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XFER Blog

XFER Blog

XFER has been serving the Livonia area since 1994, providing IT Support such as technical helpdesk support, computer support, and consulting to small and medium-sized businesses.

Tip of the Week: How to Take a Picture of a Document With Your Android Device and Turn it Into a PDF

Tip of the Week: How to Take a Picture of a Document With Your Android Device and Turn it Into a PDF

Like many of Google’s productivity applications, Google Drive is available on both iOS and Android mobile devices. One of the neat features that users of Android can take advantage of is the ability to scan a PDF and store it in Drive, all by taking a picture of the document. Plus, if it has text on it which was created by a computer, you can use Drive’s search function to find it at a later date.

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Tip of the Week: Get Rid of Those Pesky Ads on Your Windows 10 Lock Screen

Tip of the Week: Get Rid of Those Pesky Ads on Your Windows 10 Lock Screen

Do you have Windows 10 on your workstation or PC? You’ve probably realized that it’s a pretty sweet operating system. Still, there’s a reason why so many people have been bothered by it, and it’s because of its practically omnipresent attempts to advertise to consumers.

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Tip of the Week: Try This Weird Trick to Free Up Space on Your iPhone

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It’s a situation that’s all too familiar to an iPhone user: after taking a gorgeous picture, or trying to download a new app, the device flashes up a warning that there is not enough storage to complete the download. So what do you do?

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Tip of the Week: 3 Ways to Take Full Advantage of Google Drive

b2ap3_thumbnail_drive_tips_400.jpgGoogle Drive is a great way to get work done. It provides several applications that are similar in nature to Microsoft Office, like a word processor, spreadsheet software, and a presentation maker. Just like any other type of software, Drive has keyboard shortcuts and other tricks that can be leveraged for more productivity. Here are some of our favorites.

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Tip of the Week: Do Your Eyes Hurt? Try Adjusting Your Screen’s Brightness

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Computer monitors have been getting bigger and brighter for years; improving on picture quality, responsiveness, and energy efficiency. However, working in a dark room in front of a bright screen can lead to eye strain and even headaches. You can avoid these side effects by lowering the brightness on your screen. Furthermore, lowering your screen’s brightness can save you precious battery life on your laptop, so it’s worth keeping these tips in mind for that fact alone.

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Tip of the Week: How to Set Your Browser to Automatically Refresh Itself

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Have you ever been in a situation where you have to continuously hit the refresh button in your browser? Maybe you’re waiting for an online sale to go live, or you’re waiting on an online forum for a critical response. Or, maybe you’re just waiting for an important email. Either way, manually refreshing your browser multiple times can be both annoying and inefficient. We’ll show you how you can refresh it automatically.

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Tip of the Week: How to Make an Animated Image From Your Favorite YouTube Video

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GIFs. What are they? If you’ve spent any time perusing the Internet, you’ve definitely come across a GIF or two. Essentially, a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an animated picture that loops a few seconds of a video clip (without playing any audio). In addition to GIFs being fun, they can serve as a great way to enhance digital communications. How can you take advantage of GIFs?

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Tip of the Week: How to Access Multiple Gmail Accounts On Your Android Device

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If you have an Android smartphone, you know that the device is closely tied to your own personal Google account. As such, in order to get the most out of your Android device, you should take advantage of its seamless functionality with Google applications. This includes making sure that your Gmail account is properly set up on your device. We’ll walk you through how to add additional Gmail accounts to Android’s Gmail app.

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Tip of the Week: 7 Tips to Extend the Life of Your Android’s Battery

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One experience shared by every mobile device user is batteries losing power faster than they’d like. Until someone invents a battery that never again needs to be recharged, this struggle will always be real. Here are seven ways to make your mobile device's battery last longer.

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Tip of the Week: Improve Customer Experience With a Guest WiFi Hotspot

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As a business owner, you rely on your WiFi router to reliably broadcast a network connection to your entire office. This is generally a private network that you won’t want to share with just anyone. The only problem with this is that guests visiting your office might want to use the wireless Internet, and allowing them to do so can improve guest relations. So, what’s the solution to this dilemma? It’s simple: integrate a guest WiFi hotspot specifically for visitors.

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How to Block and Unsubscribe from Users with Gmail’s New Features

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We all know how annoying spam and unwanted emails can be when you’re trying to navigate your inbox. While a quality spam filter can go a long way toward eliminating these irritating time-wasters, Gmail now has a feature that lets you dodge some of this pain. With the ability to block selected users and unsubscribe from email campaigns, you can reclaim plenty of time that you might have been wasting weeding out your inbox.

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Tip of the Week: How to Save Your Keyboard After Spilling Your Drink On It

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You know that you shouldn’t keep a beverage near your computer, but how good are you at actually abiding by this best practice? Due to the busyness of our modern lives, it’s likely that most office workers eat more meals at their computer than away from it. Inevitably, this will lead to a drink spilt on your keyboard, which can put you in a rather sticky situation.

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3 Easy Ways to Go Incognito In Google Chrome

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The Internet can be a dangerous place. Sometimes you want to keep your identity a secret on the web. Now, your reasons for doing so aren’t any of our business, but you should know that there are several ways to access this secretive function in Google Chrome. Here are three ways you can take advantage of Google Chrome's Incognito mode to browse the web in an anonymous fashion.

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Tip of the Week: Adjust Windows 10’s Privacy Settings to Keep Your Information Secure

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It would be prudent to begin by saying that Windows 10 is far and away the most refined version of Windows ever created. In a lot of ways, it's like using a souped-up version of Windows 7, with a sprinkling of Windows 8/8.1 metro on top. Beneath the surface, however, is a vast information-collecting infrastructure that has many users left worried about their privacy. There are even conspiracy theories suggesting that Windows 10 is a vessel used by the NSA in order to collect all the information on every user.

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Tip of the Week: Sharing Files Between 2 PCs is as Easy as Dragging and Dropping

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What’s the best way to share files between your different personal devices and computers? It turns out that you can share files over your home’s network, and you don’t have to be an IT technician to do it.

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Tip of the Week: 10 Handy Windows 10 Keyboard Shortcuts

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With the launch of Windows 10, many users are upgrading and loving every second of it. As always, a new operating system comes with a learning curve, including getting to know the new features and keyboard shortcuts. To get the most out of Windows 10, you can try these ten great hotkey combinations to get through your workday with blazing speed.

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Tip of the Week: How to Take Back Your Website From Comment Spammers

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“Wow. That was a great article! I make $500 a day working from home and you can too! Click the link below to learn how!” This is an example of comment spam. You may have seen it before. You may have even fallen for it. How does one deal with such an annoyance?

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Tip of the Week: Take Advantage of Notepad’s Text-to-Audio Feature

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Some people talk to their computers, but not like they would speak to another human being. We coax it into doing it what we want, or we curse it out when it doesn’t. A day may come when artificial intelligence has progressed so far that we won’t be able to distinguish a computerized conversation from a normal one; but it is not this day. Until that glorious day comes, we’ll have to settle for these two methods to interact verbally with your PC.

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Tip of the Week: Try the 52-17 Rule to Get the Most Productivity Out of Your Workday

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There are countless ways to boost your productivity in the office… at least, that’s what the Internet says. How do you separate the productivity champs from the chumps? It’s simple, really; just look for the tried and true methods that have been backed by thorough research. One such study, performed by Julia Gifford of Draugiem Group, claims that workers can be more productive by not trying to do as much office work as possible.

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Tip of the Week: The 4 Most Useful Extensions for Google Chrome

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If you’re one of the many people who prefer Google Chrome to other browsers, you know all about extensions and how they can improve your browsing experience. These are mostly add-ons that are designed to augment your browsing experience or adding new features. While some aren’t so useful, there are others that are invaluable under the right circumstances. To help you get the most out of Chrome, here are four useful browser extensions that you should take advantage of.

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