Ya, there’s very little reason to run anything other than Defender. Even people who run IT companies only sell the “big AV” packages do it for extra income, not because it’s needed.
And never run the 3rd party free AVs. They’re basically all spyware these days (there may be exceptions)
Yeah, it is a Windows 11 based notebook. I will verify this is installed and functional. Thanks for the input all.
Awesome, I have realised how long I have been away from Windows that I struggle to know where things are again 
It doesn’t help Windows 11 makes it much harder to find useful settings.
I’m looking for any recommendations for a lightweight (ideally wireless) gaming headphone. I have a pair of SteelSeries Arctis 7’s which I really like, but they get a little too heavy to wear for extended sessions (and they make my head sweaty in summer 
).
Doesn’t have to be a top of the range thing, (not that I could afford top of the anything), just decent enough sound with a vaguely decent mic so I can trash talk on Discord occasionally.
Don’t get gaming anything. Bluetooth sennheiser. Even the cheapest wireless ones are stellar.
Don’t discount in ear or buds, if you’re connecting to phone or pc they work great too without the over ear headaches, especially if you wear glasses I find over ear can complicate things.
Seconded. I found the in ear pods better, I am not using the ones that go deep into the ear, those don’t work for me either, my ears start itching inside. The apple design of a wider one that sits just at the entrance of the ear is best for me. You can get them in android knock offs as well. Here is a very cheap example: they go for R500 on takealot. If I knew that this was all I needed, I would not have spent R2k on actual earbuds.
The downside of these kinds of in ears is that sometimes the mic does not work so well on bluetooth.
I’ve been using my Gemini AI to help me figure out which pods to get, and it’s a bit of a story. TL;DR is to take your personal hearing limitations into account as well.
The long version:
I suffer from not insignificant hearing loss, roughly 15% in the right ear and 25% in the left. The source of the damage is from playing in rock and metal band when I was high school aged where we all believe we’re bulletproof and invulnerable. Stood right next to the drums in our band room for 6 hour practise sessions so my ears would ring whole next day, and I would take it as a point of pride.
At varsity I got enough sense to start wearing hearing protection, but the damage had been done. On top of the hearing loss, I have proper tinnitus. I varies in volume, but when I’m a little snotty from Witbank seasonal changes, it gets rough.
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a video review of the new Apple Air Pods, a review I only watched to support a new channel. Normally both the Apple part and the Pods part would have me skip it… But the reviewer mentioned features built in specifically for people with my exact symptoms; hearing loss, but not enough to get hearing aids, tinnitus.
So I asked my AI buddy for more info. A lot of back and forth resulted in identifying this set as a great entry level set that has the fancy apple-like features I’m interested in. Worth considering, if you have remotely the same problems I do.
Hah? Say what? Ek kan’ie hoor’ie. Sê weer
Can echo much of what you say here. Although I don’t have significant hearing loss, I can feel my ears not being what they should be. And tinnitus is a huge drag - so much so that I need a form of white / grey noise at night to sleep, otherwise the ringing makes me go crazy. I have a pair of Apple AirPods Pro 2 (APP2) and they really are game changing. Comfortable, long battery life, phenomenal ANC and, like you’re mentioning, the “hearing aid” capability to boost conversations and allowing the directional mics to channel the conversation into your ears.
The way those buds go into the ear would not work for me. My ears would start itching and getting inflamed in a half hour. I hope they work nicely for you!
Agreed all round. The Air Pods are amazing for ergonomics and the fact as Shrike mentions, don’t go in ear, and fantastic for my tinnitus too. If it weren’t for their cost I would have bought me some years ago.
The cheaper knock offs are as good for use on a PC. I only found that out later 
How do you guys do your company emails? We have mweb as our provider with pop3 and smtp to our Outlook clients. The problem here is that we have been unable to send emails since Wednesday last week (cc @SIGSTART )
Any recommendations for a better company email solution?
That error usually occurs when outgoing authentication is disabled. Obviously if you already have it enabled, and you are still getting the error, then MWEB is going to have to check what is going on.
Our company hosts its own mail server, and we are an email service provider so our setup might be different from most. We have some of our mail accounts running on MS365 with our domain, then because my boss hosts our own mail server we also have sub-email accounts (also our domain) setup as IMAP on our outlooks as well. Unfortunately I do not know how the whole setup works as I am just a simple technician.
Do you have a backup strategy? POP3 is not ideal, since it doesn’t sync between the client and server, and in most cases, if the drive crashes or PC gets stolen, you’ll have no backup of your emails. IMAP will keep things mirrored to the server and as long as the server is backed up, your data is safe. Also, clients will syncronize across devies as well. The trade-off is you’ll need more storage available.
Depending how much space you need, self hosted is a great option on a cheap VPS for example, but will require a bit of technical know-how.
This fixed it, log on using and also changing outgoing SMTP server port to 587.
do you guys also find it frustrating how some ISPs (cough telkom cough) will hijack port 25 so only they can use it? So by default our mail client listens on 25 and 1025 now 
