Top Online Christmas Shopping tips
By the time you get your TWT Newsletter this month, there will be just fourteen days left until Christmas. Whether you’re relaxed and looking forward to the break, or stressing out over those last few gifts, your Windows PC is such a versatile tool that it can help in all kinds of ways to make the holiday season run more smoothly.
Your Windows PC is ideal for shopping online this festive season. With a bigger screen, a keyboard and mouse for easy text entry and the best performance, the PC beats trying to shop on your phone and tablet hands down. Follow our top tips for Christmas shopping this year and you will ensure everyone has a fantastic time come the big day.
Check where the item is coming from! – Online shoppers often make the mistake of not properly checking where an item is shipping from. Popular online stores like Amazon sell goods that are dispatched and fulfilled by Amazon themselves, usually in your home country, as well as goods that may be dispatched from sellers elsewhere in the world. Items you buy on eBay could be coming from anywhere in the world. Check the small print on the page carefully to find out where the item is actually coming from.
Goods dispatched from outside your own country can, in some cases, have customs fees or face delays in customs, and of course they take longer to reach you than goods you buy from a domestic supplier.
Using tabs – Yes, you at the back, pipe down, we know you know all about tabs in your web browser, but not everyone does! If you look at the top of your web browser, you will see a small parallelogram (in Google Chrome) or Plus sign (In Firefox or Microsoft Edge). By clicking this, you open a new tab.
In a new tab you can surf to any page on the intenet, without affecting content in the original tab, which you can go back to any time. This makes it a great tool for comparing prices online.
Use multiple User accounts – Your web search history, or even online adverts (which craftily look at what you’ve been browsing online and tailor their output to match), can spoil the surprise of a well planned Christmas gift. The solution to this problem is simple, make sure everyone on your PC has their own user account. This keeps your browsing secret from others in the rest of the family and also lets you keep other files, like documents or videos, private from other users too.
What’s more, configuring a separate user account for your children, or other family members, makes your PC more secure and prevents your kids changing system settings they shouldn’t be tampering with. Find out more about how to add new user accounts in Windows 10 here or in Windows 7 here..
Save time and improve security with a password manager – None of us are good at remembering more than a handful of passwords, so why not get a computer to remember for us? A password manager program acts like a password vault on your PC. You have one, nice long password that you remember. This is known as your master password. This password should never be sent across the internet or used for any of your accounts. Instead, it unlocks all your other passwords which are used for your online accounts.
Password managers can save you time too while you shop. They can automatically fill in your address and credit/debit card details, making for a smooth, fast checkout. No need to store your card details with the online retailer when you can recall them in a flash from your password manager. Our favourite password managers are Roboform and StickyPassword.
Colours can be confusing! – For our readers in the USA, yes that is how we spell “Colours” here in the UK. Whether they are colours or colors, they can be confusing on a computer monitor. If you’re picking out an item of clothing, furniture, artwork or anything where colour choice is important, you need to keep in mind that what you see on your PCs screen (or your phone or tablet) may not be an accurate representation of the actual colour of the item you receive. This isn’t the retailers fault, every screen displays colours differently, especially if it hasn’t been calibrated.
Graphics professionals and AV enthusiasts often buy software and hardware to correctly calibrate their monitors for the best colour reproduction, but this takes time and patience. If you’re not able to do this, allow for a little variation in colour for any items you order online and if colour really matters, make sure there’s time to return the item for a refund or exchange too.
Armed with our fantastic Christmas shopping tips, we’re sure you will scoop up not only those last minute presents, but all the great bargains in the January sales too, have fun and don’t shop too hard!
That rounds off our newsletter for December. On behalf of everyone here at Top-Windows-Tutorials, I’d like to thank you all for your continuing support and of course, to wish you a very merry Christmas and a happy 2018. The TWT Newsletter will return on the 10th January 2018 and will bring you more tips, tricks and techniques to help you get the best out of your PC, be it Windows 7 Windows 8 or Windows 10. We hope that you found this newsletter informative and useful. If you did not then please let us know why, you can contact us by visiting this page. If you have enjoyed this newsletter, feel free to pass it on to all your friends and family, or better still encourage them to sign up for their own copy. Until next month, keep checking Top-Windows-Tutorials.com, and enjoy happy, safe and stress-free computing!
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