DigitalBulldog Web Solutions

18/11/2025

This year's app/software redesign fail award goes to CCleaner, who have made a previously useful product utterly unusable with their latest version. Hideous, pointless, slower than glacial procession, doesn't do half the things the previous version did, you'll lose any custom settings from the previous version, and seems more likely to mess up your device than to clean out the trash. Certainly seems to be few users with anything good to say about v7.

If you haven't updated to CCleaner v7 yet, ffs switch off auto-update in the settings and wait until/if they fix things. If you have already, there are instructions on their support pages for rolling back to v6.x (but in short, download last 6.x version, uninstall 7, restart, install 6.x version), but you'll lose any custom settings regardless.

30/09/2025

External hard drives, great for storing all your stuff... until they go catastrophically wrong. The problem with drives getting bigger and bigger is that the idea of backing up your backups becomes financially impossible. A 6Tb drive needs a 6Tb drive to back it up, or you set up a RAID system with multiple 6Tb drives to allow for probable failure of one unit. Either way, £sh*tloads.

Bulldog is not a happy dogbot today because the external Western Digital drive attached to the media server, with around 300 movies and shows, has gone t!ts up. The only software so far that can even still read it is saying 19 days remaining just to scan it, never mind actual recovery. Most of the content is probably replaceable sure, but at the cost of hours of time, £100+ on a new storage device.

Never had this problem with VHS when all you had to worry about was a tape getting chewed, or DVDs that might get a bit scuffed.

So, your big multi-terabyte hard drive. Don't rely on it being around forever, or even lasting a few years. This one died barely a year outside the warranty period. Anything irreplaceable like priceless photos and essential documents, back it up to optical disc (buy a USB-connected external one if your PC doesn't have one built in), AND back it up to a USB stick, AND back it up to the cloud. As for going bigger and bigger with drive capacity, don't do it. Use multiple smaller drives to mitigate potential loss.

11/02/2025

Scammers never learn, but everyone else should learn how to spot their attempts at phishing. This is one of the more laughable attempts we've seen lately.

10/09/2024

Communication is key, but it works both ways. We can't emphasise that enough. Unilateral client decisions - you just never know what to expect next, other than it's not unlike a box of chocolates where everything's unpleasant. Politeness and common courtesy are, it seems, not mutually exclusive.

06/08/2024

Hellesylt is quite the office to work from! A quick update for a client while on holiday in the Norwegian fjords.

19/01/2024

It's time for Pathetic Phishing Email of the Week again. Now, please note while obvious to us here at Bulldog's Kennel, it might not be to everyone else, so keep an eye out for your less-techsavvy family members.

This email had already been diverted to our spam folder, but it could just as easily arrive in the regular inbox of some folks. There's some telltale signs that the email is fake - from the sending domain of the email ending in ".jp" (why would a UK government email be sent from a Japanese domain? It wouldn't!!) and the domain they want you to visit ending in ".ir". Yeh, that's a big NOPE.

A genuine UK government email will almost certainly address you by name, not by your email address, the sending address will almost certainly be "gov.uk", and the details of the person sending it will be prominent at the end, including their department, contact details and more besides.

Don't get phished, phlush it down the bog of the spam pholder. Not today, ya scammy bastiches.

08/12/2023

If you're using Windows, specifically 10 or (and why?) 11, you might have seen the news that Microsoft have been auto-installing the HP Smart app without user interaction or permission. The HP Smart app has apparently been running riot renaming printers and causing problems.

Is it true? Yup. Sure enough, after this week's updates, there was HP Smart in our programs list under "Recently Added". We don't have any HP printers so there's no reason for it to be there. It has not, for us at least, screwed up any existing printer names or settings.

Worth checking if it's been dumped on your PC. If you don't have an HP printer, you can right-click it in the Start Menu and just hit uninstall to get rid of it.

Microsoft have, at last, confirmed the issue, but offered no immediate cause or solution, but you can uninstall it if not needed.

Microsoft has updated the official Windows documentation with details about the weird bug with renamed printers and the HP Smart App invading Windows 10 and 11 systems. Here are the details.

02/10/2023

Oi! Scammers! NO!

Been a while since we posted about one of these. With Christmas just around the corner and home deliveries on the rise, this scam text purports to be from Evri. Look at the address (albeit edited to remove any temptation for anyone to actually visit it) - as is often the case there's a mention of the supposed company name but the rest is a bunch of random characters. Get one of those? Get it blocked and deleted.

12/09/2023

Well this was 10 years ago, and since then Android still hasn't become a mainstream OS for desktops. Still a viable alternative to Windows and Linux if you don't need heavier apps and software and don't mind the inevitably-ad-infested freemium software from the Google app store. For an older system that can't run newer versions of Windows, or might not have the resources for even Linux, installing desktop Android may still be an easy way to repurpose an old PC for use as a TV box or media server. One we're gonna try on an old beast machine at some point.

12/04/2023

Hmm. It's going to be one of those weeks. Facebook decided to make things really bleeping difficult to post stuff on business pages if you've been moved over to their new Meta business suite setup. Grrf.

05/11/2022

Effective immediately, DigitalBulldog Web Solutions no longer operates a Twitter account. In this economic climate, to lay off thousands of people just to repay the cost of a vanity purchase is absolutely despicable. Excuse the language, but .

05/07/2022

With popularity comes great vulnerability, it seems.

Google has patched a vulnerability in Chrome which was being exploited in the wild. Make sure you're using the latest version.