Easy guide to shopping online safely & easily(my 9th article)
Were all being encouraged to shop online using the world wide web(www) but unless youve been on another planet or you cant read youll have heard many horror stories in the media of people who have had their credit card details stolen or bank account details and then their money has been spent by the thief right up to their credit limit! thus the victim of these crimes will have lost all their money!. Also you can have your whole identity stolen so that a criminal can take out loans and creditcards in your name, so while they go on a spending spree shopping till they drop your the one the creditors will hassle for a very long time to pay them back! believing your the one whos spent the money. So ive decided to write a guide for everyone who intends to shop online using a creditcard or debit card or any other system to pay for goods purchased online that will be easy to understand ( ill write in simple jargon free language and explain any jargon as i go along) and will be simple for even a complete computer novice to follow, just 4 years ago i was afraid to use computers but ive quickly mastered what needs to be done and in what order!. Obviously you can skip past parts of my instructions if youve already got past a certain stage im explaining but it may well be usefull to still read it to check the latest information/my advice on all aspects of using the internet safely and enjoyably.
Step 1 once youve got a computer( in another article ill write in detail how to choose the correct pc(personal computer) for yourself) youll need an internet service provider(isp) to connect your computer to the worldwideweb(internet ) in greatbritain the main companys to choose from are britishtelecom (bt.com), demon, ntl the cable company..(i used this companys service but left because they get your bill wrong all the time so avoid this company until i tell you theyve sorted out their incredibly useless billing system),bulldog,telewest,virgin.net,freedom2surf,tiscali,aol..(america online)..rubbish dial up service constantly looses your connection,supanet,wanadoo which was called freeserve,pipex,clara.net,eclipse.net.uk,beeb.net,and madasafish.com , these are the main companys to choose from there are many other smaller companies around but generally their prices are much higher and the service not as good,to find more on these companys use googles search bar at the top of my site its the worlds best search engine and theyve allowed me to put the exact same searchbar onto my site so please use it as much as you want. At the moment bt broadband basic costs £17.99 a month if you pay by directdebit and your allowed to download 2gb(gigabyte of data) per month which is ok if your a light internet user but ive found that by visiting a few dozen websites a day and checking say 100 emails a day i go over this limit so its best to get bt yahoo which is £24.99 a month and you can download 15gb of data a month..enought to check lots of emails, surf lots of websites and download some music or video clips etc or any other isp that can equal or better this offer. Once youve got a cdrom(compact disk the same size as a music cd which can hold sound,graphics such as video clips and written information) from the isp youve chosen, read the instructions that come with it! and then put the cdrom in your pcs cdrom drive, this should then explain step by step what to do to get online,now things can go wrong or be too complex for some people because to use broadband most people in the uk will split their bt phoneline so that their only paying bt for renting 1 phone line which costs £10.50 a month for linerental then you have your cost of phone calls on top of that and then you pay for broadband/isp fees as well !. Your isp should provide you with all the equipment youll need to do this..youll need a modem( a small box with small led lights on it that handles all the data before it goes into your pc, dsl filters which you plug into your phone sockets to help split the phone line so you can be using the phone while someone else is using the computer and an extention cable so that your pc can be a few metres away from where the phone is.My advice if you simply can not follow the instructions your isp provides(always try first,if you do get stuck at least you can then ask someone how to get beyond this problem in the future so that your learning new skills) and if phoning thier helpline for advice still leaves you baffled the thing to do is to ask a friend/family member to come and do this for you or call a pc expert from your local newspapers classified adverts or yellowpages etc and pay someone to do it for you..most people charge around £20 an hour for their services and getting your isps software installed onto your pc and the modem and phone lines correctly set up should take less than 1 hour to do if all goes well.
Step2 95% of the worlds pcs have internet explorer preinstalled on them, internetexplorer (ie for short) is a browser..a browser is the programme your computer uses to move you from 1 website to another so that before your eyes on the computer screen before you shows you what ever you want, websites are simply like high tech magazines they contain written articles like what your reading now, they can have graphics such as cartoon like animations moving about in colour,they can play sounds to you if you have your computers speakers switched on and much more. Imagine your in a shop selling magazines and before you is thousands of different magazines and newspapers on the shelves your browser can display for example 1 page of a newspaper 1 minute and then transfer you at your comand to look at another magazine or page of that magazine, to do this you type in website addresses into the space at the top of the browser for example if you type in www.beingahuman.blogspot.com and press go on your browsers go button my website will be displayed. Although you can type in anyhing you want to see what gets shown to you for example you might type www.diy.com if you were guessing somebody would tell you about diy(do it yourself home improvements) but unless youve been recommended by me or by a friend of yours or a newspaper article/tv advert etc you wont know if this site is safe to use or who owns it, so my advice to get you started is to use some websites i recommend later on in article 42 to get you started using the web/internet my sites articles are all numbered so in the title of an article i put art42(short for article 42) or article 42 etc to clearly label what article your reading. Web addresses are called domain names so www.google.com is a doman name but domain names can have many different endings such as .com, .net,.co.uk,.biz,.org,.tv,.coop,.it,.es,.de,.pro, etc each country has its own unique ending so for the united kingdom..england/wales/scotland its .co.uk which stands for company of the united kingdom or .it is short for italy, .com is short for commercial to signify a website is there to make money commercially. A big danger using the internet is if you miss spell a domain so say you wanted to go to google.com but you typed in gookle.com instead by mistake, you would then be shown a different website that may well send malicious software to your pc to try and damage the data in your pc or to steal data from you or to force you to see adverts etc.Its no different from phoning somebody if you want to speak to a specific person you need their own phone number if you miss dial by entering the wrong phone number into your phone you end up talking to some one else, they may be a nice person or a serial killer!. So feel free to print off the websites i recomend in article 42 and the you can bookmark the websites you use often, bookmarking a website is simple when youve arived at a site youll want to use often or will want to come back and see click on the favorites button which is on your browser and it will store the domain of the site you like then another day when you want to visit this site simply click your favorites button and a list of your favorite websites will be shown to you in a dropdown box, you can then click on the name of the site you want and your browser will take you their.This save you having to remember the address of a site so please bookmark my website the one your on right now! so that you can come back as often as you want for advice on using the internet..please bookmark www.beingahuman.blogspot.com
when youve finished reading this article the next thing to do is read articles 10 and 12 in that order,ill be writting more articles on safely using the net soon so use the archives button near to the top right of my homepage(the first page that loads when you go to www.beingahuman.blogspot.com ) and look through all the articles ive written to find info of use to you, best of luck and remember please feel free to leave me feedback by pressing the yellow comments button and telling me what you found helpful.
Step 1 once youve got a computer( in another article ill write in detail how to choose the correct pc(personal computer) for yourself) youll need an internet service provider(isp) to connect your computer to the worldwideweb(internet ) in greatbritain the main companys to choose from are britishtelecom (bt.com), demon, ntl the cable company..(i used this companys service but left because they get your bill wrong all the time so avoid this company until i tell you theyve sorted out their incredibly useless billing system),bulldog,telewest,virgin.net,freedom2surf,tiscali,aol..(america online)..rubbish dial up service constantly looses your connection,supanet,wanadoo which was called freeserve,pipex,clara.net,eclipse.net.uk,beeb.net,and madasafish.com , these are the main companys to choose from there are many other smaller companies around but generally their prices are much higher and the service not as good,to find more on these companys use googles search bar at the top of my site its the worlds best search engine and theyve allowed me to put the exact same searchbar onto my site so please use it as much as you want. At the moment bt broadband basic costs £17.99 a month if you pay by directdebit and your allowed to download 2gb(gigabyte of data) per month which is ok if your a light internet user but ive found that by visiting a few dozen websites a day and checking say 100 emails a day i go over this limit so its best to get bt yahoo which is £24.99 a month and you can download 15gb of data a month..enought to check lots of emails, surf lots of websites and download some music or video clips etc or any other isp that can equal or better this offer. Once youve got a cdrom(compact disk the same size as a music cd which can hold sound,graphics such as video clips and written information) from the isp youve chosen, read the instructions that come with it! and then put the cdrom in your pcs cdrom drive, this should then explain step by step what to do to get online,now things can go wrong or be too complex for some people because to use broadband most people in the uk will split their bt phoneline so that their only paying bt for renting 1 phone line which costs £10.50 a month for linerental then you have your cost of phone calls on top of that and then you pay for broadband/isp fees as well !. Your isp should provide you with all the equipment youll need to do this..youll need a modem( a small box with small led lights on it that handles all the data before it goes into your pc, dsl filters which you plug into your phone sockets to help split the phone line so you can be using the phone while someone else is using the computer and an extention cable so that your pc can be a few metres away from where the phone is.My advice if you simply can not follow the instructions your isp provides(always try first,if you do get stuck at least you can then ask someone how to get beyond this problem in the future so that your learning new skills) and if phoning thier helpline for advice still leaves you baffled the thing to do is to ask a friend/family member to come and do this for you or call a pc expert from your local newspapers classified adverts or yellowpages etc and pay someone to do it for you..most people charge around £20 an hour for their services and getting your isps software installed onto your pc and the modem and phone lines correctly set up should take less than 1 hour to do if all goes well.
Step2 95% of the worlds pcs have internet explorer preinstalled on them, internetexplorer (ie for short) is a browser..a browser is the programme your computer uses to move you from 1 website to another so that before your eyes on the computer screen before you shows you what ever you want, websites are simply like high tech magazines they contain written articles like what your reading now, they can have graphics such as cartoon like animations moving about in colour,they can play sounds to you if you have your computers speakers switched on and much more. Imagine your in a shop selling magazines and before you is thousands of different magazines and newspapers on the shelves your browser can display for example 1 page of a newspaper 1 minute and then transfer you at your comand to look at another magazine or page of that magazine, to do this you type in website addresses into the space at the top of the browser for example if you type in www.beingahuman.blogspot.com and press go on your browsers go button my website will be displayed. Although you can type in anyhing you want to see what gets shown to you for example you might type www.diy.com if you were guessing somebody would tell you about diy(do it yourself home improvements) but unless youve been recommended by me or by a friend of yours or a newspaper article/tv advert etc you wont know if this site is safe to use or who owns it, so my advice to get you started is to use some websites i recommend later on in article 42 to get you started using the web/internet my sites articles are all numbered so in the title of an article i put art42(short for article 42) or article 42 etc to clearly label what article your reading. Web addresses are called domain names so www.google.com is a doman name but domain names can have many different endings such as .com, .net,.co.uk,.biz,.org,.tv,.coop,.it,.es,.de,.pro, etc each country has its own unique ending so for the united kingdom..england/wales/scotland its .co.uk which stands for company of the united kingdom or .it is short for italy, .com is short for commercial to signify a website is there to make money commercially. A big danger using the internet is if you miss spell a domain so say you wanted to go to google.com but you typed in gookle.com instead by mistake, you would then be shown a different website that may well send malicious software to your pc to try and damage the data in your pc or to steal data from you or to force you to see adverts etc.Its no different from phoning somebody if you want to speak to a specific person you need their own phone number if you miss dial by entering the wrong phone number into your phone you end up talking to some one else, they may be a nice person or a serial killer!. So feel free to print off the websites i recomend in article 42 and the you can bookmark the websites you use often, bookmarking a website is simple when youve arived at a site youll want to use often or will want to come back and see click on the favorites button which is on your browser and it will store the domain of the site you like then another day when you want to visit this site simply click your favorites button and a list of your favorite websites will be shown to you in a dropdown box, you can then click on the name of the site you want and your browser will take you their.This save you having to remember the address of a site so please bookmark my website the one your on right now! so that you can come back as often as you want for advice on using the internet..please bookmark www.beingahuman.blogspot.com
when youve finished reading this article the next thing to do is read articles 10 and 12 in that order,ill be writting more articles on safely using the net soon so use the archives button near to the top right of my homepage(the first page that loads when you go to www.beingahuman.blogspot.com ) and look through all the articles ive written to find info of use to you, best of luck and remember please feel free to leave me feedback by pressing the yellow comments button and telling me what you found helpful.
posted by whatisgod at 4:19 pm
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