Our monthly free public presentation will come earlier than our accustomed third Monday of the month in March and April. Our presentations are open to all SaddleBrooke and SaddleBrooke Ranch residents and their guests. Meetings often include question and answer sessions with PC and/or Apple instructors. A door prize drawing is held at the end of each meeting.
On Monday, March 2 at 1:00 p.m. the topic will be Using the Cloud: One Drive, Drop Box and Google Drive. This will be a group presentation about several of the most popular online storage services presented by four of our instructors – Carlton Wiens, Richard Beaty, Sue Moyer and Richard Spitzer. Our April meeting has been rescheduled to April 6 due to a competing paid event; we’re working on a presentation available on short notice.
So far this year, 148 members have enrolled in one or more of the current 38 classes available. Registration remains open throughout the semester and seats are still available in some classes! Simply click on a class description to see if an interesting class still has space available; enrollment is automatically updated every minute. New offerings include Adobe Elements 13, Office 365 for PCs, OS X Yosemite for Macs and iOS 8 for I Pads. We added a new time slot; there will be a few evening classes (PowerPoint, Windows 8.1 and Outlook). Consult the calendar page on our website at www.saddlebrookecc.org for the earliest available information about schedule additions or revisions.
If you are not yet a member, you will need to join before you can enroll; payments can be submitted by credit card via our website membership page or by a check mailed to our registrar. Membership is still $55/single and $80/couple; this fee includes all available classes for the initial calendar year. After the initial year, the annual class participation fee remains just $30 per person. If you do not have a computer or have problems with the online system, please contact our registrar Alice Stuart at 825-4239 or [email protected]. The SaddleBrooke Computer Club is a 401 (c) (4) non-profit organization; our instructors and staff are all unpaid volunteers. Membership and class fees are used solely to purchase classroom equipment and software.
Computer Tidbits: Microsoft staged a public demonstration of the current progress in Windows 10 development on January 21. Nifty features include a real, configurable start menu and Cortana, a sassy artificial intelligence that will respond to verbal inquiries and commands. Spartan is a new browser that is smaller and faster than Internet Explorer while adding multiple new features.
As widely predicted, Windows 10 upgrades will be free to current Windows 8/8.1 users. Surprisingly, the upgrade will also be free to Windows 7 users. This opportunity will expire one year after the product first becomes available later this year. The spokesman also announced a new commitment to keep devices “consistently updated throughout the supported lifetime of the device.”