For those of us that have been using e-mail since the 1990’s the prospect of changing a key e-mail address has very little appeal. With decades of accumulated messages, contacts and web site logins any changeover can easily become major task.
So this month’s announcement that the Tesco.Net service will be closing in June has triggered the need for wholesale changes by everyone still using their service. And, in our particular case, the loss of Tesco.net is the third time that our e-mail provider has closed down; with first Talk21 (British Telecom) and then Beeb.net (BBC) forcing us to look elsewhere for our e-mail.
Back in 2008 the BBC said that Beeb.net just didn’t fit with its core values anymore – i.e. flogging off licence-fee funded content to the rest of the world. And in the case of Tesco the closure of the service seems a minor consideration amongst all their other corporate cut-backs of recent years.
So for those Grandads with ISP contracts that include e-mail services the only problem should the effort needed to make all the changes. But for those wanting to have an e-mail address that is not tied to sticking with their broadband provider the choice is rather limited. The obvious front runner is the Google Gmail service – almost a given if you are also an Android user. But some viable alternatives are Yahoo mail, Microsoft’s Outlook mail or Apple’s iCloud mail. However all of these services are based in the USA so if you want something more local – in either Britain or the EU – then you need to look elsewhere.
One option from a company with a good track record is the GMX free mail service provided by Grandad’s German Internet service provider; 1and1. But which ever solution you go for you have until 27-Jun-2018 to complete the move. And don’t forget to check if anyone in your contacts list is still using Tesco.net – since it seems that not everyone with an account has been told of the closure!
Well last Friday saw the flurry of political activity in London and Brussels linked to the announcement of a major milestone in our attempts to leave the European Union. Every effort has been made since the news broke to make the limited progress made sound like some modern equivalent of the Magna Carta. At this rate Whitehall and Westminster are certain to win another Whitehall Farce Award. Oh what a mess they are creating!
Little did we know, back in the 1980s, how much time we would all have to spend installing software updates.
This week Apple reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2015. And few companies could even dream of the figures revealed. In just thirteen weeks the corporation received $58,200 million in revenue but amazingly made some $17,700 million in operating profit. Not only is that 30% up on last year but it means that Apple has a surplus of around $200 million every day to spend on … anything it fancies. And this cash avalanche is before the over-subscribed Apple Watch hits the high street stores.
Then Windows needed 256K of memory or greater and MS-DOS 2.0. Soon this minimum memory was expanded to 320K and then up to 512K – when 640K was the memory limit. But in practice most serious software ignored Windows and ran directly under MS-DOS – for obvious performance reasons. It was not until 1992 that we started moving to applications designed for Windows – then just upgraded to version 3.
Windows XP was first released in 2001. It remained current until Vista came along in 2007. And despite Vista then being supplied as standard with new PCs, much of the existing XP user base remained faithful. So by 2009 Vista was in turn replaced by Windows 7. By then the phasing out of XP had picked up speed – partly because corporate PC hardware was further into its replacement cycle.
Today we are another year on and Windows 8.1 is due to appear within just days – but it will not really resolve the basic issues. Worst of these is that there is no upgrade path to get an app that is working on XP onto Win8. Such software has to be re-installed from scratch. For anyone with an app, from say 2006, that has been repeatedly updated with paid-for releases (probably as downloads) this seems wildly unrealistic. To go through a process of uninstalling back through the versions and then installing the updates again in order – even if you still had backup copies – is as time wasting as it is impractical. And unlikely to get through the re-entering of all those security keys. The more likely (only?) solution seems to be to buy a compatible copy of the app – possibly even a full copy – and do a clean install.