Author: Mark Snell

Hey there do-it-yourself technicians. What happens to your Facebook account when you pass away? I’ve just recently started down the process of doing my will at long last and it brought up a question for me: What happens to yourFacebook account when you pass away? Let’s have a look.

It turns out Facebook gives you two different options for when you pass on. You can either have your account Memorialised or you can just have it simply deleted.

A Memorialised account just basically stays there, with a single person being able to post to it and they can keep people updated on funeral arrangements or anything else and maybe even add something in on anniversaries or whatever they feel is appropriate.

The control is in your hands though, you get to decide what happens with your account. If you click up on the menu at the top and go down to settings, it brings up this page.

Then you can click the “manage account options” here. You can nominate your legacy contact which will be the person that will control your Facebook page after you’re gone. They can manage your posts, request the removal of the account, respond to friend requests and update your cover photo and profile picture. They can’t actually post as you or see your messages.

All you need to do is click on the box here, type the name of one of your friends and then click “Add” and they’ll receive a notification to say that they’ve been nominated as your Legacy Contact. If you don’t want your Facebook account to continue on after you pass away, there’s a link here to just simply have the account deleted as soon as Facebook is notified that you’ve passed away.

So, how do you notify Facebook that somebody has passed away? Well, if you click the question mark help menu and in the box that pops up type memorial, you’ll get this bottom option here of “how do I report a deceased person to Facebook” and a link to memorialise an account that says “contact us”.

Here you’ll need to provide the details of the person who has passed away, when they passed away and a scan or photo of an obituary, death certificate or something else that proves that they’ve passed away. You also need to provide an email address and they will get in contact with you about the memorialisation of that account, taking into account the account holder’s wishes, the Legacy Contact or to delete the account.

It’s not necessarily something we really want to think about a lot, but it’s worth preparing for, just so that it’s not one more hassle that has to be sorted out after you pass away.

I hope that was helpful. Drop a comment down below if you’ve set up a legacy contact for your account.

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Thank you so much for watching and have a great day!

Hey they’re do-it-yourself technicians, a couple of weeks ago we spoke about recovering passwords and I used Facebook as an example, but I’ve had lots of people looking for a Google-specific one so that’s what we’re tackling today.

If you can’t remember the password to your Google account or gmail account, Google provides this page to give you some information on how to recover it. I’ve linked it up here.

The first link under forgot your password is: follow these steps to recover your forgotten password which will take you through to this page. There’s also a page here with some tips to help you with your account recovery.

The Google login page is empty and white and clear and lovely looking, but it does have this wonderful little button here that says “forgot password” which will take you through to a page that asks you for any recent password that you do remember.

So, if you’ve forgotten one but you remember what it might have been a week ago before you changed it or one that you had a little bit longer ago, that will help in the process of recovering the account. If however, you can’t remember any of the passwords you’ve used in the past then “try another way” is another option.

There, this next option uses a phone number that you might have registered with your Google account, which I highly recommend, but if you don’t have one registered or it’s a phone number that you no longer have then that’s not much help. Then you can click the link that says “I don’t have my phone”

The next option is for a secondary or recovery email address that you might have had registered with Google. Again a really good idea to have, but if you don’t have it, then you can click that “try another way” link.

The next option is to add the month and year that you created your Google account, which might be fairly easy if it’s something like the time you graduated or when you started a new job or something like that, but realistically a lot of people aren’t gonna remember when they created their account, but at least that’s something else that Google does know that they can confirm. So if you do have it, enter it in here, if not click the “try another way” button.

This is pretty much the end of the line as far as Google is concerned, the best you can do here is add in an email address and they’ll grab any of the information that you’ve given them so far and put it together in such a way that they can confirm that it really is you and unlock the account for you. So you provide them with another email address and they’ll use that to contact you.

If that doesn’t work for you, there’s a “try another way” button again down the bottom, but it leads you to a page that says Google couldn’t verify that you own this account, which isn’t really much help.

If you forgot the email address that you’re using for your Google account, there’s some steps hereto work out what that email address is and get you on the road to recovery.

It’s worth noting up front that all of these answers are for an @gmail.com account. If you have a Google account that is provided to you by your organization, somebody in your organization will have the authority to reset that password and you can do that much more easily.

If you’re the administrator of a Google domain and you’ve forgotten the password, well there’s other processes to go through to fix that. I’ll link them up here for you.

If you feel that somebody else might have access to your account there’s some steps down the bottom here to go through if you’ve got a hacked or hijacked account and that will step you through a separate recovery process for that.

There’s a couple of other options down the bottom of this page but they’re really only useful in very specific cases but if they help you then that’s great. The links are there.

I hope that was helpful for you. At The Tech Doctor, our mission is to help you become your own technician and navigate the technology maze. There’s some other episodes that you may not have seen here and here. Clicking the subscribe button down here will allow you to be alerted for all new videos as they come out.

We’re here to help. Thank you so much for watching. Have a great day!

Hey there do-it-yourself technicians. Today we’re gonna look at getting some old photos back off a really old PC.

Pat bought this old machine in and it does absolutely nothing. So let’s see what we can do. The first thing I’m going to do is test the power supply to see if the machine’s actually getting any power at all.

I’ve got this little Power Supply Tester which is really handy and I’ve had for years. You can still buy similar sorts of things, I’ll put a link up above if you’re looking for one.

So this is what she looks like inside all we have to do is get the power supply cables off the motherboard, the right way around and plug them into the tester. There’s no power switch on the back so it can’t be that.

This power supply is dead. We could put in another power supply but, realistically, Pat just wants the photos off it.

We don’t need to get Windows up and running at all so I don’t think it’s worth it.

So let’s hit Plan B. The hard drive in this machine is an old IDE one that going to make it a little more tricky than if it was a bit more modern SATA, but there’s always a solution. An IDE hard drive is very easily identified by the big fat connector which plugs into this ribbon cable and then the separate power supply which is this four-wire Molex connector.

So where do we go from here? In my tool kit, I have this old piece of technology which is an IDE to USB adapter. It plugs into power (because of the power requirements of the older hard drive) and it plugs into USB.

And somebody screwed it shut! Back in a sec.

This is what it looks like inside. Those same two connectors and an extra connector that plugs in the light and the button at the front, which we don’t care about in this case. In fact, we don’t need that bit at all.

We just plug the hard drive in, now plug it into a power point. Plug the cable into my laptop, turn it on and see what happens. I don’t know if you can hear the drive spinning up but now it’s working.

So here we are in Windows, with the external drive plugged in and a space to recover the data. This looks like Windows XP so we’re going to go into the Documents and Settings folder.

No terribly descriptive user names here: Administrator and User. The Default User is no good to us and All Users are not much help either. Both of these folders say there’s nothing in them. None of them have been used since 2010, which could easily be the last time this machine was started.

Let’s open the user folder. It won’t let us, [it] says we don’t have permission, but that’s permission on this machine, so clicking continue will allow us access after a minute or two. Here’s the contents of the User folder. We don’t want most of these, but the interesting ones are My Documents and Desktop. In the Desktop folder we have nothing interesting whatsoever, just some icons. In My Documents okay we’ve got a couple of images, some downloads which are probably way out of date and useless, an empty Movie folder, an empty Pictures folder and a setup folder hmm not much here at all. Inside My Pictures, yeah it’s just the sample pictures link, so let’s go back.

Nothing else here, it says there is 3Gb in total, must be in that DVDFab folder. Yep well that’s probably not much good to us. There’s nothing in there no, no. Let’s see what’s in the temp folder. 3Gb of temp files. Obviously, somebody was in the process of burning a DVD. Let’s go all the way back out and check the Administrator’s folder.

Again we have to [click] continue to get permission. This looks pretty clean as well, nothing at all on the Desktop and nothing in the My Documents directory. Hmm. Interesting, it’s worth noting from those two NTUser files at the bottom that this machine hasn’t been used since 2012. That was the last time this user was logged in, but none of the files have been touched since 2007 in this user so it looks like there’s probably nothing here at all.

Just double-check the User folder yeah the login there’s the same, 2011 2012 but none of the files have been touched much, so it looks like there’s actually not really anything on this machine at all, other than a couple of cute images. Well, that turned out to be a bit of a non-event for any files Pat might have wanted off that machine, but at least she knows now that there weren’t any.

It’s worth noting that if the hard drive in the machine has been a SATA hard drive that looked like this you can actually buy quite cheaply a dock like this with the same USB cable although this one can be USB 3 because the technology had advanced by then and the hard drive simply slots into the dock and then you can get your files off in the same way. It’s also designed to take a 2 1/2″ laptop hard drive which is really handy.

Anyway, it all worked out in the end. I hope that was helpful. Thank you so much for watching. At The Tech Doctor, our mission is to help you become your own technician and navigate the technology maze. There are some other episodes you might not have seen here and here and you can subscribe to all our new episodes down here and if you click up here there’s a Facebook group where you can get your questions answered.

Thank you so much for watching and have an amazing day!