you’ll see that every photo in that folder is named Bahamas 1, Bahamas 2, Bahamas 3, and so on.

This doesn’t make a descriptive title for the contents of each individual picture, but at least you have an idea of the event or category each one falls into.

It wouldn’t surprise me if AI were already able to rename each photo individually based on the contents. I don’t know of a process specifically like that, but the way AI is progressing, I’m sure it will be possible in the near future, if it’s not already.

If I have set up a backup process on your computer, it’s using the program called Macrium Reflect. Macrium runs the backup automatically at a scheduled time (I usually set it for 1 am), and it puts the full backup on your USB portable drive.

In most cases, I recommend going to Walmart and getting the USB portable drive. A 2 TB drive (big enough for most people) runs about $70. You can get one on Amazon too if you want.

But those drives are typically a spinning disk drive, which means they are slower. But usually that’s fine – the backup starts at 1 am, it’s done a few hours later, and you have full use of the computer by the time you wake up and get your coffee. When I used one of those drives, my backup would take around 6 hours because I have a lot of data stored on my computer.

But then I switched to a USB portable drive that is a SOLID STATE drive. Smaller in dimensions, and MUCH faster because there are no moving parts. That same backup that took several hours now takes about ONE hour for my computer. And it’s more reliable and less prone to errors.

A couple of things to note, related to this:

• You can’t just swap out your old portable drive with the new one. It has to be configured to work with the backup program (Macrium Reflect).
• If you’re still using the free version of Macrium Reflect, you will probably need to upgrade to the paid version pretty soon. The free version became unsupported about 2 years ago. It has still been working, but I’ve seen on a couple of computers where the outdated/unpatched free version causes issues with Windows 11.

And if you don’t even HAVE a backup yet, we need to get that taken care of. Your computer’s internal drive can die gradually or without any warning, so if you have anything important saved on your computer you definitely need to set up a backup.