2015 in Review

2015 in Review

It’s the end of the year and that means it’s time for a look back at 2015 out at askleo.com. Rather than the normal Top 10 List, what I’m going to do this time is take a look at the five most popular and then also talk about some of the most commented on articles at Ask Leo!

As you’ll see, it’s actually very, very interesting. And in traditional fashion, we’re going to take a look at those five most visited pages in reverse order:

#5 My Taskbar is missing and I have no Start button. What do I do? This was originally written because there was a bug in Windows that caused Explorer to crash from time-to-time and when Explorer crashes the Start menu goes away. Of course, in Windows 8, the Start menu went away by design, and of course, people are looking for it and this article helps them find it.

#4 What’s the difference between a hub, a switch, and a router? This is the oldest article on the Top list this year and it’s been a perennial favorite. For various reasons it’s been around (I think I wrote it about ten years ago), for various reasons, it’s actually a very common question as people start to understand networking.

#3 How do I get into my Hotmail/Outlook.com account if I don’t have the recovery phone or email any more? In and of itself, that title is pretty self explanatory but what’s made this article so popular this year is that Hotmail/Outlook.com/Microsfot are actually ratcheting up their security measures when you are traveling overseas and it is not an all uncommon to go overseas and not have access to your recovery phone or have an email account that itself is blocked because you are not where they expect you to be?

#2 How do I recover my Facebook login password? You know, it wouldn’t be a Top 5 List without some kind of password recovery article on it and this year, once again, it’s Facebook. In years past, it’s alternated between Facebook and Hotmail and as we’ve seen Hotmail has already made the list.

#1 How do I boot from CD/DVD/USB in Windows 8? I actually need to retitle this article slightly because it actually applies to Windows 8 and Windows 10. The real issue here is not Windows itself but rather the UEFI replacement for the BIOS. In an attempt to make your PC more secure, manufacturers using UEFI BIOS have configured it to make it more difficult to boot from something other than your internal hard disk.

As I said, that’s a security measure because someone with a rogue CD could walk up to an unprotected machine and reboot it into whatever they want and access everything on your machine. The good news is you’re more secure. The bad news is that actually booting from a CD/DVD or USB device when you legitimately or potentially want to becomes more complex. Lots of people are running into this issue everyday.

So those are the most popular based on traffic – the pages that have seen the most visitors over the last twelve months at askleo.com. I decided this year to also take a look at which pages are getting the most comments because you’ll notice there’s actually a very glaring omission from that Top 5 list.

When we take a look at which pages have gotten the most comments since the first of January, they fall into two, large buckets.

The first bucket, well, you know, “When I Ask For It”. When I ask for your opinion then you give it. I’m very, very thankful for you doing that.

In this case, in this year, I’ve asked about all sorts of things, most interestingly, backup seems to show up again. In fact, that middle one, “What Backup Program Do You Use?” actually drove which book I would write next and the book, Saved! Backing Up With EaseUS ToDo is a direct result of the comments that people left on that article. Again, I thank you. It kind of makes sense that if I ask for an opinion and then people have an opinion then they would leave a comment with that opinion but what do you think the largest category of unsolicited comments might be about?

The real number one: Windows 10. There’s simply nothing like it. I took a quick look at the top ten articles that received comments on this last year and I think six of them; I’m only showing four here but six of them turned out to be about Windows 10.

Without a doubt, the topic of Windows 10 is controversial; it is confusing and it is very, very interesting to see how much people are reacting to both positively and negatively to not only Windows 10 being software that you will upgrade to but how Microsoft is pushing and promoting that upgrade process. So without a doubt, Windows 10 is the big winner when it comes to folks having opinions and wanting to have their say.

2016

What will 2016 bring? Well, at this point, at the end of 2015, I’m going to make one prediction and it’s a fairly safe prediction based on not only what we’ve seen so far but also on what we understand to be coming and that is simply that Windows 10 will continue to be a very controversial rollout; a controversial promotion and a promotion in an upgrade that will generate lots and lots of opinions.

We’ll be seeing that in articles on askleo.com here in the New Year.

With that, I wish you all a very, very Happy Holiday season and I will see you again next week. Take care, everyone.