Table of contents for 557 in Computeractive

Thinking about Command Prompt reminds me of a brilliant Smith and Jones sketch (watch it at www.snipca.com/31892). Playing clueless hi-fi salesmen, they’re asked what the graphic equaliser does. Griff thinks he knows the answer: “Obviously, er, it, er, equalises your graphics”. Mel clarifies that “in the event of your graphics falling behind at any time, this will enable them to catch up”. So, what does Command Prompt do? Obvious. It, er, prompts your commands. The last thing you need on your PC is a command lying around unprompted. In reality, its purpose is simple: it performs advanced tasks on your PC that can’t be done by clicking buttons within Windows. These unlock powerful tools that fix problems on your network, create health reports for your system, manage your files better,…

We’d like to correct a story we published in Issue 556 (page 6) in which we said Microsoft had confirmed that laptops with 16GB of RAM could install the Windows 10 May Update (version 1903). This was wrong. Instead, we should have said that Microsoft had confirmed that laptops with 16GB of storage space can get the update. What matters when installing updates is your laptop’s storage capacity, not your RAM. In April, Microsoft had said that laptops would need at least 32GB of spare space to install the update. It has since clarified this to state that only laptops released in future will need 32GB. It means existing laptops with 16GB storage will be able to install the update properly. To find out how much free storage you have,…

Mobile-network company Three looks set to become the first UK provider to deliver home broadband through 5G, though only in London at first. The firm said customers can connect to 5G themselves by plugging in a router, without having to wait for an engineer. It claimed speeds would be as fast as on fibre broadband, but didn’t confirm prices. Three’s announcement makes it the third network after EE and Vodafone to reveal its 5G plans. After the launch in London in August, Three will make 5G available in 24 other cities by the end of the year, including Cardiff, Glasgow, Sheffield, Slough and Sunderland (for more info visit www.three.co.uk/5g). It didn’t say whether home broadband would be available in these areas, or just mobile 5G for phones and tablets. Three’s…

Quick web access compensates for fading memory There may be some truth in the claim that using the internet has reduced our ability to recall facts (News, Issue 556, page 6), but let’s not overlook how amazing it is that the internet provides easy access to all these facts. When I was studying at school, you had to rely on encyclopedias, which often lacked vital details, or take a trip to the library. We didn’t know any different then of course, so we were grateful for any source of knowledge. But imagine asking today’s students to cope for just 24 hours without the internet. They wouldn’t know where to turn! Also, it’s not always the case that in the past you could remember important facts. I remember struggling to memorise…

Can you stop TalkTalk taking me to court? LEAD CASE Q About six years ago I signed up with TalkTalk but never received my router. I borrowed a friend’s, so I could connect to its broadband, telling TalkTalk I’d reinstate my direct debit once they sent me a router. But I was cut off the next day. A company called Lowell’s has been hounding me for years about owing money and is now taking me to court. Can you help? Cheryl Joy Campbell A When we responded to Cheryl, we weren’t hopeful we could help at such short notice. But she replied saying Lowell’s (TalkTalk’s solicitors) has dropped the case, much to her relief. We’re not sure why Lowell’s has given up. It may simply have run out of time…

Wanting to know where your ancestors are buried may sound a little macabre, but it provides a full stop to their life story, as well as a place to visit. In this issue, we’ll reveal tips and techniques to help you track down your ancestors’ final resting place. Track down death records Start by locating a death record for your ancestor – if possible, the death certificate or failing that an entry in the National Probate Calendar (free at www.gov.uk/search-will-probate). Both records provide the date of death, but while the probate record lists their home address at time of death (see screenshot below), it’s the death certificate that shows the actual place of death, which may be somewhere else. This should provide you with clues as to where they were…

Q When making long car journeys, I like to have a map of the entire route to help me keep on track. A single screenshot of the journey in Google Maps is too small to be of use, so I end up zooming in and taking multiple screenshots, often resulting in over 30 images for a single trip. Can you recommend a screenshot tool that makes this easier? Paul Barnes A We’re not aware of a screenshot program that does exactly what you want, but there is another tool that should help. Microsoft’s Image Composite Editor (ICE) is primarily designed to stitch photos together to create a panoramic image, however it can also be used to create a single map image from your screenshots. Although it’s getting on a bit…

New products tested by our experts LAPTOP | £599 from Amazon www.snipca.com/31850 “If there was ever a laptop that represents who you are,” says Asus, “it’s the youthful and vivacious VivoBook”. Flattery will get you nowhere, Asus. Here’s the truth: the VivoBook S15 has been around a while and is a bit bulkier than you might consider ideal, but does a competent job for not very much money. Not a catchy slogan, but the truth. “Great value all-round laptop for everyday tasks. Not for photo editors” This is a 15in model, the biggest class of laptop you’ll want to consider if you actually plan to carry it around, but at 1.68kg (3½lb) and about twice as thick as a phone, it’s really very manageable. The plastic case, which feels sturdy…

Q In the past I’ve always had a desktop PC for performance (I edit videos as a regular hobby) and a laptop for convenience. I’m thinking of upgrading both, but I’m wondering if I really need two machines – a lot of laptops look very powerful now. Could I get away with one PC? Frances Auster A We’ve covered several powerful laptops recently, including the Asus ZenBook Pro 15 (see Issue 553, page 23). This has a 4K screen with good colour accuracy and is available with an i7-8750H processor, 16GB of memory and Nvidia GTX 1050 graphics for £1,870 (from Amazon www.snipca.com/31906). With this spec you could edit 1080p video, but 4K might be pushing it. Laptop-class processors are nowhere near as fast as their similarly numbered desktop counterparts,…

WIRELESS SPEAKER | £90 from Amazon www.snipca.com/31926 In a world where everything seems to get upgraded every year, you might think they’d draw the line at a basic Bluetooth speaker. But no, the Wonderboom (see Issue 505, page 24) is now the Wonderboom 2. It’s still melon-sized, fabric-covered and waterproof, but now it’s also dustproof, lasts even longer on its rechargeable battery (up to 13 hours rather than 10), and can be paired with a second unit for al fresco stereo. The attached loop is also bigger, making it easier to hook your finger into “It’s waterproof, dustproof and the rechargeable battery lasts up to 13 hours” The maker reckons the new model has a bassier sound. Well, yes and no: the low end is strong, but cleaner, and a…

What you need: Windows 10; Your Phone app; Android phone (version 7 or higher) Time required: 15 minutes When working on your PC, having to reach for your phone every time you receive a new text message can be a pain, not to mention negotiating the tiny onscreen keyboard to type your replies. If you have an Android phone (7.0 or higher), you can make things much easier by directing 'new message' notifications straight to your PC and using your PC’s keyboard to type messages and view recently taken photos. You can follow a similar process to connect an iPhone to your PC, but currently it only lets you start viewing a web page on your phone, then continue reading on your PC. STEP 1 If you don’t already have…

Candide Free Android www.snipca.com/31828 iOS www.snipca.com/31829 Our favourite new app is a gardening guide, green-fingered social network, public gardens directory and plant identifier tool, all in one free app with no in-app purchases or adverts. You can post questions for the UK’s leading gardening experts, and enjoy articles, video guides and audio tours after a hard day at the weeding coalface. Adobe Premiere Rush* Free (or £8.99/month unrestricted) Android www.snipca.com/31826 iOS www.snipca.com/31827 Turn your videos into masterpieces using a drag-and-drop timeline, clip trimmer, multitrack audio, transitions, voiceovers and more in Adobe’s latest editing app. The catch? You can edit forever for free, but only export three videos. Unlimited export costs £8.99 a month. Find out more at www.snipca.com/31849. Rockfax* £3-4 per month Android, iOS www.snipca.com/31848 Download nearly 50,000 climbing routes…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER Be more specific with Find & Replace The Find & Replace tool in LibreOffice Writer lets you quickly edit multiple instances of the same word or phrase in a document. There may be occasions when you want to only replace some of these (for example, only those that appear in titles, captions or the body of a document). To specify this, open the Find & Replace window in Writer (by pressing Ctrl+H), then enter your text into the Find and Replace boxes as normal. Next, click the Format button (see screenshot below), then select the characteristics of the text you want to replace. In the Font tab you can specify the font name, size and style (bold, italic, etc). In the other tabs, you can choose to only…

MAKE HANDS-FREE CALLS THROUGH ALEXA Vodafone has become the first network in the world to let customers make and receive phone calls via their Amazon Echo smart speakers. It means you can make calls without turning on your phone, or even if it’s run out of battery. To make a call, you need to speak a command like “Alexa, call Mum’s mobile”. You need to link your mobile number to an Alexa account - find out more at www.snipca.com/31852. ORDER MEDICINE USING BOOTS APP Boots now lets you order repeat prescriptions through its app (pictured) and website, after teaming up with NHS Digital and NHS England. Prescriptions can be ordered for yourself, your family, or someone you care for. They can be collected from your local Boots pharmacy, or you…

Regarding Ross Ludgate’s hard drive having 69,300 ‘power on’ hours (Letters, Issue 556), I’m sorry but he’s got a long way to go to beat an old drive recovered from a laptop many years ago. According to CrystalDiskInfo (www.snipca.com/31595), my Fujitsu drive has been on for 687,257 hours (see screenshot), or 78 years, six months. By my calculation, this means it was first powered up on 31 December, 1940! Having checked Fujitsu’s corporate history (www.snipca.com/31878), it would appear that they are still keeping their early development of hard drives a secret. Martin Dashper CA SAYS We’re not sure why Martin got this strange result, but it could be a sign that his hard drive is playing up, and needs replacing. Either that or Fujitsu managed to covertly develop a hard…

John Lewis is blaming its computers for reader Malcolm Lee not receiving the £50 gift card he was entitled to after signing up to its broadband service (see Issue 553). It claims to have fixed this “one-off error”, and has now sent Malcolm the £50, which he’s putting towards a new vacuum cleaner. An error like this always seemed more likely than John Lewis breaking the Unfair Trading Regulations, which curbs rogue traders from enticing consumers with false promises, such as discounts, free gifts or gift vouchers. The problem appears to have affected other customers. After we published Malcolm’s case, reader Alex Penny told us he’d waited over 120 days for his card to arrive. He said that John Lewis admitted it could take up to 60 days to arrive,…

I have 25 years’ worth of family research – over 14,500 names in 4,500 different families. I’d like to publish this online, but many people in it are still alive. Would I be breaking a law somewhere even though I’m publishing factual information? John Finnegan Most online websites, including Ancestry and MyHeritage, automatically ‘privatise’ personally identifiable information about living people, ensuring nothing other than the most basic information (often just ‘living surname’) is visible to anyone but yourself. Therefore, you should be free to publish without worrying about breaking any laws or violating someone’s privacy. Have a genealogy question for Nick? Email letters@computeractive.co.uk with ‘Grow Your Family Tree’ in the subject line.…

Call me overcautious, but whenever I buy anything online, I take a screenshot of the order-confirmation page from the website involved. I’ve been stung too many times by online stores failing to email these proofs of purchase, so I prefer to take matters into my own hands. Useful though Windows’ screenshot tools are (Snipping Tool and its imminent successor ‘Snip & Sketch’), neither can capture full web pages. I’d have to take multiple screenshots as I scroll the page. Instead, I use something far more powerful – PicPick (https://picpick. app). It’s free for non-commercial use and comes loaded with extra features to make the whole screenshot process super smooth. And when that orderconfirmation page pops up, I simply use the Ctrl+Alt+Print Screen keyboard shortcut and PicPick captures the whole thing…

ALL-IN-ONE PC | £599 from PC World www.snipca.com/31856 Unlike Acer’s pricier S24 (see our review, Issue 532), a monitor with a PC built into its base, the C24 is a proper all-in-one, with its computer components in a neat bulge on the back of the screen. The rest narrows to under 12mm thick, which looks impressively slim, even if you’d have to squint to imagine the case was aluminium rather than silver plastic. It’s mounted on a simple two-pronged stand with a similar finish, which has no adjustment except tilt, but feels solid. With narrow bezels, the whole effect is quite elegant. “An elegant and sensible design makes up for so-so performance” As with most all-in-ones, the secret to fitting everything into such a small space is using a laptop…

What is it? Apple’s new top-end desktop PC, replacing the ‘tin can’ design from 2013. After six years of film and TV editors, animators, photographers, 3D artists and assorted digital professionals grumbling about the impossibility of installing standard graphics cards, expansion cards or disk drives, Apple’s creative team has reverted to a standard tower design. What does it do? It’s a really fast Mac. Intel’s Xeon processors provide world-class number-crunching with up to 28 cores, fed by up to 1.5 terabytes of memory. There are eight PCIe slots, and you can install any graphics card you want, with a special bracket called MPX (Mac Pro Expansion) supporting up to four. Alternatively, these can be used for hard drives, in addition to the standard fast SSD of up to 4TB. What’s…

What was it? Launched in August 2016, the Note 7 was the eighth version of Samsung’s high-end stylus phone. Not the seventh? No, the series went Note, Note II, Note 3, Note 3 Neo, Note 4, Note Edge, Note 5, then Note 7, to match the Galaxy S7. Which was the 27th in its series. I wish I hadn’t asked. Why did the Note 7 die? Users soon started reporting incidents in which it caught fire. At first these seemed isolated, but when numbers neared 100 in the US alone, Samsung announced a full recall of the product. Did they fix the problem? Samsung exchanged users’ Note 7s for new ones with batteries from a different supplier that had been well tested. Then some of those caught fire too. Samsung…

What you need: Internet-connected camera; OBS Studio software Time required: An hour of work, plus 24 hours to wait for streaming to be activated Video streaming is now commonplace, but most people have only ever considered watching streams. That’s a shame, because it’s very easy to publish your own video stream to the web and share it with friends and family. We’ve already looked at how you can set up an internet-connected webcam to build your own home-security system (see Issue 536). However, in that scenario we made sure the results were kept private. You don’t want just anyone viewing the comings and goings at your front door, after all. But what if you want to stream something that carries less of a security risk, such as the wildlife in…

GENEALOGY Use FindMyPast free in your library Regarding Derek Bethune’s tip in Issue 554 about libraries offering free access to Ancestry, I’d like to add that libraries in East Sussex provide free access to FindMyPast (I don’t know if this is available throughout the UK). I find Ancestry can be a bit frustrating, as it will often ignore any location you specify (eg, England) and throw up US search results regardless. Cannot grumble – it is free after all. But as if to compensate for the extra time some searches might take, some computers in my library let you request an additional 30 minutes. It’s worth checking whether any of your library computers have this option, as inevitably the result you were looking for will crop up in the 59th…

Wabbitemu Free Android www.snipca.com/31825 Emulate classic Texas Instruments graphing calculators, including the TI-83 and TI-84 special editions, on your Android device. You do need a ROM file to run in the emulator, but you can download one via the app. It then recreates the face of the calculator on your device screen, with every button working as it always did. Best For Retro calculating experience Desmos Graphing Calculator Free Android, iOS www.desmos.com Turn numbers into interactive, animated, customisable graphs, tables and charts using this magnificent app. As well as performing basic calculations, it helps you understand and analyse data by taking your numbers and functions and automatically visualising them - then changing as you tweak the numbers. Best For Turning calculations into graphs Handyman Calculator Free Android www.snipca.com/31823 Find out…

Set up a private group video chat Group video chats are perfect if you want to hold a meeting with club members who aren’t based locally. Most services also let you share your desktop if necessary. Which service is best for you will depend on how many people you want to include in your chat and which devices you’re likely to use. Here, we outline four of the best. Facebook If you use Facebook to keep in touch with your club members, it makes sense to arrange your group video chats through the site as well. With up to 50 people able to join the same call, there should be room for everyone. When there are six people or fewer in the call, each participant’s video is displayed; over six,…

Hide your personal files Whether it’s bank statements, personal letters or family photos, we’ve all got files on our PC that we want to keep away from prying eyes. If you share your PC or laptop with someone else - or are worried that it might get stolen - Virtual Hidden Disk (www.snipca.com/31895) provides a fast and effective way to keep your personal files hidden from view. To use it, run the program, click Settings, then select ‘Use hidden system folder’ and enter your password in both boxes (see screenshot below). Click Save, then Open. Your new drive will be created (press Windows key+E to see it in File Explorer) and ready to receive files. Click Close and the drive will disappear. If you close the Virtual Hidden Disk window…

Google will soon stop automatically syncing your photos and videos between Google Drive (https://drive.google.com) and its Photos website. This means that photos and videos you add to Photos will stop appearing in Drive, and vice versa. In addition, photos and videos you delete in one won’t be deleted in the other. In a blog post (www.snipca.com/31888), Google said the changes - due to be implemented in July - will make Photos and Drive less confusing and easier to use. It also added that one of the reasons for the change is to prevent users accidentally deleting a file from both sites when they think they’re just erasing it from one. To replace automatic syncing, Google will provide a new ‘Upload from Drive’ tool. This will appear on Google Photos, letting…

Broadband companies that charge existing customers more than new customers could face instant fines under new Government plans. It’s thought these ‘loyalty penalties’ end up costing UK customers billions of pounds every year. Ministers will consider whether to let the Competitions and Market Authority (CMA) fine firms without having to go through the courts first. The Government hopes the threat of immediate fines will deter companies from treating customers unfairly. Other industries like energy, insurance and phone networks would also be covered. Companies could also be fined for inserting unfair terms in a contract’s small print and making contracts hard to cancel. Specifically, the Government wants contracts to be “as easy to exit as they are to enter”. In addition, it plans to give telecoms regulator Ofcom more powers to…

The concept of ‘open banking’ doesn’t sound very secure, but it will help you keep a closer eye on all your accounts, and in theory make it easier to spot fraud. Introduced by the Government earlier this year, it gives banks access to accounts you hold with other banks. They can show you this info within their own app, so you don’t waste time logging into different websites. It’s completely safe: banks require your permission to show rival accounts, and will never share your login details. Lloyds already lets you add rival current accounts to its app (see screenshot), as does Barclays, but it has now become the first bank to also show savings and credit-card accounts you hold with other banks. At the moment, you can only see these…

In Consumeractive you often mention how infuriating the word “reasonable” is. You rightly say that it appears too many times in law, leading to confusion and ambiguity. What’s reasonable to the retailer may, for example, be unreasonable to the customer (and vice versa of course). That’s why I wasn’t jumping for joy after reading your news story in Issue 556 (page 9) about broadband providers “promising” to let customers cancel without a fee if they can’t fix problems. It sounds good, but read on and you’ll notice they’ve given themselves a get-out clause: they’ve got a “reasonable” time to fix these problems. How long will this be? Weeks? Months? I’m willing to bet it won’t be hours or days. Don’t be fooled by this commitment from broadband companies. The reason…

I’ve had very good service from Alpine Computers (https://alpinesystems.co.uk), run by Paul Fryer, based in Bishop’s Cleeve near Cheltenham. The company tends to specialise in flight-simulation computers, of which I’ve been a bit of a fanatic for over 30 years. I’ve visited the company a couple of times to see how it’s set up, and been very impressed. I bought a PC from Alpine in 2017 that was purposefully built as a flight-simulator machine, running Prepar3D (www.prepar3d.com). Paul installed all the software, and helped me to perfect the system, including ‘spanning’ the displays on my three AOC 27in monitors (you recommended these some time ago - they’re great!). He is extremely meticulous in how he puts systems together, so I would definitely recommend his company. Howard L Smith Has a…

VIDEO CAPTURE OBS Studio 23.2 https://obsproject.com What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 OBS Studio is a free, open-source tool that lets you record video from multiple sources, including your Windows desktop and anything captured by your webcam. You can integrate multiple sources into the same scene - so you could have your desktop on one side and your webcam footage on the other. OBS Studio also links to live-streaming services, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitch (see How To…, page 37 for info on how to do this). You can use these services to broadcast to private groups, such as friends and family, or to members of a club you belong to. For a detailed guide on how to set up live streaming, take a look at the…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: Driver Manager When Windows 10 launched in 2015, I was hopeful that the chore of updating PC drivers was finally over. At the time, Microsoft seemed to promise that Windows would now handle this boring task automatically, updating hardware drivers as part of Windows Update (WU). Sadly, however, things haven’t panned out quite as I’d hoped. On my PC, for example, some drivers appear to get updated automatically via WU, but others need to be updated manually via Device Manager or directly from the manufacturer’s website. Using a driver manager tool should make the process less painful by checking for and downloading any updates for you. The trouble is that many of these tools are designed either to extract money from you or clog up…

LAPTOP | £839 from Insight www.snipca.com/31863 What’s in a name? Well, how long have you got. The Satellite Pro was made by Toshiba until Toshiba got tangled up in a US accounting scandal and had to sell off various parts of itself. The laptop part became a company, mostly owned by Sharp, called Dynabook. As every computer-history geek knows, ‘Dynabook’ was Alan Kay’s name for a digital tablet concept in the early 1970s. But Dynabook (the company) isn’t named after that. It’s named after a laptop that Toshiba made in 1989 and called, for reasons nobody seems clear on, the DynaBook. Dynabook (the company) says it followed Toshiba’s invention of the first laptop, the T1100, in 1985. “A bulky throwback with a large screen and keyboard and scope for upgrading”…

VIRTUAL-REALITY HEADSET | £400 from Scan www.snipca.com/31908 You may have noticed we’ve started mentioning the SteamVR benchmark score in our reviews of games-oriented PCs. This number (out of 11, for fans of Spinal Tap) indicates how well the system’s processor and graphics card cope with the demands of a connected virtual reality (VR) headset, such as the Oculus Rift or HTC Vive. Desktop PCs costing around £1,000 can now get top marks, but if you weren’t planning to upgrade at the moment, that expense and around £400 for a headset might put VR out of reach. “It doesn’t use a PC at all – pop on the headset and play” The Quest is a different proposition, because for £400 (or £500 with twice the storage) you get everything you need…

HARD DRIVE | £132 from Lambda-Tek www.snipca.com/31917 Unlike Toshiba-branded laptops (see page 24), the Canvio Premium is actually made by Toshiba, and Toshiba is very pleased with it. ‘A better class of storage,’ it calls it, snootily. The Canvio Premium has an aluminium case with diamond-cut chamfered edges, finished in dark grey or silver, which does look quite posh. On the inside, though, it’s just a hard drive. With a compact 2.5in mechanism, which works off USB power without a mains plug, it’s properly portable. It even comes with a handy USB to USB-C adapter, so you can plug it into either port. But still, it’s a hard drive. That means it’s a lot slower – and, some might say, less classy – than an SSD. True, in an external…

LAPTOP HP Envy 13 £799 from www.snipca.com/29555 Tested Issue 539 The combination of an eighth-generation quad-core i5 chip and MX 150 graphics makes this an excellent all-round laptop, let down only by the poor colour reproduction of its Full HD touchscreen. Seven-hour battery life is adequate, and it’s nicely made. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 This premium laptop starts at £1,200, but the best deal is with the brand new quad-core i7-8550 and QHD touchscreen. £1,450 from www.snipca.com/26796 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 9.7 £349 from www.snipca.com/30707 Tested Issue 501 Now discounted and with a stylus included, this full-size HDR tablet is a better deal than the new Tab S4 (see Issue 540). Apple’s faster £319 iPad with optional £89 Pencil is superior, but lacks microSD expansion. ALTERNATIVE Amazon Fire…

ANDROID & iOS Share your screen during a Skype video chat Skype’s mobile app (www.snipca.com/31838) now lets you display your own device’s screen to the person you’re chatting with, instead of the view from your front or back camera. It’s the long-distance version of physically showing someone your device, so you can scroll them through your latest photos, play them an online video, or even demonstrate a problem with your device settings. They can’t interact with your screen, but they can see what you see. To use the new feature, you’ll need the latest version of Skype and be running Android 6.0 (or higher) or iOS 12 (or higher). You may need to ‘invite’ contacts to get Skype even if they have it. If so, they’ll receive a link that…

WINDOWS 7, 8.1, 10 Select program window faster using keyboard shortcuts You may already know that pressing Alt+Tab is a quick way to cycle through your running programs. But if you have multiple items open, finding the one you want isn’t always easy. In this case it may be better to use the lesser-known Windows key+[number] keyboard shortcut. For example, to open the first program on your taskbar, press Windows key+1, for the second item press Windows key+2, and so on. If you choose a program that has more than one window running, repeatedly press the keyboard shortcut until the one you want is selected (in our screenshot above, we pressed Windows key+2 twice to open our second Chrome window). You can also open a new window for any program…

What is it? The codename for a new type of laptop marketed by Intel that it claims will fix the biggest problem users face: poor battery life. It wants devices to last at least nine hours in what it calls “real-world performance conditions”. What are these conditions? Simply using a laptop like a normal person would – browsing the web with the screen on full brightness. Laptop manufacturers by contrast calculate battery life by how long the device can play a video, often with Wi-Fi turned off and the screen dimmed. This boosts battery life because it uses less processor power, but doesn’t reflect how most people use their laptop. If manufacturers rise to Intel’s challenge, we might see a new generation of ultrabooks. What are they again? Back in…

Use a less cluttered Gmail Google continues adding more and more features to Gmail. Some are useful, others gimmicky - but they all take their toll on its initial concept. What was once a simple email service has now become crammed with buttons, icons, menus and other graphics. Former Gmail designer Michael Leggett decided it was all too much and so created the wonderful Simplify Gmail extension (Chrome www.snipca.com/31900; Firefox www.snipca.com/31901). It removes all the frills and provides a cleaner design that lets you focus on your email. All the original buttons and controls are still available, but they’re hidden within dropdown menus. And with a click of the Simplify icon in your browser toolbar (see screenshot), you can quickly switch back to the old Gmail layout whenever you want.…

Q I’ve smashed my old iPhone 6’s screen so, much to the annoyance of my wallet, I’m in the market for a new iPhone. I was looking at some of the modern handsets and the choice is a bit overwhelming. In particular, I’m really not sure of the difference between LED and OLED screens, the latter of which seem to feature on the most expensive iPhones. I’ve read Apple’s product pages but it’s so full of marketing speak that I’m really none the wiser. So, please, could you explain the difference in a way that I can understand? David Archer A First, are you aware that it’s reasonably cheap and easy to get a screen replacement? Apple will do it for around £133 (www.snipca.com/31782), though you’ll find many a specialist…

Having a problem with our recommended software or expert tips? Email editor@computeractive.co.uk and we’ll do our best to help Why did you recommend an analogue tuner? Q I’ve followed the TV industry for 50 years, and I wish to tell you that your response to Gerd Gerhard in Issue 555’s Reviews section (page 26) was inaccurate. The first part of your reply is fine. However, when you turn to analogue TV signals your answer is wrong. There are no analogue TV transmissions in the UK and have not been since 2012. As well, all aerials designed for reception of UHF TV signals are able to receive any such signals regardless of the form of modulation used – so there’s no such thing as a ‘digital’ aerial (that’s a marketing ploy).…

1080p Of the common types of high-definition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 pixels. 256bit Advanced Encryption Standard. A form of encryption based on a key length of 256 bits. Cracking it would take longer than the age of the universe. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much data a PC can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 6K Video with a horizontal resolution of 6144x3160 pixels. ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Represents each character on a PC keyboard as a number. Bandwidth A measure of how much data can be transferred through a connection at one time. Biometric Using measurable personal characteristics, such…

QWERTY was designed to slow typists down, as you probably know. But QWERTY has nothing on Insert, which was surely designed only to mess with our heads. Does anyone ever press Insert on purpose? Rhetorical question – of course they don’t. They press it accidentally then continue to type away while glaring down at the keyboard because they never learnt to touch type, unaware that Insert has turned their cursor into a vicious paragraph-gobbling Pac-Man that’s busy overwriting their work. By “their” I do, of course, mean “my”. Then there’s F12. There it sits, right above Delete, ready to leap into action at the mere hint of a twitchy little finger, shoving a big HTML information panel into my Google Docs page. And Caps Lock. Who put Caps Lock there?…