According to Dictionary.com:

The original settings. The standard setup. The way things were configured when it came out of the box. Vanilla. No changes. In technology, these are called the defaults. For most people, the defaults are enough.

Many moons ago, my friend Abby and I set out to make our non-work lives easier by starting up this little site called Beyond The Defaults. There are a million resources available to research just about anything – and that’s a pretty overwhelming endeavor when all you want to do is understand why a laptop might be a better option versus a tablet computer. For technical people (like us), we know how to wade through swamp, finding the nuggets that are useful. That’s why all of our friends and family start their phone calls with “hey, I’ve got a computer question for you”.

There are a lot more people like our friends and family than there are technical people like us, and those friends and family types simply don’t know what they don’t know. Even though things have advanced in big ways and people are a lot more technically savvy than they were nine years ago when we started, there’s still plenty to talk about.

I know that I’m doing a lot of things now that I wasn’t doing nine years ago, so I’m sure I’m not alone. Let’s reboot this thing and see what happens.

The objective hasn’t changed since 2011 – to show you the simple stuff that can make technology your friend, save you time and get the most out of all that money invested in technology. Some posts might very short – maybe just a quick note with a link to something useful. I’m hoping to also do a few longer things along the way as well. I hope you find some of it useful.