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Normally I recommend 8GB of RAM and as near to an i3 processor in terms of speed with an aim to spend about £300. Early 2017 this is do-able. Just I’ve just spotted a new trick I would be quiet happy to do myself.

Second hand from an Amazon refurbisher. Why? £100 cheaper, some sort of warranty and buyer protection via Amazon.

Go to https://www.amazon.co.uk/

Click on “Shop by Department”, this top left hand side just under the logo
Click on that phrase, you’ll not get a list, scroll down until you see “Electronics & Computers”, under this heading you’ll see “Laptops” – click on this link.
Now then next page will basically show you the Amazon list of computers for sale but we just want to narrow it down to all laptops for sale with 8GB RAM Computer Memory. Continue reading →

Print Edit by DW-dev: Choose areas of a web page you don’t want to print by selecting them and clicking on hide, press “Preview”, then “Print”

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/print-edit/olnblpmehglpcallpnbgmikjblmkopia
or
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/print-edit/

People often ask me about Outlook and Microsoft Mail in all it’s forms and I always say, “sorry I don’t support any of them, I only support GMail”

• Your past email is on your PC or laptop
• If you have it installed on multiple machines, then your sent mail is in multiple places
• If you upgrade your computer exporting to a new has always been a painful process
• Backing up is not something people remember to do
• Eventually if you keep using Outlook or Mail, or for that matter Mail on a Mac – they will corrupt themselves. People unknowing accumulate 4 DVDs worth of email and wonder why their email no longer works
• Most modern hard disks fail within 3 years

v GMail

• You can see it and reply on ANY device you come across and see all your replies
• Your email is held on 5 different locations in the world
• You can choose to back it up or pay a month fee and get a third party company to do it
• After you have created a GMail email address, GMail can be programmed to collect email from your old email address (up to 3 or so) but if your old email can forward and delete you can have hundreds of old email account coming in
• Number one misconception you cannot use GMail offline, yes you can, there is a plug-in for it; strangely enough called GMail Offline

Classic Shell 
If you are new to windows 8 – the first thing to do is to install Classic Shell & make a recovery disk.

Classic Shell turns you windows 8 into something that looks like windows 7 / XP

Make a recovery disk
Why? Because you don’t get one in the box in the more and you’ll regret it if you don’t.
The official way to do it is here:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-gb/windows-8/create-usb-recovery-drive

But as usual there are a few missing bits…

• If it says it needs a 16GB USB stick , it probably needs a 32GB USB stick as when a 16GB stick has been prepared it could be significantly smaller that the 16GB it says it needs
• Before you start the creation process, see if you need a second USB stick in case you need to create a USB stick containing “drivers” for the machine
• Next via the menus look for manufacturers approved route to make a recovery disk – do both the Microsoft route and the manufacturers route if you have a choice
• Lastly put the USB stick in the rear of the machine if it’s a desktop (Don’t ask me why)

Here is quite a good video of the process