Update News for January 2026

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

• • Happy New Year

  • Term4Sale Land Rush – PAY SPECIAL ATTENTION

  • Some Postal Codes You Might Consider

  • Cloudflare Outage

  • Don’t Throw Out Your Old Computer Yet

  • Windows 11 Can Run On Many Older Computers

  • Our Current Programming Plans

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

Happy New YearI say it every year, but every year it is true. Without you Compulife could not deliver the products and services that we provide. THANK YOU for your business this past year.

As we look forward to this coming New Year, we are VERY grateful and wish you a VERY prosperous 2026. We know that if we can help you to be successful, then your success becomes our success.

Term4Sale Land Rush –
PAY SPECIAL ATTENTIONNOTE:   This story is in reference to the U.S. and one of our subscribers there. Having said that, I think it is worth a read. I have Canadianized the links where necessary.

This year an UNUSUALLY LARGE NUMBER of EXCELLENT ZIP CODES will become available on Monday, January 12, 2026 at 12 noon EST (same date and time for Canada re. postal codes).

The reason is that one of the biggest past buyers of zip codes is an insurance agency which is no longer going to renew those zip code listings. The agency in question was one of the very early participants at Term4Sale (since the late 1990s). Over time they kept accumulating more and more zip codes. The owner of that agency was a VERY astute marketer and they picked up many good zip codes early. Many of those zip codes have been full with 3 subscribers, and they have kept their listing, locking them up by renewing them for decades.

That agency has been sold and is now under new management. The new owners simply do NOT understand the benefit of those zip code listings and have decided to let them go in the interest of reducing their costs. We know they are making a mistake, but they don’t know it.

That means those zip codes will become available on January 12th to our other customers and some of those are GREAT ZIP CODES.

If you are NOT paying attention to this opportunity, all I can say is “you snooze; you lose“.

As we do each year, the new list of postal codes will be available very early on Monday January 12th here:

If you find postal codes that you want to purchase, email us your list NO EARLIER than 12:00 PM EST on January 12th. Send that email to:

WARNING:   If your email comes in earlier than 12:00 PM EST on January 12th, it will be ignored until later in the day. Once we get to it, later in the day, you will be asked to resubmit it. Anyone who asked for one of the postal codes that were on your list, before your resubmission, will get that postal code and you won’t.

IMPORTANT:  Don’t even THINK about jumping the gun because it will hurt you not help you.

These strict rules exist to keep the playing field fair and even for all subscribers. No one gets any special treatment on this.

Some Postal Codes You Might ConsiderWhen a subscriber clicks the “How To Purchase” button in a Term4Sale quote, we provide a list of the 3 agents who are closest to that postal code, FROM that province (only that province). We have some simply opportunities where ONE listing anywhere in that province, would list your anywhere in that province.

NOTE:   You must be licensed to sell in that province to be listed.

Currently, Newfoundland has ONLY one agent listed for the entire province. According to Google the population of Newfoundland is 545,000

Currently, Prince Edward Island had NO agents listed for the entire province. According to Google the population of Prince Edward Island is 182,000

Currently, Northwest Territories has ONLY on agent listed for the entire province. According to Google the population of Northwest Territories is 45,000

Currently, Yukon has NO agents listed for the entire province. According to Google the population of Yukon is 45,000

Currently, Nunavut has NO agents listed for the entire province. According to Google the population of Nunavut is 41,000

All other provinces list at least 3 agetns.

Cloudflare OutageHere I am sitting on November 18, 2025 trying to visit some of the sites where I get my daily news, and all I see is this screen:

These articles explain what happened:

I have four news services (3 are aggregators) that I check each day for my political (and otherwise) news. They are:

citizenfreepress.com
breitbart.com
realnewsfeed.com
bonginoreport.com

Three of those four were taken down in the Cloudflare outage. Only Breitbart remained available. Breitbart is the only one of the four that is a publisher of original news content. The others simply give links to new stories from multiple publishers.

All of this does NOTHING to soothe my serious skepticism about relying upon “cloud services” (the internet). Fortunately, for Compulife, we do NOT use Cloudflare. During this outage, none of our services were interrupted.

The argument for Cloudflare, and similar competing services, is that your website is duplicated over an array of internet servers. They argue, because of that redundancy, that your site will never go down. Yeah, right, until the technology that connects all those servers experiences a failure which is what happened to Cloudflare.

Cloudflare is not alone. Microsoft had a similar outage in July 2025:

and another outage in October 2025:

There have been others:

Compulife’s objective is to make sure that YOU, the life insurance agents and agencies, who depend on your ability to use our quotes to help sell life insurance, are not stuck looking at the walls waiting for the internet to come back online; whatever the problem. Having said that, I don’t doubt that the day will come when we will experience such a temporary interruption. That is why we have REDUNDANT services on different servers with different IP providers. If something you use with Compulife is temporarily not working, there is a very good chance that you will be able to get a quote on something else.

And most important, that is why I personally remain FULLY COMMITTED to providing our main service for agents on Windows PC computers via autonomous PC software. With the Windows PC version of Compulife on your computer, it does not have to be connected to the internet for you to be able to function.

Eventually, Compulife’s objective is to have a web-based quoting tool that does everything our PC version does. That will be an expansion of our “Mobile” version which will be modified over time with additional features. As that happens the price of that software will go up.

NOTE:   The Mobile software will continue to be included in the price of the PC software.

It is important to note that the Mobile software is password protected and the number of users for any particular license is restricted. That software will NEVER be available on a website where anyone and everyone can use it for free. If a software company gives out their best software for free, there is no way that anyone is going to pay for the service.

On a related note, I remain surprised by the number of people who subscribe to Microsoft 365 and who do not use Microsoft’s office products on their PCs. I do not use Office 365 because I trust the versions of Word and Excel that are actually on my computer to be more dependable than the web-based versions.

IMPORTANT:   Under no circumstances do we trust the web to preserve our documents, data and software. We keep our data on our own computers and do our own backups to multiple disks and machines.

If all this sounds old school, YES IT DOES. Here’s some more old school thinking for you.

Don’t Throw Out Your Old Computer YetI am sure a lot of our subscribers have recently purchased NEW computers, having been told by Microsoft that Windows 10 is no longer supported. Microsoft offers a FREE upgrade to Windows 11 but when you run the system compatibility check, you are likely told that your OLD computer is NOT compatible with Windows 11.

A couple of quick observations. First, Windows 11 is NOT that great (from my point of view). It has a bunch of annoying changes which have me wondering, “What’s the point?” Of course the BIG message from Microsoft is that if you don’t upgrade to Windows 11, your Windows 10 will be vulnerable to attack because it’s security software will degrade over time (not keep up with new threats). That is true, but fortunately there are a LOT of third party security systems out there that can do that for your Windows 10 system.

When I am traveling with my laptop, and using it with Wi-Fi routers that are not my own, I use this security software on my machine that is connected to the web:

NO antivirus product is perfect. Having said that, we have done a LOT of technical support for our subscribers and we have certain antivirus products that seem to routinely give us headaches. I rarely have to deal with issues arising from those who use Avast.

Avast is FREE. Oh sure, they want to sell you their pro version, or whatever they call it, but the free product is just fine. Why do they give it out for FREE? Because they use that FREE software to gather intelligence about new viruses. Detecting and building defenses against new viruses, faster than the competition, is all about getting intelligence faster. By offering a FREE version they ensure they are on millions and millions of machines all telling them what is going on with viruses and trojans.

If you are using Windows 10, then I think you should feel good about continuing to use Windows 10 providing that you add an antivirus product to replace your Microsoft Defender.

If you are using Windows 11, then I would do what I do, and use the Windows Defender software only. Provided that my computer is plugged into my home router, I think Windows Defender, which comes free with Windows 11, is a perfectly good system of defense.

Windows 11 Can Run On Many Older ComputersAnd like so many, we have computers that we were told by Windows 10 could not be upgraded to Windows 11.

NOT SO FAST.

I would encourage you to watch this video:

IMPORTANT:   If you decide to do this, MAKE SURE YOU FOLLOW CAREFULLY the instructions to learn how to preserve all your existing programs and data (including all your desktop icons).

REALLY SUPER IMPORTANT:   Backup (CLONE) your current hard disk before you do it. This means copy your hard disk to a NEW hard disk, and do the upgrade on the new hard disk.

Cloning means making an identical COPY of your existing hard disk. The best way to COPY a Windows hard disk is to use this software (it’s what we use):

RECOMMENDATION:   If you decide to make a copy of your hard disk, NOW would be a great time to upgrade your old mechanical hard disk drive (HDD) to a new solid state drive (SSD). We buy our solid state drives (usually Samsung) here:

Newegg offers VERY competitive prices; discounts and sales come on fairly routinely.

If your hard disk drive is getting full, this is also a GREAT TIME to increase the capacity. Buy a bigger drive than the one you have. Once you have cloned your old drive to the new drive, you can easily expand the old drive capacity to take advantage of the larger capacity available on the new drive. Here’s a video on that.

Upgrading from an old HDD to an SSD will SPEED UP YOUR COMPUTER more than you can imagine. If you have not already done so, this change will make your old, slow computer pop to life. You can see an example of the performance upgrade here:

If you don’t have a way to physically connect a second drive to your computer, so that you can clone the drive, you can buy and use this external case/adapter to plug the new drive into your USB 3.0 port (make sure you have a 3.0 port):

Bonus for laptop users. If you upgrade from an HDD to SSD your battery life will be greatly extended. SSDs require less power to function, and they run noticeably cooler.

And if all of this is over your head, then find a local computer shop that can do the upgrade for you. Tell them to read this bulletin and if they have any questions, give us a call.

Our Current Programming PlansThe following is the current order for new work that we will be doing moving forward:

• • Introduction of New PC Version: CQS.EXE.

• • Overhaul Of Current Product Data Files.

• Introduction of Compulife Mobile Plus (with Pick 12).

Anyone with questions about any of these upcoming projects can call Bob Barney to discuss:

Please don’t email me essay questions; just call. If I’m not in, email me your phone number, I’ll call you.

These planned objectives will easily consume our programming time during the balance of this year and throughout 2025. The good news is that once the product data files have been converted, and we have introduced the new CQS.EXE and upgraded our internet engine to use the new data files, Compulife will be turning its full attention to our web-based, Compulife Mobile software. The long-term goal is to have a web-based product that does everything our PC-based software does.