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My first attempts at selling on eBay were disastrous. I signed up in 2000, a year or so after it launched in the UK, and listed all the junk I could find in my loft. It mostly comprised football programmes, seven-inch singles, and lots of tech in formats that had become obsolete. None of it sold. It took a lot of trial and error before I worked out the secrets of successful selling - choosing the right price, description, photos and end time. It didn’t make me rich, but I made enough money to buy more football programmes, seven-inch singles, and tech in formats that were about to become obsolete. We followed these tips when listing items for our Cover Feature - on Amazon Marketplace as well as eBay -…

STOP USING ITUNES ON XP & VISTA Apple has said it will soon end support for the iTunes Store on Windows XP and Vista computers. From 25 May you’ll no longer be able to use those operating systems to make or re-download purchases from the store. You’ll still be able to use old versions of the store, but these won’t receive any further security updates from Apple. Read more on the company’s site: www.snipca.com/27120. NOKIA BRINGS BACK OLD ‘BANANA’ PHONE Nokia is to bring back another popular old phone, following the success of its 3310 last year. In May it will relaunch the 8110, which was much loved in the final few years of the 20th century. It was nicknamed the ‘banana’ phone because of the shape formed when the…

Children are using tablets and phones so much that their fingers lack the strength to hold a pencil properly, doctors have warned. Sally Payne, head paediatric occupational therapist at the Heart of England NHS Foundation Trust, said that “children are not coming into school with the hand strength and dexterity they had 10 years ago”. She added: “To be able to grip a pencil and move it, you need strong control of the fine muscles in your fingers. Children need lots of opportunity to develop those skills.” Ms Payne believes this is due to kids using iPads and phones, instead of doing more traditional “muscle-building” exercises involving building blocks, paper and glue. Other health experts point to the dangers of inactivity. Karin Bishop, assistant director at the Royal College of…

Tell us what’s on your mind Email: letters@computeractive.co.uk Facebook: www.facebook.com/computeractive Twitter: @ComputerActive www.twitter.com/computeractive Virgin’s V6 box better than slow TiVo Surely George Griffiths (Letters, Issue 522) cannot recommend Virgin’s TiVo over the V6 (pictured)? He should read the Virgin forums (http://community.virginmedia.com) to see how fed up people were with TiVo getting slow. A couple of months ago I was so fed up with how slow the original TiVo had become that I phoned Virgin and told them I was leaving unless they fixed it. After much haggling they agreed I could have a deal with my existing package, including V6 for 2p less per month than I was already paying! They said I could keep the old TiVo for existing recordings and it would make a spare cable tuner too.…

Contact us so we can investigate your case Email: consumeractive@computeractive.co.uk Please include both your phone number and address. Should Amazon fix my tablet? Q I bought a £230 Huawei MediaPad tablet from Amazon in November last year, but the battery no longer charges properly. I contacted Amazon and was told that I was 12 days outside of the company’s automatic refund policy, so would have to contact Huawei. Do I have to deal with Huawei, or it is Amazon’s responsibility? Judith Malet Veale A No, Judith doesn’t have to deal with Huawei, unless she wants to use its warranty. The tablet is barely three months old, so under the Consumer Rights Act (CRA) it’s Amazon’s responsibility. Customers often want to speed things up by contacting the manufacturer directly under warranty,…

WATCH OUT FOR… Malicious Word docs sent by email What’s the threat? Hackers have worked out how to infect computers with malicious Word documents – even if the victim has turned off macros in Microsoft Office. A macro is a series of commands that automatically perform repetitive tasks. They simplify complex actions, and are triggered by pressing a key on your keyboard. However, they are written in a code that’s easy for hackers to turn into malware. Infecting Office documents then emailing them was a common tactic in the 1990s because back then Microsoft switched on macros by default. It meant that once a victim opened a file, the infected macro would automatically run, wreaking havoc on the computer. One of the most famous macro viruses was Melissa, which struck…

What does it do? Covers the lens of any camera incorporated into a device. It‘s a feature we’re seeing more often: the Somfy One home-security camera (see our review, Issue 518, pictured right) has a prominent shutter that closes automatically when you de-activate it, and manufacturers such as HP and Lenovo include manual covers (pictured below) in some of their latest laptops. Why would I want it? A camera connected to the internet is handy, but when you’re not Skyping it’s still there. Of course, it isn’t really watching you unless software is accessing it, but how can you be sure? Most PC webcams have an LED light that shows when they’re active, but it’s possible for malware to disable the light. Unfortunately, the fear of being spied on is…

Over the past year or so, we’ve tested several new Wi-Fi kits that create a ‘mesh’ of radio signals between multiple nodes. Here we’ll recap our results and cover a few more options, but first it’s worth explaining again what mesh networking does. Broadband internet comes into your home through a modem box, which may also act as a wireless router, enabling phones, tablets and PCs to connect via Wi-Fi or with Ethernet cables. Alternatively, you may have a separate router connected to the modem. Over Wi-Fi, the further away devices are, or the more walls there are in between, the more trouble they may have connecting to your router and the slower data will travel, meaning web pages don’t load or BBC iPlayer keeps buffering. One solution is to…

PHONE | £299 from Sony www.snipca.com/27072 Sony’s distinctive phones may not be as popular as rival brands, but this is one of the most appealing we’ve seen for a while. Available in black, silver, blue or pink, the XA2 has the familiar neat, squared-off Xperia styling, but costs less than half as much as Sony’s flagship XZ Premium. “A practical and classy phone with plenty of features and no serious flaws” Protected by Gorilla Glass, the XA2’s 5.2in Full HD screen is a practical size, somewhere between an iPhone 6s and a 6s Plus, and looks terrific, covering 96.5 per cent of the sRGB colour range with good brightness and contrast. The default Super Vivid mode makes colours pop even more, yet, unlike some budget phones, isn’t too garish. On…

CD-ROM WHAT WAS IT? In the mid-1990s, CD-ROM was going to change the world. The internet wasn’t yet widely used, and the flash memory chips that would later appear in MP3 players and smartphones weren’t available. Physical media – CDs for music, tapes for video – were the way to deliver content. Then Sony and Philips’ ‘Yellow Book’ standard described how to store video within CDs, while Apple’s QuickTime arrived, compressing low-resolution video. This allowed publishers to create ‘multimedia’ discs playable on the latest PCs’ CD-ROM drives. CDROM encyclopedias (pictured) and ‘edutainment’ became big business. HOW HAVE THINGS CHANGED? The capacity of CD-ROM was limited. As the internet took off, people did not want to pay for content that would fall out of date. Also, multimedia’s high production costs weren’t…

PULL OUT &KEEP Issue523 Get instant alerts if someone uses your PC What you need: O&O Syspectr; Any Windows version (XP to 10) Time required: 45 minutes You previously had to pay £1 per month for the remote PC-monitoring program O&O Syspectr, but it’s now completely free. You first need to install it on the PCs that you want to monitor remotely. Using any web browser, you can then set notifications to see if other people use your PC. It’s like having a guard-dog program that ‘barks’ when it detcts an intruder. It also lets you install Windows updates remotely. STEP 1 On the first PC that you want to monitor remotely, go to www.syspectr.com/en. You need to create a Syspectr account, so click the ‘Sign up now!’ button. Next,…

What you need: Android (phone or tablet); iPhone or iPad Time required: 10 minutes There are plenty of free photo-editing apps that let you create collages using the photos on your phone or tablet, but Fotor is our favourite. Its collage section lets you add multiple photos to a grid or to a magazine-style layout, then modify your layout and edit your selected images. You can then save your finished collage as a high-resolution photo and share it with friends and family. STEP 1 Install and open the app (Android www.snipca.com/27061; iOS www.snipca.com/27062) on your device. You’ll see options for Camera, Edit and Collage on the main screen. Tap Collage and you’ll see two tabs at the top. Classic 1 has several grid styles 2 that you can tap to…

goHenry - Pocket money Free Android: www.snipca.com/27135 iOS: www.snipca.com/27136 Created by a British company goHenry, this app aims to teach kids how to manage their money. It lets you transfer pocket money to your 6-18 year-old, who can then use it with their own goHenry Visa card. You can track their payments and even set aside a percentage to be saved. Otter Free Android: www.snipca.com/27137 iOS: www.snipca.com/27138 This app is great for meetings, interviews and even general conversations. It lets you record audio, then transcribes what it hears, breaking up the transcript based on the different voices it recognises. You can then edit the transcript and search for specific words or phrases within it. Obliviate Free Android: www.snipca.com/27139 iOS: www.snipca.com/27140 Obliviate lets you send self-destructing messages, so you can share…

LIBREOFFICE CALC See cell totals and average values instantly LibreOffice Calc has a useful setting that displays the total and average value of any data you select (these appear in the status bar at the bottom right of the program window). As well as this, you can choose to see the maximum and minimum values in your selection and the number of cells you selected. It’s a handy feature that lets you see this information without having to apply any formulas (as you need to in Excel). Open LibreOffice and click Calc Spreadsheet on the left. If you see ‘Sheet 1 of 1’ at the bottom left, it means your status bar is active. If you don’t see this, click the View tab at the top, then click Status Bar.…

Email us your problem and we’ll try to help:noproblem@computeractive.co.uk Are smart meters secure? Q My domestic-energy supplier keeps sending me letters to tell me about its supposedly spiffy smart meters. It’s all wireless apparently, and means I’d no longer have to provide meter readings or wait in for a person to come to do the same. But I wonder if these smart meters pose a security risk? I assume it’ll connect to my router, so will I have to give my password to my energy company? Do I have to have one? Hugh Lyon A Security flaws are frequently found in both software and hardware, so we wouldn’t guarantee that a given smart meter is – and always will be – 100 per cent secure. However, as this is a…

Why did Fall Creators Updates install twice? Q I welcomed Issue 520’s Cover Feature on Windows Updates. I have recently updated my Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop-tablet after neglecting it for a while. It took ages catching up with a number of updates, eventually installing the Fall Creators Update (FCU). However, it appears to have installed it twice, a few days apart – one at the end of January, and then another in February. I have checked that update version 1709 is installed on the laptop and everything seems to be working so far, so should I uninstall the earlier installation or leave well alone? I am an ancient silver surfer and find your magazine very informative and helpful. Keep up the good work. Marjorie Carden A What you’re probably seeing…

My Editor chirped up “I’ve got an idea – dogs!”. I pretended to look interested as his face assumed one of his ‘I-failed-the-Bond-villain-audition’ sinister grins. “Dogs”, he said, then emailed me a link (www.snipca.com/27064) about scientific research into whether touchscreen challenges can boost a canine’s quality of life and keep them mentally agile. “Can you get hold of a dog and try this?”. A few pints later, I agreed. So let me tell you about Charlie (pictured below). He’s a particularly dim golden labrador retriever and possibly one of the laziest creatures on Earth. Still, he pays attention when there’s food on offer. I reached for an iPad and decided to give Dog Matching (www.snipca.com/27065) a go. It’s a simple game, aimed at kids, where you match pictures of dogs.…

Michael Gove has said that much of the £3bn farmers currently get as EU subsidies could be spent improving rural broadband and phone coverage after Britain leaves the EU. The Environment Secretary said it was “ridiculous that you can get better mobile-phone coverage in Kenya than in parts of Kent”. Mr Gove, talking at the National Farmers’ Union annual conference in Birmingham, said fast internet and 4G mobile coverage were as essential as clean drinking water and mains electricity. He added: “It’s unjustifiable that in the country that first guaranteed universal mail provision, which invented the telephone, the television and pioneered the world wide web, that broadband provision is so patchy and poor in so many areas”. Mr Gove has often said over the past few months that money reclaimed…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: FileZilla FTP File-transfer protocol (FTP) tools aren’t exactly exciting, but they’re incredibly useful. I regularly use them for – among other things – uploading files to various websites I manage. My program of choice has always been FileZilla (https://filezilla-project.org). It’s open source, so it must be trustworthy, right? Wrong. When recently downloading FileZilla’s software on to a new PC, I was dismayed to find that its developer had started bundling junk into the installer. As you click through, you hit a pre-ticked box that installs our old friend Avast Free Antivirus. I swear, this unwanted adware has tried to sneak on to my PC more often than any virus. What happens next, though, is a new one on me. You’re also invited to install a…

In Issue 522 (News, page 8) you asked readers whether they read local news online or in newspapers. Judging by the shocking statistic that 200 local papers have closed in the past 10 years, I’m probably one of a dwindling number of people who still derive much pleasure from them. Where I live in rural Yorkshire, they are vital in bringing the local community together. They cover news in more detail than TV, and provide a valuable way for local societies to advertise their meetings. I know you can get all this online, but it’s more fragmented. You don’t always know where to look. The advantage of local newspapers is that you know thousands of people living nearby will be reading the same information on the same day. It feels…

If a manufacturer won’t honour a warranty for whatever reason, legitimate or not, you should turn instead to your statutory rights, which are backed up by law. Doing this helped Computeractive reader Jade Langton persuade PC World to fix her broken Microsoft Surface Book laptop (pictured). As we reported in Issue 522, Jade wanted Microsoft to fix a problem with the laptop’s keyboard battery. The laptop, which was still under the company’s two-year warranty, had already been repaired three times. But Microsoft refused a fourth repair claiming a crack in the screen voids Jade’s warranty. Microsoft was allowed to do this because it can put any terms it likes into its warranty’s small print (even if the screen crack was a lame excuse, in our view, because the keyboard is detachable, so…

EBOOK MANAGER Calibre 3.18.0 www.snipca.com/27112 What you need: Windows 7, 8/8.1 or 10 With support for just about every ebook format, plus plenty of useful tools, Calibre is easily one of the best ways to read and manage ebooks on your PC. The program’s layout is simple and friendly, letting you increase the font size, add bookmarks or navigate straight to a specific page with one click. The program supports keyboard shortcuts and the large icons mean that it works well on touchscreen devices, too. You can import EPUB, Mobi, PDF, Kindle, Word and many more file types into your Calibre library. The program provides lots of brilliant tools for organising, editing, rating and even converting your ebooks into different formats. The only exception is DRM-protected ebook files, which can…

In Issue 522 (see page 29) we cast our mind back to 1994, when the IBM Simon Personal Communicator marked the dawn of the smartphone. Back then, with mobile coverage sparse and expensive, the US-only $1,099 handset appealed to such an exclusive market that only 50,000 were sold. Today, Apple is estimated to sell over 50 million iPhone X handsets (pictured) per quarter. Yet it starts at £999. Even allowing for inflation, it’s clear we’re paying more for smartphones than most of us would have expected. But components that were top-end a few years ago are now as cheap as, well… chips. Why isn’t there a bigger choice of better phones at lower prices? Last year, we raved about Lenovo’s £200 P2. Almost immediately, it vanished. It may be significant…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2017 Back Issue CD: £15 fromwww.snipca.com/26848 LAPTOP Asus ZenBook UX410UA £590 from www.snipca.com/26789 Tested: Issue 518 With a dual-core Intel i3 processor, 4GB of memory and 128GB SSD, this slim aluminium 14in has just enough power to make Windows 10 feel smooth – and unlike Asus’s cheaper models it has a very good Full HD screen. ALTERNATIVE: Dell XPS 13 This premium laptop starts at £1,149, but the best deal is with the brand new quadcore i7-8550 and QHD touchscreen. £1,300 from www.snipca.com/26796 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 9.7 £600 from www.snipca.com/27058 Tested: Issue 501 Samsung’s new mid-sized tablet has a wonderful HDR screen and comes with a pen included, unlike Apple’s iPad Pro. But its processor isn’t the…

Handy hints and tips from your fellow readers Email us your tips: letters@computeractive.co.uk TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Sort LibreOffice dates for easier genealogy Having retired recently, I decided to trace my family history and realised it would be easier to do this within a spreadsheet first, before exporting this information to a genealogy program. I don’t have Microsoft Office and didn’t want to pay for it, so I decided to use LibreOffice instead. One quirk I noticed about LibreOffice is that you can’t sort dates if they’re written in the standard ‘July 1, 1978’ format. I then resorted to the DD/MM/YY format, but quickly realised the sorting pitfalls of this format when it comes to older dates. For example, when I write 05/09/21, the program seems to think I’m referring…

AGES 0-5 Teach Your Monster to Read Free www.snipca.com/27142 (Android) Free www.snipca.com/27143 (iOS) Designed in collaboration with leading British academics, this app teaches your toddler the basics of reading using games and activities. They can design their own monster and meet different characters along their journey. AGES 6-10 Alto’s Odyssey £4.99 www.snipca.com/27144 (iOS) Physics-based snowboarding game Alto’s Adventure was hugely successful when it was released in 2015. In this sequel, you need to tap the screen to time your jumps and collect golden coins while sand-boarding across a majestic landscape of dunes, canyons, deserts and temples. AGES 11-16 The Official BBC Earth Quiz* Free www.snipca.com/27145 (Android) Free www.snipca.com/27146 (iOS) This app features 4,000 questions from award-winning BBC Earth TV series including Planet Earth II, Life, Africa and Blue Planet II.…

Show hidden devices Although the list of devices in the Device Manager is very comprehensive, there are drivers which aren’t shown. These can include older, non-Plug and Play hardware, devices that were once connected to your PC but are no longer, temporary task-specific drivers, and anything related to emulators. To see these, click View, then ‘Show hidden devices’ (see screenshot above). The Device Manager will expand and you’ll probably see a lot more network adapters, and USB drives, for example. Sometimes these hidden items can cause problems with new hardware – this view makes it easier to remove them. Add the Action pane The ‘Action pane’ doesn’t show any actual action, but it does let you access the View menu in a sidebar (see screenshot below left). To add this…

Shortly after we listed our iPhone 6s on eBay we received a message via the site from a potential bidder: “I am interested in buying it for my son. I’d like to know the current condition and how much you are willing to let it go for, with postage to London, and if you are around London, let me know maybe we can arrange pickup in person” (see screenshot). It sounded innocent enough, so we replied with its condition – very good – and the Buy It Now price we’d accept. The buyer replied saying he was happy with the price, and asked us to send him a PayPal request at his email address, promising to send payment straight away. Essentially the buyer was saying: “let’s do this outside of…

Online maths resources are not without a sense of humour. Rather wonderfully, if you ask Google what’s the answer to life the universe and everything, it gives the same answer calculated by fictional super-computer Deep Thought in Douglas Adams’ novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (we won’t ruin the surprise, in case you haven’t read it). Bob Dylan and Monty Python fans will be pleased to learn that Wolfram Alpha provides the correct answers to the questions “How many roads must a man walk down?” and “What is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?”. The current crop of smart speakers get in on the act too. Amazon’s Alexa appears to be the joker in the pack, because it’s the only one to correctly quantify “How much wood would…

Why is OneDrive stealing my data? Q I have an Android phone with a 1GB data allowance. This is normally fine – I only use my handset as a phone and camera. Recently, I checked my bill and was horrified to see it was £42, while the previous month was £90! My average bill previously was around £10 monthly. When I itemised bills for these periods I found my phone had been sending packets of data all day, so my allowance was regularly exceeded – resulting in a £3 excess charge each time. Virgin’s idea of help was to offer me a higher data allowance. I was so frightened of further charges that I asked them to prohibit data usage, so now I can’t use some essential services. When I…

An Egyptian mummy (pictured), a sundial from the world’s first railway station and Rodin’s The Kiss sculpture are among 41 artefacts that you can see in augmented reality (AR) in a new app to accompany BBC2’s Civilisations series. The Civilisations AR app, available for free for Android and iOS, places 3D images on the view of the world that you see on your phone or tablet screen. This lets you see the objects as though they were in your front room. Using the X-Ray feature you can see ‘inside’ an artefact, revealing what’s hidden beneath the surface of a painting, for example. There are also audio guides, and a Restore tool that shows you what the object looked like when new. All the items come from museums and galleries across…

A French man has lost his legal claim that his human rights were breached when his bosses opened files containing porn on his work computer. Rail worker Eric Libert argued that his privacy had been infringed when French national rail operator SNCF discovered the files. He had worked for SNCF for 49 years until being suspended in 2007. When he returned the following year he was told that porn photos and videos had been found on his PC. He was sacked in July. Libert took his case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), after losing an industrial tribunal and further appeals in French courts. He claimed that because he had marked the files ‘personal’, French law prohibited SNCF from looking at them. He said it undermined his “right…

John Todd (Letters, Issue 521), like almost everyone who doesn’t use Facebook, only mentions the things that are of no real value (what people had for lunch etc), which by the way is a definite no-no for most users. My small town has several pages and groups where people can advertise events, ask for recommendations, report a crime and highlight suspicious behaviour. Then there are all the businesses (local, national, and international) that use Facebook to promote themselves. These days, for a business not to have a presence on Facebook is like not having a website used to be. Personally, I have 10 pages and groups. Two of the groups are secret, which means only members can see them. One is a walking group, and the other a group of…

The power button on my Dell Inspiron laptop stopped ‘clicking’ recently, which meant I could still sort of turn it on and off, but couldn’t power down. The laptop was about eight months out of warranty, so I thought I would repair it myself, even though I know it needs a complete strip-down to replace the power button board. Wanting a genuine spare part, I phoned Dell to try and order one. Having taken my details the tech guy disappeared for several minutes then came back and said: “As your laptop is only a few months out of warranty, Dell would like to repair this for you, free of charge”. The laptop was collected next day and returned within a few days, working perfectly. I think offering a free repair,…

How can I scan text in foreign languages? Q I am currently learning Greek and Russian, but when I scan Greek and Russian documents, I get a lot of gobbledegook back in Word 2007. Is there free software that will allow me to scan text in the document’s original language so that I can translate it? Lenny Webster A Scanning a document as an image will retain the original language but won’t result in an editable document – it will just be a JPEG file (or similar), so you wouldn’t be able to copy and paste text, for example, or edit content. In order to turn a scanned image into an editable document, you need something called optical character recognition (OCR) software, which analyses the image and converts printed text…

PC MONITOR | £135 from Amazon www.snipca.com/27068 This 24in monitor is marketed to gamers, which explains the ‘exciting’ red stripe along its bottom edge. At £135 for a tidy-looking Full HD screen, though, it’s too good to be used solely by people who like zapping aliens. It’s based on the TN variety of LCD, which has rather fallen out of favour because of its relatively limited picture quality and viewing angles. IPS panels tend to give a more consistent image when you’re not quite head-on, and more accurate colour. But these gaps have been closed by recent TN screens. “This is a decent, cheap, and sizeable monitor for gamers and non-gamers alike” Out of the box, the G2460VQ6’s low brightness and contrast made a poor first impression. Our colour meter…

Because it only appeals to iPhone, Apple Music and HomeKit users, the HomePod doesn’t really change the smart-speaker landscape. Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant are both good at answering questions about the weather, news, sports results, directions, maths homework and so on. Currently, Alexa’s support for smart accessories like lightbulbs and thermostats is the most comprehensive. Google Home (£129) is elegant, while Amazon’s Echo Show (£200) and Spot (£120) up the ante with a screen. But the basic Echo (£75, pictured) works fine, and none of these does anything you can’t do with the relevant app on your phone or tablet – they just make it something you don’t have to think about. Sonos One, from the multi-room speaker company, does offer something new, with support for both Alexa and…

What’s the best dual-SIM phone for 3G and 4G? Q I want a phone with two SIM card slots, for different networks, to save carrying two phones when overseas. But when I get to Australia later this year, that country will have switched off its 2G networks. I bought a dual-SIM Samsung Galaxy J1 (pictured) for £69, only to find that when the first SIM is on 3G, the second is switched to 2G. I sent it back, but I’ve found this is quite common. Can you recommend an inexpensive Android phone that supports two SIMs on 3G and 4G simultaneously? David Bennett A You’re right: only a few phone processors support one 4G and one 3G SIM at once (none support two 4G), and they’re mostly in pricier models.…

HEADPHONES | £279 from Amazon www.snipca.com/27118 We unzipped the neat hard case, unfolded the headphones, slipped the padded cups over our ears, paired our phone over Bluetooth and settled back to listen to a favourite album. Insulated from the world outside by Bose’s extraordinary noise cancellation, just one thought drifted through our consciousness: ‘Two hundred and seventy-nine quid for a pair of headphones? Are you having a laugh?’ “Comfortable, light and great for blocking background noise” Bose founder, the late Amar Bose, an audio engineer and MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) professor, was not having a laugh when he invented the first noise-cancelling headphones back in the 1980s, and his company is still pretty serious about sound quality. There’s a lot more competition now, but we have to admit the…

CyberLink’s Director Suite 6 is a complete photo-, video- and audio-editing package, containing the company’s best loved software: PowerDirector 16, AudioDirector 8, PhotoDirector 9 and ColorDirector 6. It also includes 50GB of online storage for one year. Separately, these cost over £750. These award-winning programs work seamlessly with each other, providing a smooth and highly efficient editing environment. They provide tools for complete start-to-finish 360-degree video and photo editing, as well as advanced audio editing. To enter, email your address to cacomp@dennis. co.uk with ‘cyberlink’ in the subject line by midnight 27 March. You can buy Director Suite 6 priced £329 from CyberLink’s site: www.snipca.com/27051. For more info on CyberLink follow @CyberLink on Twitter and ‘like’ www.facebook.com/cyberlink. MESH ROUTER BT Whole Home Wi-Fi £189 from www.snipca.com/26990 Tested: Issue 496 BT’s…

Brilliant things to do on your device ANDROID & iOS Start a group video call in Facebook Messenger Facebook Messenger has always included the ability to make group video calls, but until recently you could only do it by creating a Facebook group, then tapping the video-call icon to call everyone in the group simultaneously. Now the app lets you make a video call to any of your Facebook friends, then selectively add another friend to the call. You can repeat this process to add other friends. To make a video call, open Facebook Messenger (Android www.snipca.com/27131; iOS www.snipca.com/27132), use the search field at the top to search for the person you want to call, tap to select their name, then tap the video call icon at the top right.…

WINDOWS 7, 8.1, 10 Quickly select a few items within a large group There’s an easy way to unselect a few items from a larger selection. This is useful if you quickly need to move or copy most items within a folder – but not all. Press Ctrl+A to select all your items. Next, press Ctrl, then click to select items you want to deselect. You can then move or copy the items left selected. WINDOWS 10 Save articles to read offline in Microsoft Edge Pocket (www.getpocket.com) is our favourite way to read online articles while offline. It has handy extensions for Chrome and Firefox that let you save articles with one click. You can then read these online via the website, or offline using the Pocket apps for Android,…

What are they? Progressive Web Apps – or PWAs – are websites that you can run as apps on your computer, phone and tablet. They look and work exactly like a normal app, but there’s nothing to install – they run in their own browser-like window. Crucially, they’re not dependent on an internet connection, so they work offline too. What’s the benefit? PWAs are potentially safer than normal apps and programs because they don’t need to be installed on your device – thereby eradicating the risk of accidentally downloading malware. They also take up less storage space, because most of the app’s data is stored on a server rather than on your PC, phone or tablet. You never need to manually update a PWA – this is done automatically by…

If you’re having a clear-out, most things in good condition will find a buyer. Tech items, like old phones, tablets, computers and routers, are particularly popular, as long as they are working perfectly. But before you sell these, make sure you wipe all your personal data. On a laptop, securely erase your hard drive (making sure you’ve taken all your data off it first) using a tool like DBAN (Darik’s Boot and Nuke, www.dban.org). To wipe a phone or tablet, switch it back to its factory settings. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings, General. Scroll to the bottom of the screen and tap Reset. From here choose to ‘Erase All Content and Settings’. You’ll be prompted to enter your passcode and Apple ID to complete the reset process. For…

Q Inspired by suggestions that additional memory speeds up an old PC, I decided to add extra RAM to the 4GB in my ageing Windows 7 desktop computer. Checking the manufacturer’s website, I learned that this memory is comprised of four 1GB DIMM sticks – and that I could replace these in pairs to bump the RAM up to either 6GB or 8GB. However, I am confused by memory types. The support page says this machine takes DDR2, but I’ve also seen DDR3 and DDR4 on sale. The manufacturer’s information says my PC takes up to 800MHz modules, but I’ve seen adverts for “PC2-6400 (800MHz)”. Is that the same? I need help to understand the differences. Terry Collins A Memory terminology is tricky because of the many different types –…

1080p Of the common types of high-definition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 pixels. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much information a computer can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 3G/4G A set of technologies that delivers faster mobile broadband, so called because they are the third and fourth generations of mobile data networking standards. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 8K Video with a resolution of 7680x4320 pixels. Currently the highest resolution available. ASCII American Standard Code for Information Interchange. Computer code that represents English characters as numbers. Benchmarking Comparing software and products with an accepted standard. Beta A version of software that’s being tested. Beta versions are often released so problems can be ironed out. BIOS…