There have been volumes written on the subject of online safety, some good and many that are quite misleading. The reasons that your use of the Internet carries risks is due to the opportunity for criminals to commit a crime with little chance of getting caught and high return on time invested. In other words “Internet crime does pay”. Read the rest of this entry »

I get regular enquiry about opening the new Word (standard) documents in earlier versions of Word. Apparently Microsoft has seen fit to change a well established document format and make it different in response to criticism that the documents produced by Office programs were not open source. My conspiracy theory friends believe it is so they can more easily track who wrote a document and what computer was used. Maybe they are right, I don’t know.

What I do know is it is a serious pain in the bum when somebody sends you a document that you are unable to open.

The good news is, to cut to the chase, that the problem can be solved easily and better still for free. All you need to do is download the file formats convertor from Microsoft and install it on your computer. Just like magic you can now open those pesky DOCX files. If you do not have Microsoft Office installed on your computer you can still open these documents by installing the free “Open Office” program or ABI Word. There are also several viewers available as well that should allow viewing and printing of DOCX documents.

At the time of writing, this was the link to the download page. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=941B3470-3AE9-4AEE-8F43-C6BB74CD1466&displaylang=en

If this fails to work for some reason, goto www.microsoft.com and search for “docx file converter”

If you would like to know more about the DOCX format, try this website www.docx.net/

I hope this helps. If you found this useful, drop me a line and let me know.

Don’t get caught in a scam. I have seen more volume of phishing scams over the last few weeks than ever before. I suppose the economic downturn makes it even more attractive for scammers to hit the keyboard in the quest for easy money. Add to this the low chance of getting caught and the relative low penalties it they do and you can see why this is growth industry.

Remember your bank will not ask you to update your account via email nor will paypal use unheard of portals to do business. If you are not sure if an email message is real or not, please contact the sender and find out.

Yes that correct, AVG 9 can be installed on your computer and offer basic protection against internet nasties for free. The only restriction Read the rest of this entry »