Do you need to use anti-virus software on a Mac?
Probably not.
I’ve just loaded Malwarebytes on our iMac and MacBook Pro computers – provided by our bank – and only found one piece of tracker code, on one machine, which was very old and most probably not active. I deleted it.
Macs have a very good history of not being hacked, and when they are they close the problem down very quickly. This is a benefit of Apple owning both the hardware and software and being able to control which of the latter is installed on MacOS.
Using Paypal instead of Credit Cards
This was a question that was raised during the General Meeting discussions. PayPal has a Buyer Protection and Fraud Protection policy which for small transactions (ie <£100), and for transactions with companies/individuals you regularly do business with, is probably sufficient protection.
For large value items (ie >£100) and up to £30,000 you might prefer to choose using your credit card because of the Section 75 protection you get.
Should I use Russian anti-malware software – Kasperski?
Well … a lot of people do, and even government and other public bodies do, I believe, and it’s supposed to be very good and used to be recommended by Which?
But I don’t!
Keeping safe online …
The threats – real and perceived
Luckily, there’s plenty of advice and guidance available – often slanted particularly towards our demographic (ie oldies) …
Those two sites are particularly easy to follow and understand, but others are equally informative and targeted.
Your bank probably has guidance which it publishes online and which is accessible to everyone, not just their customers …
I’ll return to further information, guidance and references at the end of the talk, but first we need to look at a few issues, discuss some terminology that’s widely used and try and tease out what’s really important, and what’s just an inconvenience and then it’s up to you to judge where you find yourself on the scale of …
Terrified -> Apprehensive -> Sensibly Aware -> Relaxed -> Unconcerned
First let’s distinguish the difference between online security and online privacy. These are two different issues which are however linked. Sometimes you have to relinquish some privacy to receive a service – unless you choose to pay for it (and I’ve long been an advocate of paying for services if they do a job that is necessary); exactly how much privacy are you prepared to relinquish?
Security on the other hand is an absolute – you should not be prepared to accept less than your very best efforts . We’ll deal with that in the third part of the talk.
How do you relinquish your privacy, and how much of a loss of privacy is acceptable?
Some services could not be offered without income from adverts, or paid-for advertising – eg Facebook, twitter and instagram; and some eg Google and Amazon track and provide information to resellers if you don’t block them from doing so. As an example of how much value Google sees in getting knowledge of what you’re doing and where you’re doing it, they paid Apple $8bn recently to remain as the default search engine for any browser that’s running on an Apple device!
Incidentally, if you clicked on that link you’d have been asked whether you wanted to accept cookies – what exactly are they, and what do they do …
This article from Norton explains what they do quite well. Essentially, they record what you do on a website so that when you return some of the settings are remembered and applied. They do however also have a downside in that some can also act to track your activity once you’ve left the site. For that reason, you should disable in your browser the ability of third-parties to glean information from a cookie, and also to prevent them tracking your activity once you’ve left the site. You can at anytime, clear the cookies from your browser, and indeed on some internet browsers set them up to delete cookies when you leave (close the window) the site. You might also have noticed that my browser – Firefox – alerted me to the fact that Norton was using a Fingerprinting cookie itself …
… we’ll leave that for another day!
Another thing you might have observed when I opened the link in my Firefox browser was that the site requested that I enabled adverts to be shown. That is because Firefox, like Brave and Microsoft Edge, by default switches adverts off. These are often annoying and having a browser that blocks adverts, or if you use Chrome – using an ad-blocker like AdBlock Plus often makes for a more “pleasurable browsing experience” by limiting the intrusion you might feel upon your privacy.
Which brings us to browsers and search engines
Search engines are not created equal! Whilst Google is often thought to be the same as the internet and is often mistaken by U3A members to be an internet browser, it is in fact just one of a range of possible search engines that you can use to look for information on the internet. It uses a platform called Chromium to display the results of its searches to you through a browser called Chrome. However, other browsers – Microsoft’s new Edge, Brave and Opera all use the same underlying Chromium technology – the difference being they don’t track what you’re doing “to present the content that most meets your needs” (Google’s philosophy) and in some cases (eg Brave) they can actually prevent tracking of your browsing history. For the reasons given above, I use Apple’s Safari, or either Brave or Firefox as my internet browser.
So what safe and private search engine could you use as an alternative to Google. I use DuckDuckGo …
… but others I could have used might have been Bing, Yahoo or another one included in this article or in the list of articles at the foot of the post …
Finally, no discussion of Privacy can ignore Social Media and Facebook in particular. These applications if left to their own default settings are effectively personal information mining engines. They grab what information they can from you, and sell it on to whoever is willing to pay for it, or are indeed the platform for data mining, vis the Cambridge Analytica affair. Online retailers are not exempt from this and Amazon for instance has a wonderful record of your browsing history and who knows what they do with it! So look at this table taken from the recent Which? Publication – Staying Secure in a Digital World – and just check whether you need to change your settings, if you use any Social Media apps …
So that’s Privacy dealt with.
Should you be frightened?
The take away message I want you to have is Frightened – no; cautious – yes!
Online banking is very secure – a recent survey in Which? produced the following scores …
… plus you are protected and most of the banks are increasingly opting to adopt an online and mobile guarantee to refund you where you’ve been the innocent victim of a fraud. Here for instance is Barclay’s “Online and Mobile Banking Guarantee.”
They really don’t want to shell out money, so are trying to educate us to be wise to scams. So let’s take a scam test …
Banks are also often supplying software free (or at reduced cost) for you to install to protect your machine, to protect you from fraud – and of course themselves from having to pay out! I was recently offered a piece of software called Malwarebytes by the NatWest and although I have an Apple Mac computer which are well known to be relatively secure from Viruses, Spyware, Trojans and other malware, I installed it. I was pleased to note that I didn’t have any malware on the machine. We’ll return to this later!
Surprisingly you might think … it’s safer to use the mobile app on your phone, or tablet to do online banking and retail purchases than a web browser. This is because the app on the mobile device has to be verified by Google for Android (Google Play Store) or Apple for iOS/iPadOS (Apple Store). Whereas a browser could be infected, or compromised with malware. That’s something I’ve learnt from preparing this talk!!!
What is more with the advent of Two-factor Authentication (2FA) which makes use of a personal device associated with you, your phone which you’ve protected with your fingerprint, or facial image), is even more secure.
When you’re out and about and NEED to do an online transaction from your mobile – use cellular rather than WiFi. The latter can be really open to “sniffers”. [I must admit I try to avoid doing online transactions when away from a domestic network.] Alternatively use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to connect through the Public WiFi “Hotspot”.
So we come to phishing and pharming, vishing and smishing – I kid you not! We’ll leave aside spear phishing because we’re not important enough for that! [Please excuse me not going into details on any of these. You can follow the links for further information.]
However the most scary scam I’ve been made aware of is one that befell a member of my family when they were distracted sufficiently to become the victim of SIM swapping.
I have discussed this with you before and you can read read the updated post on the public Thought grazing site.
Bruce Springsteen shouts out at his legendary concerts “Is there anyone alive out there?” I hope there are still many of you alive out there with me, because we now arrive at perhaps the most important part of the talk.
What should you do to protect yourself?
Some of these are really quite straightforward, some require some intervention by yourselves.
- Keep your operating software up to date. This is particularly true if you’re a Windows user, and even more true if you are still running an older version of Windows than Windows 10. If you’re using Windows XP, Windows Vista or even Windows 7 you should seriously consider disconnecting your machine from the internet.
- Install anti-malware, or anti-virus software if you’re a Windows user. Don’t pay more than you need to. Windows Defender from Microsoft is Free and for us relatively undemanding users more than sufficient. Keep it up-to-date as well! [As I said previously, your bank might be offering free software as well.]
- Keep the software you use regularly up to date as well. Consider removing any software from your machine you don’t use – this is because software vulnerabilities are discovered sometimes quite a while after the software was first released.
- Be cautious over installing extensions into your browser. These are often extremely useful and valuable tools, ie password managers, Dropbox, note taking, Google Back up and Sync, but if you don’t get them from the official sources then you might be importing vulnerabilities, eg spyware and trojans to your system.
- Very seriously consider logging-out from social media and other retail sites when you’ve finished using them, especially Facebook, you just don’t know what tracking and logging of what you do, even where you are, if you’re logged in on a mobile device.
- Free software is both a boon and a curse. Only download open source software from a reputable site such as Softpedia, and never try and get proprietary software for free. Read this article about Free download sites if you want to know more.
- Remember the golden rule 1 – if it seems too good to be true, it probably is, so steer clear!
- Remember the golden rule 2 – don’t speak to strangers (an oldie but goldie one, that); in other words if you don’t know where an email has come from – ignore it; if the website address looks a little strange – do an internet search on the company or organisation to check if the address you’re looking at is a spoof of the proper one.
- Have more than one email address. Use one as your personal address, other ones you can use to “throw away”when you need to register to a website, but you’re unlikely ever to go back to it again. Or have an email address (UserID) specifically for online purchases. Splitting things like this reduces the risk of you being the victim of fraud.
- Seriously consider using an email service that is NOT connected to your Internet Service Provider (ISP) – if you decide to change your ISP, and you should review them periodically, then you will have real problems if your email address is linked to their service!
- You’ve got Spam filters running? Of course you have – but you better check! Probably your ISP, or email provider (eg Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft Outlook or Hotmail) is filtering out what it thinks is spam, but occasionally some gets through. If that’s the case then you can always look at the real sender of your message.
You can also apply filters to divert incoming email into different folders in your email system. That reduces the amount of Junk that you need to review. [I’ve also advocated using the “native” email application for your device rather than rely on the web-based service the email provider has. Thus on a Windows device – use Windows Mail (or Outlook); on a Mac use Mail. You can then easily synchronise your email between devices from multiple email accounts. Tidy!]
So we come to Passwords …
… this is the point at which you need to consider intervention and changing your behaviour! You might also need to do a fair bit of work, but it’s worth it if you want to have a secure internet experience.
Let’s just see what using an insecure Password can lay yourself open to. Frightening eh!?
What about the combination of your email address with your password has that been “pwned” (ie stolen through a data breach)?
And if you want to see a list of which websites have been breached, it’s alarmingly long!
So … use a unique password for everywhere you sign on. There’s lots of tricks to achieve this; some of which I wrote about in a post quite a long time ago …
… but the real change of behaviour is to use a Password Manager – again I wrote about this a little while ago and linked it to using Two Factor Authentication, which I described earlier.
Password managers
I used to use LastPass and I believe there’s nothing wrong with it – despite the security scares last year, but other common ones are Dashlane and 1Password. Please make up your own minds after reading some Reviews and seriously consider using one.
However the biggest change in Online Security which started last year with Apple’s announcement of the launch of its’ implementation of FIDO is Passkeys.
The Video and the Slides from the talk given to the Cardiff u3a General Meeting
Slides: https://thoughtgrazing.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Keeping-safe-online.pdf
References
Which? webpages – Scams & older people
Which? Scam Alert Service – sign up for an email alert
Age UK webpages – Staying safe in your digital world and specifically How to stay safe online
Your bank, eg NatWest – mine has a Security Centre web presence and particularly they provide a number of Fraud Guides
I could give a million references to changing your privacy settings on Social Media, but here are a couple relating to Facebook, perhaps the most challenging service of the lot.
First – what Facebook unchallenged will want to get from you. You are able to disable (prevent) all or some of these … Sign up for Facebook – this is not sign-up site, it’s just one to educate you on the privacy you might give up without realising then How to change settings on Facebook and finally Securing Facebook: Keep your data safe with these privacy settings.
My new bit of gear – an Amazon Echo Show 8
It has to be said that I am a bit of a gadget geek. I was actually quite an early adopter of the Amazon Echo voice activated assistant. I bought a pair of them a couple of years ago and have since added some lights to my smart home. All in all, I’ve been delighted with the system although to be honest, I’ve sometimes felt that I wasn’t getting the experience quite right. Maybe I was missing something.
About six months into The Great Lockdown I noticed that Amazon had a special offer on the Amazon Echo Show 8; just £69.99 (it is now £89.99 so keep an eye on the price). It really is sinfully easy to click on the “Buy Now” button. Here’s what I’ve discovered.
First of all, I believe that you can only get the full value of the Echo experience if you are an Amazon Prime subscriber. I’ll tell you more about that later.
The Amazon Echo is a bit like a voice activated tablet screen. You can set it up to :-
- Show a continuous slideshow of your photographs, cycling through your snaps at random.
- Play your music. You can ask Alexa for a particular album, artist or genre of music. You can also get her to play your favourite radio station. You can control the volume with your voice.
- Show recipes, with video and audio hints as you go along. Similarly, it can show exercise routines.
- Show Youtube videos, Iplayer and news channels.
- Show Amazon Prime movies.
- Make phone and video calls.
- Play a range of games and quizzes.
AND, it does all of this through voice control. It really is just like having your own personal assistant or butler even. You simply use voice commands like, “Alexa, phone Betty”, or “Alexa, send a text to Betty,” or “Alexa, play songs by Val Doonican.”
Setting up the device might be a bit tricky. You will need an Amazon account and you will probably need The Alexa app running on a phone or tablet. If you were setting it up for somebody with limited technical skills, you could use a friend’s phone or tablet. There is a video here to show you how to do this.
Now, since The Great Lockdown started, I’ve become a big fan of Slow Movies, It’s hard to explain this concept. Basically, it could be video taken of a view, or of a scenic route. Nothing happens but for me, they provide me with a link back to The Before Time. Alexa Show will show movies from the Prime catalogue. Besides a huge choice of regular movies and T.V.shows, there are plenty of Slow Movies available. Try one of my favourites, “Morning Jazz at the Coffee Shop,” takes me back to enjoying a cappuccino at Coffee #1 in Whitchurch.
Now, the Amazon Echo Show comes in three sizes; just like Goldilocks’ bears. The 5 inch would look great on your bedside cabinet. I have the 8 inch in my kitchen. There is a 10 inch model that would probably look great in your living room.
It really is a bit like having one of those Swiss Army knives, the ones that do everything. Besides being a digital photo frame, it plays music or radio, shows movies, acts as a clock and calendar, provides weather forecasts, does sums, tells you spellings, gives you a cheery Good Morning greeting, acts as a timer or reminder turns lights on or off….I really could go on and on.
Now, as I said earlier, you probably won’t get much out of the device unless you have Amazon Prime subscription. Basically, for £79 per year, you get free next day (or fast ) delivery on many of the Amazon products. I’ve ordered something at 10 p.m. on a Saturday and it was delivered at 10 a.m. the next day. You also get access to a huge catalogue of music and videos. You might have to pay extra for some of the newly released videos but believe me, there is plenty of choice for free. It provides unlimited storage space for your photographs. You upload photographs to your storage area. You can then choose the ones that you would like to see on your Echo Show. Find out more about Prime here.
Those who know me, know that I really am a bit of a sucker when it comes to new gadgets. Believe me though, this one does something that most of my other gadgets fail to do quickly, easily and with minimum hassle. This one regularly makes me smile.
Windows 10 – Major Update
The first thing is, to see if there are any updates available, you go to Settings – Update & Security – Windows Update.
That is worth doing anyway, but I want to tell you about my experience with “Feature update to Windows 10, version 2004”. I started that running yesterday afternoon, and it finally stopped downloading this morning, seventeen hours later. I now have to decide when to install it. I’ll let you know how that goes.
My laptop is seven years old, and I use mobile broadband, so your experience might be different, but still …
Update: The installation took three hours.
Linux on Mac
Not a Spielberg masterpiece but something I knocked up this morning. There is one mistake in it, corrected in the second-half of the video. The Mac requires a 64-bit Linux distro, not a 32-bit one, so the same .iso file I used for the Dell Inspiron was used in trialling Ubuntu 20.0.4 on the 2008 MacBook Pro.
I’ve also discovered that Etcher is available for Windows as well – go to pull-down button on this page. It might be worth looking at this as an alternative to Rufus.
Improving home network performance
This short note is written to advise on possible performance improvements you can employ if you feel that your network is “slowing down”. It may be that you just feel files, or pages, are taking longer to download, or display; or it may be that you feel it’s taking “too long” to connect to the remote site from your browser.
The first case can often be resolved by moving your WiFi router, if possible, to a better location. Remember that although WiFi can appear to go through walls and ceilings, the more you expect it to do, the worse will be the signal. So move the WiFi router and perhaps you’ll get a better signal. This is often not possible, so the next thing to consider is to use one of the ethernet ports on the back of the router and connect the computer to the router by ethernet cable, rather than using WiFi. This will always provide better network performance. This may not always be convenient so the last solution is to “extend” your network using either a WiFi extender, or a different approach called Powerline. This article explains the difference between the two and also includes a commentary on ethernet cable as well.
If you opt for Powerline, you will plug a unit into a 13amp socket near to your router and connect it with an ethernet cable to the router, and then on the same electric circuit (ring main) plug in another box which can be just another ethernet socket, or more likely it will have a WiFi capability. Systems from Trendnet, TP-Link, D-Link and others are amongst those you could purchase. Here’s a review of possible systems, most of which can be purchased from Amazon. It is possible to configure these to use the same SSID as your router, but you may have to make do with having a separate network when you connect to these points.
Alternatively, your ISP will often have a solution that will mean that you can use the same SSID for the extended WiFi access points, or you can purchase WiFi extenders (as described above) from Amazon which you can then configure to use the same SSID as your router. So that’s the first case taken care of. What if you just feel that your network is lazy, is there anything you can try to improve performance.
Well first – and perhaps you should have done this first anyway – you should check whether your ISP is delivering something near to the broadband speed it’s contracted to provide. We’ve talked about this before but test your internet speed using something like Speedtest. [As an aside, you can also download the Speednet app for your mobile device and walk round the house testing your signal this way too.] If that’s not the problem, and it just seems to take too long to make connections, then perhaps you should apply some new configurations to your router.
The first thing you can do is to see if you and your neighbours are battling to use the same wireless channels. The common ones used are 1, 6 and 11 as they don’t overlap. However for this reason, sometimes, routers might be “hard-wired” to use one of these channels and so two nearby networks might actually be using the same channel which could then be interfering with each other. Read this article to learn more about this, and then once you’ve tested your network and it looks as though you could be suffering this way, you’ll need to refer to your router manual (or talk to your ISP) to change the channel(s) you use. Why channels? Well because most routers now broadcast signals at two wavelengths – 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. What’s the difference – read this article.
The other thing you can do is look at how your router is setup with its DNS server. Your ISP will have configured your router to use their DNS servers, but it might be that these are not the best ones for your locality – especially if you’re on a laptop and are moving about a bit! So what is a DNS server, and what does it do, and why might this be important?
A DNS server translates a URL (such as https://thoughtgrazing.org) into a sequence of numbers – an IP address – that instructs the modem that transmits and receives data going and coming from the internet where to go. This whole process is explained in some detail in this article. If you decide to change the DNS settings on your router, or just on a device, you can look at this article which shows you how to do it.
In my case, I’d been disappointed in the performance of my new Netgear Orbi routers which although they seemed to shovel the data around very fast, there was a noticeable lag/delay in achieving connections, and I’d also felt that the router was dropping connections more than it should. So, bearing in mind I have a Virgin Media Superhub that’s only running in modem mode with the Netgear Orbi router behind it, I changed the configuration of the router which was pointing at VirginMedia’s DNS servers to point at Google’s secondary DNS server. I also checked what channels were being used by nearby WiFi networks using the Mac’s Wireless Diagnostics tool described in this article …
… which indicated that I should change the 2.4Ghz channel that was being used from 1 to 11, and to set my 5Ghz channel to 161.
I left the DNS server setting on my devices to be ‘automatic’. This makes it much easier to “roam” away from the house with a mobile device. I then ran a test called namebench (from Google) to try and find the best DNS server for my home network, but you don’t need to do this. I would suggest you look at this article and then experiment with Cloudflare, Google, and OpenDNS perhaps in that order until you get a response to your internet request that satisfies you. Leave your ISPs DNS server in the list of servers (the third in the list below) – just-in-case.
Linux
What is it and why might I be interested in it.
Before I start, a little information for you.
I’m typing this on my Acer laptop.
It is a dual-boot system. It has both Windows and Linux Ubuntu installed on it. When I turn it on, it asks me at boot-up, whether I want to use Windows or Ubuntu. I hardly ever use Windows because I find Ubuntu so much better. However, for this, I’m using Windows because I know that most of the afternoon Zoom group use Windows. I’m using Windows this afternoon so I can see how the Windows installation of Linux works.
Windows is horrible.
So far I’ve had five pop-ups and two programs starting without me wanting them to start. Added to that, with Windows, this laptop takes ages to start.
You don’t get those sort of problems with Linux.
You will also not need anti-virus software as Linux doesn’t appear to get viruses.
Now, you might be interested in taking a look at Linux from a purely academic standpoint; something new to learn during lockdown.
OR … you might have an old computer lying around; one that you’d like to drag back from the grave.
So let’s get started
Linux is an operating system. Windows and MacOS are also operating systems. An operating system is the program that actually makes your computer work.
To proceed, you’ll need to do the following … and it would be best if you did this before next Thursday’s meeting because some of the processes take a bit of time, otherwise you’ll just have to accept being an observer.
- Take a look at the computer that you’ll be trying to revive – but remember you can run Linux from the USB drive without making changes to your computer, so it could be any machine. Make sure it has a USB drive. You’ll need an empty USB pen drive doohicky, at least 4Gb in size. Also, the computer that you intend targetting, it would be best to be a 64-bit system. Google your computer’s make and model to find out whether it is 64-bit.
- Download the Ubuntu Linux image file. Here’s the link. https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop
This is for Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS. LTS (Long-term support) means that the software will be supported for 5 years. A new version of Ubuntu comes out every April and every two years you have a new LTS release. This page also tells you the minimum requirements that you need on your computer for Ubuntu to run well. Incidentally Ubuntu is a South African enterprise. It is totally free to download, install and use. In fact, everything in the Linux world is totally free. Linux comes in many different flavours e.g. Mint, Red Hat, Fedora … you chose the flavour that best suits your needs. My opinion; they are all very similar. Ubuntu is probably the easiest to get to know and with the best support. It will take a while to download as it is a big file … about one hour in my house but I have Virgin cable.
If you only have a 32-bit system there is another Linux operating system that works well on older 32-bit computers. It is called Bodhi Linux. Download the image file here. https://www.bodhilinux.com/download/ download the legacy version.
You can also download an older versions of Ubuntu Linux for 32-bit systems from here. http://releases.ubuntu.com/16.04.6/
Once Ubuntu has finished downloading, don’t do anything with it. Don’t double click on it or try to get it to run. Just make a note of where you’ve stored it.
- Now, you can’t just put the file that you’ve downloaded onto your USB drive. It is just a bit more tricky than that. You’ll need one more piece of software. It will transfer the Ubuntu file you’ve downloaded onto your USB drive and create a bootable disk image. These pages will give you a run down on what to do next on a Windows computer.
You will need a piece of software called Rufus (free, open-source) to create the bootable disk image. Here’s the link to get it.
You should Download AND install Rufus 3.11 1.1Mb onto your machine.
Please note. These pages show you how to prepare a Ubuntu image if you are using a Mac to prepare the Ubuntu disk image. You need a piece of software called balenaEtcher instead of Rufus to do that. You can get it here.
Now, on Thursday afternoon, in order to proceed, you will need the Ubuntu file stored in your computer and have Rufus downloaded and installed. We’ll talk you through the rest of the procedure over Zoom but rest assured, you’ve already done an awful lot.
Please note. All the above assumes you will be working on the target machine; BUT you could prepare the USB pen drive on one machine and then apply it to another. For instance David prepared his Ubuntu installs on a Mac, with the intention of targeting an old Windows machine. It’s just important to know what your target machine is, that it’s 32-bit, or preferably 64-bit.
Things you need to understand.
Once you have Ubuntu on your USB pen drive you can:-
- Run Ubuntu on your computer just to see what it is like. This won’t make any changes to your computer. After you’ve taken a look around the system you can just shut down, pull out the USB drive and re-start. All will be just as it was before.
- Make a full Ubuntu install. This will completely change your computer to a Ubuntu device. There will be no turning back from this option. However, you will have use of all of the space on the hard-drive.
- You can choose a dual-boot installation. This will partition your drive into two sections. You can keep Windows on one section and Install Ubuntu on the other. Although this sounds complicated, it really isn’t … you just need to make a choice on the size of the partitions that you’ll need. If you chose this, every time the computer starts you’ll be asked whether you want to start Windows or Ubuntu.
Other things to consider.
You can get Windows programs to run on a Linux machine but this is a bit of a black art and beyond the scope of this project.
However, Ubuntu comes with quite a few pieces of software pre-installed including Libre Office. This is very similar to Microsoft Office. You should know though that when you create a document in Libre Office, you can choose to save it in Microsoft Office format and a Windows computer will be able to read the document. Similarly Libre Office will open Microsoft Office files seamlessly.
One of the pre-installed programs is called Synaptic. This is a bit like the app store on many mobile phones. You can find oodles of pieces of software within Synaptic, all totally free.
One last thing to consider.
Both myself and David have successfully undertaken these procedures and everything worked just fine. However, please realise that if anything does go wrong then you really should be prepared to take the responsibility yourself. We can’t really be held responsible for the vagaries of a variety of computer systems. However, usually just preparing the Disk Image on the USB stick and trying again is usually quite successful. All I can say is that many people have installed Ubuntu. I’ve just checked the website to find out how many Ubuntu users there are. It was quite refreshing to learn that Canonical; Ubuntu’s parent company do not harvest that sort of data. A rough estimate is that 1-2% of all of the computers in use world wide use some sort of Linux installation.
Addendum. A note on Boot Order for PC-folk and your BIOS
You’ve got your USB install drive; you’ve got a PC; the only “tricky” bit left for you is to change the boot order of your PC. By default the machine will look to boot from an internal hard drive, but it doesn’t have to. You want it to start from your USB drive. So read this to see how to change the boot order.
If there’s no bootable USB drive in your machine it doesn’t matter; the boot sequence just looks for the next drive it could boot from – usually the internal hard drive. That’s why on some BIOS you’ll see the CD/DVD drive as first in the list as that’s where (traditionally) you would have installed/upgraded your Windows from – before the internet! Before that it was the floppy drive (a: or b:) – remember that; and that explains why the late-comer the hard-drive is always labelled c: or later, d: etc.
Of course on the Mac, it’s much easier , you just have to keep the Alt/Opt depressed as you boot-up and then select the boot device 😉
Second Addendum. Having problem with Booting your USB disk?
You should look at these settings in your BIOS on a PC. Often the key to press when you want to access BIOS settings is F2.
From the BIOS settings menu just make sure that Boot USB Devices First is enabled. If you have the USB Device inserted, it will also appear in this list. You could move it to the top of the list, but of course it will disappear from this list when you take it out – that’s why Boot USB Devices First is important. You could also Disable the Boot to Network option.
From the same F2 BIOS Settings menu you should make sure that F10 is enabled (or whatever key is designated to Enter Boot Menu) and F12 is disabled as you don’t want to boot from the Network at this time. [You can always enable it at a later date, in the unlikely event this ever becomes a requirement.]