Table of contents for 544 in Computeractive

No, don’t worry - Microsoft hasn’t released a new version of Windows during Christmas, sneaking it out while the rest of us were falling asleep on the sofa weighed down by turkey and brussels sprouts. In fact, Microsoft says it will never release another brand new version. It wants Windows 10 to be a continuous “service”, improved by twice-yearly updates, not a one-off operating system. That’s fine in theory, but will the updates (when they work) ever provide the same performance leap as from, for example, Vista to 7? Probably not. For that kind of improvement, you need to invent your own Windows 11, adding the tools it currently lacks. Start by installing the software recommended by Will Stapley in our Cover Feature (page 50). As 2019 begins, I’d like…

Telecoms regulator Ofcom has said broadband providers should be forced to tell customers what their best deals are when their initial contracts are coming to an end, as part of its push to make sure loyal customers don’t pay more than they need to. These notifications would include special discounts available only to new customers. Ofcom also said companies should email their deals to customers once a year, so they are regularly told about cheaper packages they could switch to. As well as broadband, the new rules would apply to mobile, landline phone and pay-TV contracts. These proposals strengthen Ofcom’s existing proposals to protect customers whose contract is coming to an end. It previously called for companies to email or write to customers between 40 to 70 days before their…

For the first time more than half the world’s population has access to the internet, the United Nations has said. Around 3.9 billion people are online – 51.2 per cent of the global population, rising from 48 per cent in 2017. Houlin Zhao, Secretary General of the UN agency for information and communication technologies (ITU), called the milestone “an important step towards a more inclusive global information society”. However, he acknowledged that “far too many people around the world are still waiting to reap the benefits of the digital economy”. The gains are strongest in developing countries, rising from 7.7 per cent in 2005 to 45.3 per cent now, with much of this down to increased mobile internet access. Africa saw the biggest growth, from 2.1 to 24.4 per cent.…

Not so smug after being ‘tricked’ by Amazon Prime December came and so did the first issue of my renewed subscription to Computeractive. As a pensioner I now have to think long and hard about my magazine subscriptions, and initially cancelled them all. But I could not stop myself getting involved on the old PC and continually reading about all these scamming traps in the online world. I read your response to Graham Arnold in Issue 542 about being tricked into signing up for Amazon Prime, and then checked my credit-card bill. To my horror there was a £7.99 charge for Prime membership, so I followed your advice and cancelled it post-haste. Now feeling quite smug, I mentioned this incident to my wife. She said, “What about November and October…

LEAD CASE Is a pay-monthly extended warranty worth the money? Q I bought a Daewoo American-style fridge-freezer for £599 from Dixons in May 2011, paying £4.99 a month for an extended warranty. After it stopped working in October, engineers came out twice, but couldn’t fix it as neither of them had the right part. I was told the part wasn’t in stock, so a repair couldn’t be booked. Dixons is ignoring the fact that I told them I’d contacted Daewoo and was told the part is no longer made. Can you help? Claire Maughan A We can, and we did. Claire had been without a fridge-freezer for three weeks, so we contacted Dixons. It wrote off the item, and gave Claire a £599 voucher to buy a replacement. But we…

What can I use to transfer iPad photos to my PC? Q I agree with your article about iTunes being a junk offender (Named & Shamed, Issue 541). Could you advise an alternative to iTunes for transferring photos between iPad and PC? John Beckett A Apple would have you believe iCloud Photo (which uploads your photos directly to Apple’s cloud storage) is the best way to get photos off an iPad or iPhone. Although handy, it’s not great if you then want to transfer them to a computer because there’s no option to download multiple photos from iCloud. Instead, you have to download each photo individually, which is painfully slow. Another option is to simply plug your iPad into your PC using its USB cable and use File Explorer in…

There are two kinds of computer companies. International brands place multi-million-pound component orders and assemble thousands of computers a day in huge factories in the Far East. Small system builders, on the other hand, buy parts on the open market and put together PCs on British industrial estates. Generally, the first is a great way to make laptops, because you can design everything to fit together perfectly in a small space; and the second is ideal for desktop PCs, because you can change the specifications as fast as you want to take advantage of new technology or falling prices. But here’s a desktop PC made by a top name that’s better known for its laptops. Does it break the mould? “Acer takes on the UK’s custom PC builders – and…

What does it do? Much the same as any other hard drive. What’s new about the Exos drive Seagate is working on, which could arrive in 2019, is how much it can pack into the standard 3.5in slab. It uses heatassisted magnetic recording (HAMR) to squeeze data closer together. Seagate says it’s very reliable. Why would I want it? It’s the perfect place for those two billion pages of Word documents you’ve got lying around! All right, that’s silly. But if 16 terabytes sounds a lot, consider that to store one whole movie in original cinema-quality 8K you’d need at least half as much again. What’s the catch? Hard drives are still slow. We’d expect copying the whole 16TB drive to take well over a day. So can I do…

Q When O2’s mobile-data network went down in December (see page 9), it made me think about how reliant I am on 4G. When a network fails, or just doesn’t have reception, why can’t I hop on a different one? Are there SIM cards that allow this? Janice Anderson A Good question. Back in 2014, Sajid Javid, then Digital Minister, asked UK mobile networks to look at offering multi-carrier SIMs. They looked, and said they didn’t want to. Virtual networks such as Anywhere SIM (see www.snipca.com/30042, pictured) and Pebble (www.snipca.com/30043) can connect to multiple carriers, but their tariffs won’t suit everyone. It’s impractical to use a second-network SIM as a backup – you’d have two phone numbers and you’d need to swap SIMs manually. While dual-SIM phones are common in…

What was it? Announced by Bill Gates in 2003, these digital watches could receive news and messages wirelessly. Although watch makers Citizen, Fossil and Suunto were on board, customers had to wait a year until the first ones appeared, in January 2004. In October, Swatch joined the platform with its Paparazzi model (pictured). Why did it die? The Paparazzi cost $150, (around £100, had it gone on sale in the UK, equivalent to £150 today). Prices ranged up to $725 for a Tissot model. On top of this, MSN Direct required a $59 annual subscription, and rather than using mobile networks, Microsoft broadcast data over FM radio. This Heath Robinson arrangement was limited to major urban areas of the US and Canada, and never made it to other countries. By…

What you need: Internet connection; optional VoIP app Time required: 30 minutes Do you hesitate when asked to provide a phone number? You’re not alone. Booking accommodation, placing online orders and even reserving products in a high-street store often requires a phone number. That’s why those in the know use disposable numbers. Known in the trade as ‘burners’, disposable numbers route your call over the internet. They work like a regular number, but are set up to be used for a short period of time. As we’ll show you, they’re entirely portable, and live happily alongside your regular number on your smartphone. You don’t even need to change your SIM card. 1 Consider your options Most providers of burner numbers dish out only American or Canadian numbers, but Flipper (www.flipperapp.co.uk)…

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Create a virtual Home button on your iPad if the physical one stops working My three-year old iPad Mini 2 still works perfectly – except for one crucial thing: the all-important Home button only worked intermittently for a while and has now stopped functioning altogether. When I enquired about a repair, I was told it would cost me at least £100. Thankfully, I learned about iOS’s Accessibility function that lets you control your iPhone or iPad (even if the Home button stops working) by adding a virtual button on your screen. It only took five minutes to to set this up. Open Settings, tap General and select Accessibility, then scroll down to the Interaction section and select AssistiveTouch. Switch on the Assistive Touch slider (see screenshot),…

WINDOWS 10 Use Edge’s new dictionary One of the new features added to Windows 10’s Edge browser in the October 2018 Update is a dictionary that you can use when browsing online articles in Reading View, or while reading ebooks and PDF files. You first need to switch on the feature, so click the three dots at the top right of the browser, Settings at the bottom, then scroll to the bottom of the section that opens. Now switch on the ‘Show definitions inline for’ slider and tick Books, ‘Reading view’ and ‘PDF files’ (see right of screenshot below). To activate Reading View in Edge when reading an article online, click the book icon in your URL bar. You’ll now see the article with a sepia theme and no adverts.…

What is it? The third and latest version of HTTP (hypertext transport protocol - the first of many acronyms and abbreviations here, so please bear with us), which is the system web browsers use to fetch web pages from servers. It should lead to a faster experience when browsing the web. Why’s that? Because it’s very QUIC. That’s Google’s name for its Quick UDP Internet Connections system, which it started developing in 2013, and suggested three years later as a successor to HTTP/2. It cuts the number of times computers need to request data from a server when downloading information via HTTP. It also estimates in advance the bandwidth connections require, and spaces packets of data accordingly. Together, these techniques make web pages load faster. Google’s brainwave was to ditch…

Fake online chatbots Chatbots are used by many companies these days to provide automated answers to basic customer queries. However, security company WatchGuard (www.snipca.com/30082) has warned that in 2019 fake chatbot windows could be inserted into hacked websites, including online banking services. Using advanced artificial intelligence (AI), it’s feared these could fool people into providing personal information (such as passwords or account numbers), or may offer links to dangerous websites and downloads. Protect yourself: Be sceptical when using any form of online chat. Most official websites never ask for personal information. If you suspect something is wrong, close the chat window and contact the company by phone instead. Phishing emails get personal This year, phishing emails will become much harder to spot – and it’s all down to the rise…

Why don’t I have Windows Defender? Q In Issue 541’s ‘Get a complete health check for your PC’ Workshop (page 38) the first step says to type windows defender security center. However, it seems my Windows 10 Home PC does not have that! When I type this the search box just shows a web link. Does this work only on Windows 10 Pro, perhaps? Dennis Anthony A We do need to clarify, but you can thank Microsoft for constantly chopping and changing the names of Windows’ features. Between two Windows builds the company quietly changed the name of Windows Defender Security Center. So, it’s now called Windows Security. While this rebranded version contains more or less all the same tools, searching for it using the term we published won’t work…

1080p Of the common types of high-definition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 pixels. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 802.11ac A standard for wireless networks that allows for much faster transfer speeds than 802.11n. Add-in Microsoft’s name for tools that can be added to Office software. Adobe 1998 A colour space using a monitor’s primary colours to encompass a printer’s CMYK colours. AMOLED Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode. An alternative technology to LCD for creating flat-panel displays. Antivirus engine The core component of an antivirus program that detects malware. Aperture An opening that controls the amount of light entering a camera lens. Bandwidth A measure of how much data can be transferred through a connection at one time.…

The thing they never tell you about middle age is the amount of storage space you’ll need for videos. I gave up wanting to wave cameras at pop stars many moons ago. Now I just want to point my phone at squirrels, swans and my oboe-playing teenage niece, for hours on end, and then proudly show my videos to the world. But the world won’t have them, thanks to 30-second upload limits and reduced attention spans. In gentler times, audiences were happy to exhale at length in front of Interlude films (here’s my favourite, a vision of my own future: www.snipca.com/29825). Today, audiences want instant gratification. You have a video of a gnat sneezing? Sorry, too long. Next. But they don’t just want gratification to be instant. It has to…

BT LAUNCHES ‘COMPLETE WI‒FI’ HUB ROUTER BT has launched its Smart Hub 2 router (pictured), which offers the company’s new Complete Wi-Fi service, a form of mesh Wi-Fi that boosts coverage around the home. However, it’s available only to BT Plus customers - the company’s joint fibrebroadband and 4G package (www.snipca.com/30118), which starts at £54.99 a month. To use Complete Wi-Fi you’ll need to pay an extra £5 a month. We’ll review it soon. 123456 STILL MOST COMMON PASSWORD For the sixth year in a row ‘123456’ is the world’s most common password, beating ‘password’ itself into second place. Software company SplashData has been publishing annual lists since 2011, when ‘password’ was the most popular. Its results come from analysing five million passwords leaked online. New entries include ‘princess’ and…

You’ll soon receive an automatic £8 a day in compensation for loss of landline or broadband, after Openreach agreed a scheme with BT, Sky, TalkTalk, Virgin Media and Zen Internet. It will apply only if the fault hasn’t been fixed during the first two days. There will also be £25 compensation if an engineer does not arrive on schedule, or cancels within 24 hours, plus £5 a day for new services not starting on time. Plusnet and EE have already suggested they will also sign up to the voluntary plan, which is due to come into force in early 2019. Telecoms regulator Ofcom set out the compensation amounts in November 2017, giving ISPs 15 months to implement it. Openreach, which runs the UK’s broadband and telephone network, said it would…

WATCH OUT FOR… Battery-draining Android apps What’s the threat? Criminals infiltrated the Google Play Store with apps that – once installed – started clicking repeatedly on online adverts, draining your device’s battery. Through this scam, known as ‘clickfraud’, the criminals running the adverts received money every time they are clicked. Researchers at antivirus firm Sophos discovered 22 apps carrying out the scam. In total these had been downloaded more than two million times. Half of these downloads were for just one app, Sparkle Flashlight, which turns your phone’s LED camera into a torch. Other apps included the game Neon Pong and the magnifying-glass Magnifeye (pictured). Visit www.snipca.com/30125 and scroll to the bottom for the full list. Until Google removed them in late November, most of the apps had been available…

I’m the world’s proudest granddad so like John Hilditch (‘Using iPad in cot is lazy parenting’, Issue 543), I too have concerns about kids being exposed to tech too early in life. However, having watched the recent BBC 2 documentary The Wonderful World of Babies, I’m not so worried. An experiment showed that two year olds who used tablets had better dexterity skills than non-users-being able to draw straighter lines and balance more blocks. Also, anecdotally, my grandson, now five, has learnt so much. At two and a half, he drew zig zags and said they were sound waves. At three, he asked if a tractor dynamo has an inverter. And at four, on seeing my Philips sound bar, told me that the company also makes CT scanners. He also…

Find misspelled ancestor names No matter how diligently you plot someone’s life, key pieces of information can remain elusive. Perhaps the person mysteriously vanishes from one census only to reappear in the next. There are many reasons why someone’s records may be missing – for example, they may not have registered for a census, as the National Archives explains at www.snipca.com/29956. Sometimes, however, your ancestor is simply listed under a misspelled name, either because it was entered that way on the original document or it was typed incorrectly into an online form, perhaps because the writing was difficult to read. Look for close matches Genealogy websites recognise this kind of error, and include names in the search results that are phonetically similar to the one you want (Davis and Davies,…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: iPhone ‘bloatware’ Pre-installed junk - also known as bloatware - is a pain on new PCs, but it’s even more of a nuisance on phones and tablets, where storage comes at a premium. Take my new iPhone XS, for example. Apple’s ‘basic’ devices are already expensive, but the company charges silly money for phones with higher storage capacity, so I opted for a modest 64GB model. I was somewhat anxious about this, because Apple doesn’t let you add more space by popping in a cheap memory card. So, you can imagine my anger when I received the phone, only to discover that there was a paltry 55GB left. iOS itself accounts for some of this, but it turns out that more than half my missing…

Windows 10 PCs In the past 18 months, Intel’s eighth-generation processors and Nvidia’s GeForce 10-series GPUs have dramatically improved PC performance, with strong competition from AMD’s Ryzen and Radeon. That might make you wary of picking a new machine before you’ve seen what 2019 has to offer. But it shouldn’t. Current eighth-gen configurations are great value, and you can get a very capable desktop PC for under £800, despite the fall in the value of the pound. Those planning to spend significantly more may want to wait for prices of the recently unveiled ninth-generation i5-9600K, i7-9700K and i9-9900K (pictured) to settle down. But the next big advances in consumer silicon aren’t expected until the end of the year. SHOULD I WAIT? Probably not Windows 10 tablets This time last year…

LAPTOP HP Envy 13 £849 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. £1,350 from www.snipca.com/26796 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 9.7 £470 from www.snipca.com/27058 Tested Issue 501 Samsung’s new mid-sized tablet has a wonderful HDR screen and comes with a pen, unlike Apple’s iPad Pro. But its processor isn’t the fastest and it’s disappointingly expensive, especially compared to the £319 iPad 9.7in. ALTERNATIVE Asus ZenPad 3S 10…

What you need: Android phone or tablet; iPhone or iPad Time required: 20 minutes Google recently launched a new free app called Voice Access that lets you navigate and control your phone and tablet - from opening apps to typing and sending emails - using only your voice. If you use an iPhone or iPad, skip to Step 6 to see how you can do the same thing using iOS’s built-in voice assistant Siri. STEP 1 Install and open Voice Access (www.snipca.com/30059) on your Android phone or tablet, then tap OK. This takes you to your phone’s Accessibility settings where you need to grant the app permission to use your mic. Tap Voice Access, tap the Voice Access slider to turn it on 1, then tap OK 2. You’ll now…

ANDROID & iOS Create artistic images in Snapseed A ‘colour pop’ image is one where the subject of your photo is in colour, while the background is black and white. It’s a nice effect if you want to focus on just one element of the image or just get a bit artistic. We’ll show you how to achieve this effect using our favourite free photo-editing app, Snapseed (Android www.snipca.com/29990; iOS www.snipca.com/29991). Tap the Open button at the top left of the app, then the three lines at the top left for options to select and open a photo from your device’s gallery, Google Photos or Google Drive. Next, select the Pop effect at the bottom, then tap the tick icon at the bottom right. Next, tap the Tools tab at…

MICROSOFT OUTLOOK Distinguish emails in your inbox Outlook has a useful Conditional Formatting feature that lets you customise how messages appear in your inbox based on criteria you set. This can be useful to identify important emails faster, for example. Here, we’ll show you how to apply a different font style and size for emails from a particular recipient. First, click the View tab, click View Settings at the top left, then the Conditional Formatting button at the bottom left. You’ll now see a list of email categories. To add your own, click the Add button at the top right, then name this whatever you want. Next, click the Font button, select the font style and size you want for these emails, then click the Condition button at the bottom…

BT has upgraded its Wi-Fi street kiosks to make them easier to use for people with hearing and sight problems, though has been forced to close some in London because they had been taken over by drug dealers. The company’s InLink kiosks (pictured), which are replacing over 1,000 payphones across the UK, provide free Wi-Fi at speeds up to 1Gbps (1,000Mbps). They also let you make free 30-second phone calls, charge your phone, and show local maps on a touchscreen. The kiosks now have BT’s next-generation text (NGT) service, which lets callers type the words they want to communicate. These are then spoken by a ‘relay assistant’ to the person receiving the call, whose responses are typed by the assistant and sent back to the caller. Users will be able…

Astreet in the Gloucestershire village of Bamfurlong has been named as the slowest for broadband in the annual survey of UK speeds from comparison site uSwitch. Homes in Greenmeadows Park in the village averaged just 0.14Mbps, nearly 1,900 times slower than the fastest street, Abdon Avenue in Birmingham, where speeds hit 265Mbps. This was much higher than the second fastest, Redwell Grove in West Malling, Kent, which averaged 178Mbps (see the full results at www.snipca.com/30099). At 0.14Mbps it would take more than 102 hours to download a two-hour HD film on Netflix. At 265Mbps this would take less than four minutes. USwitch’s figures were based on more than 279,000 broadband speed tests by members of the public. They show that the UK’s average speed is 46.2Mbps, though just over a…

Even if you don’t use the world’s most popular password ‘123456’ (see page 7), your accounts are vulnerable to attack because the dark web is swarming with stolen login details. To check quickly if yours have been taken, visit Have I Been Pwned? (https://haveibeenpwned.com, HIBP?), as we’ve recommended many times. Spybot Identity Monitor shares the same database of leaked passwords as HIBP?, but provides a more thorough, long-term method of monitoring your accounts. Once you’ve added multiple user names and email addresses, add it to the Windows Scheduled Task tool so it launches whenever you log into your PC, checking for new examples of your details being leaked. To do this, click Settings at the top of Spybot Identity Monitor, then turn on ‘Re-test for breaches at each Logon’ (see…

I have grave concerns about the police letting the public report incidents to a ‘chatbot’ (‘Question of the Fortnight’, Issue 543, pictured). When you report a criminal incident it should feel like you’re performing a social duty. You should do so with care and diligence. You should be respectful of the seriousness of the process. It’s much harder to uphold these standards when you’re simply typing words for a robot to read. I foresee two problems. One, the public will abuse the system by exaggerating what they’ve seen or simply lie. A chatbot won’t be able to ask the kind of nuanced questions that could expose lies. Also, talking to another human - particularly one in a uniform - forces you to respect them (well, it should, anyway). The other…

PORTABLE SOFTWARE PortableApps Platform 16 http://portableapps.com What you need: 7, 8/8.1 or 10 Traditional software can be more hassle than it’s worth, often entangling itself in the Windows registry, changing system settings and refusing to fully uninstall. In contrast, portable software requires no installation and can be run directly from a USB stick, so it never gets near the internal Windows system. PortableApps Platform makes using portable software simple, helping you to find, organise and run them. You can install it on a USB stick, in online storage (such as Dropbox or Google Drive), or on your PC. Once it’s installed, hunting down portable apps is a breeze - click Apps, Get More Apps, choose a category, then browse the list and tick those you want. PortableApps Platform will then…

In the good old days, children went to school to learn. Nowadays, they go to school to have their data stolen – at least they do if they were taught by Darren Harrison. Mr Harrison was suspended from his position as deputy head of Isleworth Town Primary School in west London after it was discovered he had uploaded personal data about pupils taken from his previous schools in Richmond. Investigations revealed he had stolen the data using a USB stick. It’s shocking to think that not even our children are safe from data thieves. And the fact that the data thief in question was someone whose job it was to protect children’s welfare is a gross abuse of trust. Thankfully, Mr Harrison was successfully prosecuted under Section 55 of the…

Huawei, the giant Chinese tech manufacturer you can’t pronounce, is in the news because of government security concerns about its products, but its smartphones are deservedly popular. Xiaomi, the other giant Chinese tech company you can’t pronounce, hasn’t sold its phones in the UK until now, so the Mi 8 Pro is our first taste of what users elsewhere have known for years: this is another company that makes really nice phones at very competitive prices. “A mid-range phone with a superior screen and processor” The Mi 8 Pro’s price tag invites comparison with the OnePlus 6T (£499 from www.snipca.com/29844, see our review, Issue 543), and on paper they have a lot in common. The big AMOLED screen gives bright, accurate colour, even if it’s not quite as sharp or…

AirForShare* Free Android: www.snipca.com/29995 iOS: www.snipca.com/29996 This app lets you share text, links or files across your PC (download from www.airforshare.com), phone and tablet, as long as all are connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Items you share are available for 30 minutes before it’s deleted. The free version limits you to 5MB file size each share. InboxIt* Free Android: www.snipca.com/29994 Email app InboxIt adds an option to your device’s Share menu that lets you save any online articles (to read offline) with one tap – great for those longer articles you want to read on the train. You can also save images and videos offline (up to 25MB). Clips Free iOS: www.snipca.com/29997 Apple has updated its Clips app with some excellent new features that make it even better for…

Share a club calendar for 2019 events New year is a great time to plan club events and add them to a shared calendar. Your members will be able to access it from the web, a smartphone or tablet, and see last-minute changes without having to check their email. We’ll show you how to create one using Google Calendar. It’s free, but requires a Google account so, if you don’t already have one, head to www.snipca.com/29987 and follow the instructions. Create a calendar Go to www.snipca.com/29986 and sign into your Google account. The first time you use Calendar, Google will detect your location and ask whether you want to set your time zone to match. Click Yes if the time zone it shows is correct. If not, click Settings and…