Christmas is just about here and this year you can expect to see a flood of dodgy emails using fake invoices, and bills from energy providers and the like. This last year has been one of the worst ever for fake emails.

I have seen many people is small business spend 30 minutes each morning deleting spam and junk emails. This is a good way to ensure your junk emails continue to grow exponentially. Most junk and spam emailers use the same tools as email marketers to track what happens to emails when they are delivered.

They can tell who (which addressee) opened it and read it, who clicked on it to get to a link or deliver a virus or spyware, they can even tell where your mouse traveled on some emails.

The email that opens only in the reading pane will not register generally but it is a good idea not to delete the email as this tells the spammers what you did. If you right click the email and send it to junk they will not know what you did. Using this management method for spam it will reduce over time down to just about nothing. If you are not a live target they will quickly lose interest. It is tedious at first sending individual emails to the junk folder but the Microsoft junk email filters are state of the art and will work for you.

We see a lot of Windows 10 upgrade issues which are more common to legacy systems and laptops. The thing with both desktop and laptop computers from big name brands like HP, Dell, etc etc., is many consumer models are made for the operating system of the day with no upgrade path. While business class laptops and desktops can have resources for future upgrade paths.

While Windows 10 provides most drivers for its operating system upgrade, sometimes there are issues. One of these is the often reported black screen, or a delayed startup whilst on a black screen. There is no straightforward one answer fits all to these black screen issues, but one we commonly see is a problem with legacy graphics. A visit to the the vendors website might indicate the latest driver is installed and you can go no further however, Radeon released a driver external to its own automated system on its website indicating there is an issue with the current driver and we are doing something about it.

You can also try the compatibility tool to set your graphics driver software to an earlier/previous version of windows.

So this is at least one good solution for the windows 10 black screen phenomenon after an upgrade from windows 7 or windows 8.1 on a legacy proprietary system.

Website design and coding is expensive because of the human labour and degree of skill involved. If you are starting up a new website from scratch and have a good budget it would be a good idea to find the right firm for you to get the skills level and the right advice so ultimately you are not wasting money. In the IT world the cheaper alternative doesn’t always work out. Having said that, for those who are on a tight budget or have no budget, the sole trader and startup alternatives are free or low cost templates.

You can work out where to put your text or you can employ a freelancer to do it for you. There are many sites these days to get free or creative commons licenced website templates such as HTML5-UP site with a collection of the latest html5 standards, there is also one of my favourites, the envato showcase with low cost templates who are located over in Melbourne Australia.

Keep your eyes on our blog for future posts on our picks of the land of the free.