Privacy

Short version: this site sets no cookies, runs no third-party analytics, carries no ads and no tracking pixels, and never sees your name unless you email me. What follows is a description of what the code on this site actually does — not a template.

The visit counter

PcFixin' counts visits with a small script I wrote and host myself, at pcfixin.com/track/. There is no analytics company involved. When a page that carries the counter loads, the script sends one message containing four things:

1. Which site was visited — pcfixin or pc-fixin.
2. The path of the page you're on, for example /windows-help.html. The path only, never the full address with any query string attached.
3. The referring page, if your browser sent one — that's the site you clicked through from, such as a search engine or another website.
4. Your screen width in pixels, which tells me whether to keep testing layouts on phones.

The server adds the time of the request, a flag marking whether the visitor looks like a bot, and a visitor hash. That's the whole record. One line of text per pageview, saved to a plain file on the same web server that serves this page.

The visitor hash, and why there's no IP address in here

To count two visits by the same person as one visitor, the server needs something stable to compare — but it doesn't need to know who you are. So instead of storing your IP address or your browser's user-agent string, it combines four things: a private secret that only lives on the server, today's date, your IP address, and your user-agent. It runs that combination through SHA-256 (a one-way hash) and keeps only the first 16 characters of the result.

Two consequences worth stating plainly. First, your IP address and user-agent are never written down — only the hash is, and a hash can't be turned back into what went into it. Second, because today's date is part of the recipe, the hash changes every day. Yesterday's you and today's you are two unconnected strings, so there's no persistent fingerprint and no way to follow anyone across days.

The bot flag is worked out from the user-agent at the moment the request arrives — again, the user-agent itself isn't kept, only the resulting yes/no.

Which pages carry the counter

Being precise, because "we collect analytics on our site" usually hides a lot: the counter runs on every page of this site — the home page, Windows Help, macOS Help, Archive, About, Contact, Privacy and Terms, and every individual how-to article under /windows/ and /mac/. No page is counted differently from any other, and an article records nothing extra: it is the same four fields described above.

An earlier version of this page said the how-to articles carried no counter. That was true when it was written — the articles are generated by a script that had been leaving the counter out — but it was a bug, not a policy, and it has been fixed. If the coverage changes again, this page changes with it.

Contact-button clicks

One more thing gets recorded: when you click an email button on this site, the script notes that a contact button was clicked. What's stored is the time, which site, the fact that it was an email button, the same daily visitor hash, and the bot flag. Your email address is not involved — the button just opens your own mail program, and what you write there is between you and me. There are no forms anywhere on this site, so there is no form data to collect.

The one request that leaves this site

Every page here loads its typeface from Google Fonts (fonts.googleapis.com for the stylesheet and fonts.gstatic.com for the font files). That is a genuine third-party request, and I'd rather say so than pretend the page is fully self-contained: to serve those files, Google's servers receive your IP address, your user-agent, and the fact that you loaded a page on this site. That exchange is covered by Google's own privacy policy, not mine.

Beyond that, nothing on these pages phones anywhere else. Images, styles and scripts are all served from this site. There is no Google Analytics, no Facebook pixel, no ad network, no comment platform, no chat widget, no embedded video.

A note about the twin domain

The same site is published at both pcfixin.com and pc-fixin.com. They are both mine — it's a deliberate experiment to see which name people actually take to. Both use the same counter, and on pc-fixin.com the counter's script is loaded from pcfixin.com, so there is a single collection point rather than two. It's the same operator, the same code, and the same handful of fields described above either way.

Server logs

My web host keeps its own standard access logs, as every web host does. Those are the hosting company's normal operational records, kept for a limited time and used for things like diagnosing outages and abuse. I don't build anything on top of them.

If you email me

Then I have your email address and whatever you chose to tell me. I use it to answer you and nothing else. I don't add anyone to a mailing list, and I don't sell, rent, or share what you send. If a question becomes the seed of an article, the article is written generically — your name and your details don't go in it.

Links to other sites

Articles here link out to manufacturers' documentation and other sources so you can check my work, and this site links to Geaux Tech NOLA, my New Orleans service business. Once you click through, you're on someone else's site under their privacy policy, not this one. This site sends a strict-origin-when-cross-origin referrer policy, which means an outside site is told you came from pcfixin.com but is not told which page you were reading.

Opting out

There's nothing to sign up for and nothing to log into, so there's no account to delete. If you'd rather not be counted at all, block pcfixin.com/track/ in your content blocker or your hosts file. The counter is written to fail silently, so the site will work exactly the same with it blocked — nothing here depends on it.

Children

This is a computer help site for a general audience. It isn't directed at children, and it doesn't knowingly collect anything from them.

Changes

If what the site does changes, this page gets rewritten to match. I'd rather revise this than let it drift into being decorative.