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Reading dozens of privacy policies feels like a modern form of torture, so hats off to Deputy Editor Will Stapley. He scoured the small print of every VPN mentioned in our Cover Feature (and several that aren’t) to expose services that compromise your privacy. He emerged with his soul just about intact. His legwork reveals that a shocking number of VPNs are run by chancers who at best offer a shoddy service, and at worst steal your personal data. He explains how to spot these, names and shames the worst offenders, and recommends services you can actually trust. It’s an essential read for all VPN users. On another note, many readers have taken advantage of our offer to download Windows 10 Home at a huge discount. We’ve worked hard to…

Social-media companies will soon have to protect children from harmful content under the first-ever code to regulate the internet. In a groundbreaking move, the UK’s Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham has published rules that will bar tech giants like Facebook and Google from showing children any content that is “detrimental to their physical or mental health or wellbeing”. She said: “There are laws to protect children in the real world – film ratings, car seats, age restrictions on drinking and smoking. We need our laws to protect children in the digital world too”. Key measures include protecting children’s identity so they can’t be groomed online by paedophiles. Websites will have to make sure children’s default privacy options are set to ‘high’, which means a child would have to actively decide to…

BT will now charge new customers if they don’t return their router or YouView TV set-top box at the end of their contract. It rewrote its contract in December to state that it continues to own the devices should the customers move to a different provider. Rival ISP Virgin Media already operates a similar policy. Customers will be charged between £43 and £50 if they keep the router, and between £60 and £115 for keeping the YouView box. The move, which will eventually also apply to BT companies EE and Plusnet, is an attempt to reduce electronic waste. BT wants to incentivise customers to return equipment so it can be refurbished and given to other customers. It estimates the change will stop customers throwing away a million set-top boxes and…

Upgraded to Windows 10 after ‘girding my loins’ My dear Computeractive, may I pass on my thanks to your excellent magazine. You have directly saved me between £120 and £500 -ie, the cost of purchasing a Windows 10 licence or buying a new laptop. Your article in Issue 570 on running Windows 7safely (page 60) was the final straw. I girded my loins, took a deep breath, and followed your instructions on upgrading to Windows 10. Based on your guidance, everything went smoothly and I came out the other side of the black hole with everything intact. I did not even need the Windows 7 product key for my Dell Inspiron 5510 laptop, which I bought in 2012. However, here’s a tip. It took eight hours to download Windows 10…

LEAD CASE Can I get a refund if my tracker is out of warranty? Q I have problem with the strap of a Garmin Vivosmart 3 fitness tracker (pictured) that I got for Christmas in 2017. The tracker has a two-year manufacturer’s warranty, which I registered in September 2018 because I had to have the strap replaced. Then in December 2019 it broke completely. Garmin refuses to help, saying it’s out of warranty. Do you have any advice? Marilyn Barratt A Before we start, we need to find out precisely when the A fitness tracker was bought. This is when the two-year warranty began, not when Marilyn registered it eight months after receiving it as a present. If the tracker was bought in December 2017, the warranty may just have…

Add ‘then and now’ photos to your tree Some of the most evocative photos in our family trees are taken in front of buildings, whether familiar landmarks or the homes our ancestors lived in. Wouldn’t it be great to see how things have changed in the intervening years? Thanks to a free online service called Historypin, you can do just that. Share your photos on Historypin First, check whether Historypin already has photos of places where your ancestors lived. Go to www.historypin.org and click Explore Historypin at the top left to browse the map, or use a keyword search to find historic photos posted by others. But what about your own photos? Historypin can help there too. Its map is based on Google Maps, which doesn’t just make it easy…

Browsing the web and downloading files go hand in hand. So why, then, do web browsers have so few options to customise downloads. Chrome, for example, lets me choose a folder in which to dump all my downloads, but it won’t let me prioritise them, resume those that have been interrupted nor choose where to save specific file types. Thankfully, the free download manager JDownloader (www.snipca.com/33925) lets me do all this and more. Instead of left-clicking links in Chrome, I divert them to JDownloader by right-clicking them and selecting ‘Copy link address’. JDownloader then grabs the links from my clipboard and places them in its LinkGrabber tab. By default, the files only start downloading when you click the Play button (top left). But if you’re as impatient as me, you’ll…

What was it? In September 2017, while launching the wirelessly charged iPhone 8, Apple announced a power mat that would charge three devices at once. As shown in the mockup above, you’d be able to plonk your iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods case anywhere on the shiny white surface, and they’d all charge simultaneously. The trouble was that anyone who knew anything about how wireless charging coils worked immediately pointed out that they didn’t work like that, and it would be technically impossible to build such a product: the coils would interfere and overheat, and the software wouldn’t be able to monitor charging effectively. Why did it die? The experts were right. Apple kept bashing away at the problem, but after a year there was still no sign of AirPower,…

Shotcut I feel a bit bad recommending readers should stop using Shotcut (https://shotcut.org) because it’s a handy little video editor, but it has some annoying design quirks that I became frustrated with. And what I use instead… I now consider myself something of a self-taught expert at video editing, so I like the advanced tools provided by Kdenlive (https://kdenlive.org). The timeline interface is simple enough for beginners, while keyframed effects will satisfy more confident users. I’ve yet to find a video or audio format that it can’t read, so you don’t have to waste time converting files. I’ve taken a screenshot (right) of the transitions and effects it offers, such as dissolve and overlay. Tony Sharpe Tell us why you stopped using a website, app or program: letters@computeractive.co.uk…

TripBuk Free iOS www.snipca.com/33843 Android www.snipca.com/33841 TripBuk is a comparison app for travel websites. But rather than just searching Trivago, Expedia and others one by one, this app searches them all simultaneously. It helped us find London to Edinburgh flights for £25 at a week’s notice and get a 56 per cent discount on Parisian hotels without booking ahead. NordPass Password Manager Free iOS www.snipca.com/33844 Android www.snipca.com/33845 Synchronise your passwords between PCs, phones and tablets with this easy-to-use, powerful password manager and digital vault. It includes plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, and a dedicated Windows 10 program. It can also import your details from rival managers like LastPass and 1Password to save you starting from scratch. History of English Places Free iOS www.snipca.com/33842 Android www.snipca.com/33853 Compiled by the Institute…

Have you ever clicked a web link, only for an advert to hijack your speakers? It’s annoying at home, but can be hugely embarrassing if you’re in a quiet public space such as a library. Using a tool called NirCmd from NirSoft, you can create a keyboard shortcut to quickly mute your speakers. First, download NirCmd from www.snipca.com/33939 (scroll to the bottom for the download links) and run nircmd.exe from the ZIP file. In the window that appears, click Copy To Windows Directory (this lets you run NirCmd directly from the Start menu – see screenshot below right). To create the mute shortcut, click Start, then type nircmd.exe cmdshortcutkey "~%folder.desktop%" "Mute" "CTRL+SHIFT+M" mutesysvolume 1 (you can copy this command from our Pastebin account at www.snipca.com/33940). Press Enter, and a new…

250m How many Microsoft customer-support records were exposed in a breach - p11 227 Number of towns and villages added to Openreach’s full-fibre list - p7 £109 Price of the Neocore E1 tablet recommended by reader Terry Warner - p43 HOW TO USE SNIPCA URLs We use snipcas to turn long URLs that are hard to type into ones that are short and simple. They aren’t websites themselves, which means they won’t be recognised if you type them into Google. Instead, you need to type them into your browser address bar, then press Enter. Doing this will take you to the correct website.…

Openreach has announced that work will soon begin to deliver full-fibre broadband to 200 hard-to-reach areas. The company, which runs the UK’s broadband infrastructure, said 227 market towns and villages will be connected, giving speeds of 1Gbps (1,000Mbps) to around 250,000 homes and businesses. Locations include Aberdare and Camarthen in south Wales, East Grinstead in Surrey, Shaftesbury in Dorset, Liskeard in Cornwall and Clitheroe in Lancashire (download the full list as a PDF at www.snipca.com/33924). Work will begin before March 2021, following successful trials last year that connected 50,000 rural homes. Openreach will use heavy-duty tools specially built to lay cables in difficult terrain. Diamond cutters, for example, have a giant rotating blade embedded with sharp diamonds to slice through roads and pavements to create a neat channel for engineers…

Four companies that make systems to verify the age of internet users are suing the Government over its decision to shelve the scheme to force porn sites to check visitors are over 18. The age-verification scheme was passed in December 2018 as part of the Digital Economy Act. But its implementation was delayed several times, before it was suspended in October last year by Digital Secretary Nicky Morgan. She said the scheme could be added to potential new laws to create a regulator for the web. The plans had been criticised by privacy campaigners, who said hackers would seek ways to steal the personal data stored by porn sites in order to blackmail people. However, AgeChecked Ltd, VeriMe, AVYourself and AVSecure are arguing that Mrs Morgan only had the power…

It doesn’t surprise me to read about the toddler Parker George’s fame and fortune on Instagram (News, Issue 572, page 8). It seems to me that 21st-century parents are addicted to sharing snaps of their kids online. A friend of mine, who is otherwise quite normal, recently became a father. I’m pleased for him, but since the birth he’s posted photos of the baby in hospital, coming home in the car, going to sleep in her basket, waking up in her basket, doing her ‘business’ in her basket, and so on. At least 30 photos a day! It has the opposite effect to the one intended. I’m meant to think, ‘Aw, how sweet!’. Instead I just skip through the photos, barely noticing them. I can’t dare mention this to my…

What does ‘fairness’ really mean in the complex area of consumer rights? It’s an issue Ofcom has been addressing in its ‘Fairness for Customers’ campaign, which asks companies to agree to codes of conduct when dealing with the public, such as moving customers on to the cheapest contract when their initial package ends. It has released its Fairness Framework, clarifying what it will look for when deciding whether a company has acted fairly. It has five key questions. First, how are the public treated during the “customer journey”? Are they given clear information to make the right decisions, and is it easy for them to complain? Second, has anyone been harmed? In particular, have any vulnerable customers been affected, like the elderly or disabled? Third, how significant has this harm…

OFFICE SUITE LibreOffice 6.4 www.snipca.com/33952 What you need: Wndows 7, 8.1 or 10 One thing we love about LibreOffice (the free alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite) is that it’s regularly updated with new tools. The eagle-eyed among you will immediately spot the first new feature in version 6.4 – small icons on the thumbnails of your recently opened documents, showing you which LibreOffice program they were created with. Compatibility with Microsoft Office formats (DOCX, XLSX, etc) has also been improved, and you should no longer see errors when importing complex documents containing text boxes, section breaks and headers. The release notes for this version also claim extensive spreadsheets in Calc will open faster, however this wasn’t borne out in our tests. Our test spreadsheet, packed with formulas, took five seconds…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: Android bloatware It’s no secret that Android devices often come with pre-installed tools. Most are a complete waste of storage space, and many you can’t remove. When I bought my latest phone, I specifically opted for a Google-made Nexus device in order to avoid this junk, and yet it still came loaded with tons of pointless Google apps and tools that I’ll never use (see screenshot). What you may not know, however, is that much of this so-called ‘bloatware’ on Android devices is completely unregulated by Google. This gives manufacturers, developers, and their dodgy advertising partners a whopping great privacy loophole, effectively letting them bypass Android’s security rules. They can then access data and device functions, such as microphone, camera and location, without your consent.…

LAPTOP HP Envy 13 (2019) £1,149 from www.snipca.com/33308 Tested Issue 568 Thanks to eighth-gen Intel processors and dedicated Nvidia MX250 graphics, this sleek aluminium laptop offers a practical combination of all-round processing power and portability, topped off by 8 hours 30 minutes battery life – and the touchscreen is now excellent too. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 Gets the most out of Intel CPUs, now tenth-gen, but there’s no GPU option and the cheapest sensible configuration is £1,049 from www.snipca.com/33309 DESKTOP PC NEW ENTRY Chillblast Fusion Onyx Ryzen Family PC £1,000 from www.snipca.com/33720 Tested Issue 572 With AMD’s6-core Ryzen 5 3600X processor plus a 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 Super graphics card, 16GB of memory, 512GB SSD and 2TB hard drive, this is a good-value and well balanced all-round system in…

Although you can do everything that we’ve outlined here for the price of a single Tile Mate, you can subscribe to Tile Premium (free for the first seven days, then £29.99 a year or £2.99 a month: www.snipca.com/33819) for some extra features. You’ll get free batteries every year, though whether this represents good value will depend on how often you use your Tile. Tile Mate uses a CR1632 battery (pictured), and Tile Pro uses CR2032, neither of which are expensive. The former is £3.99 for five on Amazon (www.snipca.com/33794) and the latter is £3.99 for 10 (www.snipca.com/33795), so for less than two months’ subscription you could get between five and 10 years of replacements. Other Premium features let you track where your products have been over the past 30 days,…

OFFICE Do calculations in OneNote I’ve appreciated the OneNote tips from readers in recent issues. I think it’s an underrated tool that I’d like to read more of in Computeractive. Irun my own business, and frequently take notes in OneNote. One thing I love is that you can quickly perform maths sums. Type your sum, then add the equal sign (=) and press the spacebar or Enter. You’ll see the answer, which will also appear in your Notebook on the left (see screenshot below left). Edward Langley PHONE SETTINGS Stop videos playing automatically on Google Play Store Like James Clifton (Problems Solved, Issue 571, page 69), I don’t like videos that play automatically. Your solution for YouTube was spot on, and I’d like to suggest one for the Google Play…

Because of increasing problems with my ageing Hudl 2, I decided to purchase a new tablet. After some internet research, I bought a refurbished Neocore E1 10.1in tablet for £85, and which to my untrained eye appears ‘as new’. The tablet performs as expected and the specification seems as good as or better than other tablets Computeractive reviews. It includes a two-year warranty, full tech support from Neocore, and isn’t ruined by loads of built-in bloatware junk. The Neocore is the higher-spec of the two tablets offered from this small British company (compare them at www.snipca.com/33852). I’m surprised that you haven’t reviewed this tablet, especially as it appears to offer such excellent value at around the £100 mark. Want to recommend hardware or software to fellow readers? Email letters@computeractive.co.uk…

Signal Free iOS & Android www.signal.org Signal is open source, so the code that underpins it is available to anyone who wants to examine it. This helps guarantee there are no back doors that could give someone access to your messages, and lets the more tech-minded users help keep it robust and secure. Also available on Windows, Mac and Linux. Best For Complete peace of mind Viber Free iOS & Android www.viber.com Viber goes beyond encrypted text messaging to encrypt your voice/video calls, too, which potentially makes it more secure than a regular phone connection. Calls between users are free, and it also supports group chats and video messages. ‘Viber for Desktop’ lets you run it on Windows, too. Best For Encrypted calls Telegram Free iOS & Android www.telegram.org Telegram messages can be…

MICROSOFT WORD Stop Word indenting lists Sometimes Word tries to be too helpful. For example, when you start a new line with a dash, it will assume you’re typing a list, then indent it and add extra spacing after the dash. If this happens when you don’t want it to, there’s a quick way to take back control. When the first indent appears, press Ctrl+Shift+N. This shortcut applies the Normal text format to what you’re currently typing, removing Word’s list formatting. Sadly, Word won’t take the hint and will repeat the indent if you start your next line with a dash. An alternative is to turn off its automatic list feature so the indents never appear in the first place. To do this, click File, Options, Proofing, then the ‘AutoCorrect…

6GHz Things are getting crowded in the radio spectrum What is it? It’s a frequency range in the radio spectrum that could be used to make home Wi-Fi faster, safer and more reliable than ever. At the moment, Wi-Fi uses only two radio bands: 2.4GHz and 5GHz. But more space is urgently needed. Why? To cope with the demands of Wi-Fi 6, which is the latest standard for Wi-Fi technology. Technically called 802.11ax, it has a theoretical top speed of around 10Gbps (10,000Mbps), up from the 3.5Gbps that Wi-Fi 5 can hit. The speeds you’ll get in reality will be much lower, but they could still reach 1Gbps, around four times faster than before. However, speed isn’t the main benefit of Wi-Fi 6. Oh, then what is? It lets more devices…

Q My camera takes full-size SD cards, requiring high-speed U3 cards for best performance. Would there be any performance hit if I used a same-grade microSD card in an adapter that would let it fit my camera? Michael Roberts A The simple answer is no, there would be no performance hit. That’s because such an adapter is fundamentally nothing more than an extension of the electrical connectors. There’s no other technical wizardry inside an SD card adapter: a microSD card’s metal contacts press against the corresponding metal contacts inside the adapter, allowing the electrical current topass through to the metal contacts on the adapter – much like a mains extension cable, really. As stated, that’s the simple answer. We’d also say that most of the time it’s the correct answer,…

Q I wonder if you can help me with something that isn’t a problem but does tome seem rather odd. My wife and I both use Gmail on our respective Windows 10 laptops, and have done for several years. Recently, while reading an email from a mutual friend over the shoulder of my wife, I noticed that she has a folder in her Gmail called Trash. However, on my laptop the folder in the same position in the list is called Bin. A bit of experimenting shows that they both seem to serve the same purpose, which is as a place for deleted emails to go – but why would these folders have different names on two different laptops? Arnold Read A This might be the first time we’ve had…

2.5Gbe Gigabit Ethernet speed. 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 higher transfer speeds than 802.11n. Accelerometer A sensor that detects movement. Used in phones to determine portrait or landscape mode. Active cooling Using fans to reduce the heat of computer components. Add-in Microsoft’s name for tools that can be added to Office software. Airplane mode Phones and tablets in this mode disable all radio communication (GSM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc) so they are safe to use on aircraft. Bandwidth A measure of how much data can be transferred through a connection at one time. Benchmarking Comparing software and products with an accepted standard. Beta A version of software that’s being…

CONTROL AUDIO & VIDEO IN CHROME Google has added an option to Chrome that lets you control a web page’s audio and video from the browser bar. If you play a video, a musical note icon will appear at the top right of the bar (see screenshot). Click this and you’ll see play, fast-forward and rewind controls. Read more at www.snipca.com/33922. BBC GIVES RED BUTTON SERVICE REPRIEVE The BBC suspended the closure of the Red Button text service a day before it was due to be axed. It came after a petition (www.snipca.com/33911) organised by the National Federation of the Blind of the UK was handed in to the BBC and Downing Street. It said the Red Button was vital for people who find it hard to use the internet,…

WATCH OUT FOR… New ‘Microsoft support’ scam calls What’s the threat? Microsoft recently admitted in a blog post that a massive data breach left almost 250 million Customer Service and Support (CSS) records exposed online, containing conversations between Microsoft support staff and customers worldwide stretching back to 2005. Most of the info that could identify people was obscured, it said, but in some cases customers’ email addresses, IP addresses and location may well have been visible. Anyone online could have accessed the information from Microsoft’s servers during an estimated two-day period between 28 and 30 December 2019. In its blog (www.snipca.com/33882), Microsoft said its investigations have “found no malicious use” of the data. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it hasn’t already fallen into the wrong hands – you can…

On 15 January the new version of Edge arrived. I gave up on the old version ages ago and switched to Chrome, although I still used it from time to time–for example, to read PDFs. So, is the new version any better? Downloading and installing it were quite straightforward. I then went about setting it up to my liking. What a revelation! Gone is the muddled mess of settings from the old version, replaced by a neat and logical new approach. Customising was a breeze. I tried many sites I use regularly, some with video, some with audio, and some I previously had difficulty with. First impressions are good. It appears fast and clean and I’ve had no problems so far. The default search engine is Bing, but you can…

Late last year I accidentally dropped my Moto G6 phone into some water and it stopped working. Amazon, who I’d bought it from around 15 months earlier, said they would attempt to have it repaired, adding that if it couldn’t be fixed, they would replace it free of charge even though it was out of warranty. It took a couple of weeks to sort out but, because the G6 is no longer available, Amazon agreed to give me a full refund – the exact same price I paid 15 months earlier! So I added an extra 20 quid to the refund and bought myself a Moto G7 phone (pictured) from Amazon. I didn’t even have to pay for delivery because they sent me printable post labels throughout. How’s that for…

What can I use to get my missing key back? Q My old computer let me quickly fix spelling mistakes in Word by pressing the ‘right-click’ key on my keyboard, then choosing from a list of suggestions. This key is missing from my new Windows 10 laptop. Is there an easy way to get this function back? Kevin Parkins A Smaller laptops often leave out this key because they don’t have space for it (the key is often referred to as the Application or Context key, and performs the same function as a right-click on a mouse). You can actually perform the same function using the Shift+F10 keyboard shortcut, but making the switch to this isn’t always easy when you’re used to pressing a single key. Using a program called…

PC | £1,449 from PC Specialist www.snipca.com/33860 Red hot Whatever you’re buying, if you want the best but also want value for money, a good tip is often to look a step or two below the priciest option. Walk into any well-stocked local pub, for example, and ask for their most expensive bottle of wine, and your host will be only too happy to visit the dusty rack holding a single case of a ludicrously rare vintage acquired some years earlier from an unscrupulous merchant, and present you with the sort of bill you’ve only previously seen at a car showroom. The next most expensive bottle, on the other hand, could have been yours for £39.50, and very tasty too. “Sensible processor and graphics choices make this a desktop PC…

The NAS units tested here contain a processor running server software, with a variety of extra apps, and two or more bays into which you slot standard SATA III hard drives. They may be sold as enclosures or with drives. Using multiple drives lets you implement RAID schemes (see www.snipca.com/33906). RAID 0 splits data across two or more drives, which can improve speed. RAID 1 mirrors your data to two drives, so if one fails you won’t lose files (known as ‘redundancy’) – but you’ll need two 1TB drives to get 1TB of capacity. RAID 5, for three or more drives, sacrifices less capacity while surviving any one drive failing. An external 4TB USB 3.0 hard drive costs around £80, so why pay three times that for a box to…

What is it? One of Google’s Digital Wellbeing Experiments, ‘Envelope’ (www.snipca.com/33923) is a paper case that you print and stick your phone inside. You then can’t see the screen or use apps, but buttons glow through for you to make phone calls and apparently, it says here, even take photos. Of what, you’ll presumably find out later. What does it do? The idea is that it gives you a break from obsessively using your phone to check social media, play games, access all the world’s repositories of knowledge and so on. What’s the catch? It’s all catch, really, isn’t it? But people have been talking for years about how we use our mobile-phone screens too much. The Envelope’s designers refer to “a trend where people buy a second, simpler phone…

PHONE | £165 from Amazon www.snipca.com/33950 Apple makes its smartphones in China, and rakes in billions of dollars by charging prices for them that give it a nice big profit margin. That’s great if you’re an Apple shareholder, but if you’re buying an iPhone it means you’re only paying some of your money for the phone, and the rest for Apple CEO Tim Cook to add to the firm’s cash reserves. Xiaomi, based in China, makes its own smartphones, with no American partners to draw fruit logos on them, and has a rule that it only takes a margin of five per cent. And Redmi is its budget brand. So if you were looking for a smartphone bargain, you’re in the right place. Available in shiny dark grey or iridescent…

What you need: Google Keep; Android or iOS device Time required: 15 minutes Wouldn’t you love to be highly organised? Every bit of paperwork in its place and instantly to hand when you need it. Sadly, for most of us, the reality is very different. Take receipts. We receive so many, it’s impossible to keep track of them all. It needn’t be this way. Using Google Keep, you can store all your receipts (and much more besides) simply by taking photos of them with your phone’s camera. Best of all, you can search everything you’ve stored in Keep, letting you find exactly what you need in seconds. STEP 1 Download the Google Keep app on your Android (www.snipca.com/33854) or iOS (www.snipca.com/33855) device. If you’re not already signed into a Google…

Thanks for the warning in Issue 571 (page 9) that Flickr is struggling for money and needs more Pro users. Reading between the lines, it wouldn’t surprise me if Flickr closed this year, so I’m taking no chances. I’ve got about 5,000 photos on Flickr, so I’ve spent the past few weeks downloading them. I’d be heartbroken if Flickr closed suddenly, taking my pics with them. I’ll explain how to download entire albums of snaps. Open the relevant album, then click the download arrow (see screenshot). Flickr will tell you that it will zip the images – click the blue ‘Create zip file’ button. You’ll see a message at the top right saying “A FlickrMail with your download link will appear here shortly”. In the message you can click the…

iOS Create your own silent alert iOS lets you set your preferred iPhone ringtone – and apply a unique ringtone to individual contacts. You’ll find that setting by opening Settings and tapping Sounds followed by Ringtone. Here, select an option from the Ringtones section. The Alerts section below this lists links to shorter tones that are better suited to incoming text messages and notifications. However, it’s also possible to change the vibration that your phone uses, either at the same time if you’ve set ringing and vibration to occur simultaneously, or when your phone is set to silent mode. Scroll back to the top of the Ringtone screen and tap Vibration, where you can choose between eight vibration patterns (see left-hand screenshot 1 above right) or create your own. To…

WINDOWS 7, 8.1, 10 Keep your laptop running when you close the lid Laptops’ tiny screens, small keyboards and fiddly touchpads can make them awkward to use for anything longer than an hour. If you use your laptop as your main PC at home, you may prefer to attach it to a separate monitor, keyboard and mouse. Problem is, once you’ve attached everything to your laptop, it will shut down or go to sleep when you close the lid. To carry on using your laptop with the lid closed, right-click the battery icon (in the system tray, bottom-right corner of the desktop), then select Power Options. On the left side of the window that opens, select ‘Choose what closing the lid does’. In the ‘When I close the lid’ box…

Calculating the sum of a selection of cells isn’t tricky – just type =sum(XX:XX), where ‘XX:XX’ is the range of cells you want to add up. Sometimes, however, you’ll want to calculate the number of times the same cell contents appear in a series, such as if you wanted to find out how many people responded Yes, No and Maybe in a questionnaire. There are various ways to do this, but the quickest is to use the COUNTIF formula, and it works exactly the same way in Microsoft Excel and LibreOffice Calc. First, select an empty cell near to those you want to use the formula in, then type =COUNTIF(B2:B21, "Yes"), changing the ‘B2:B21’ to match the cells you want to search, and ‘Yes’ to what you want to search…

How do I give Microsoft Edge the elbow? Dick Endecott Q After using my wife’s Windows 10 PC for a while, I plucked up the courage to upgrade my own Windows 7PC. I now find what a bully Windows 10actually is. I’ve been using Firefox for years and have been happy with it, but now any link I click opens in Microsoft’s wretched Edge browser – which I’m rapidly learning to hate! Making Firefox my default browser is not given as an option. A Upgrading from Windows 7 to 10 shouldn’t see your preferred browser demoted in this way but funny things do happen sometimes. Regardless, it’s easily remedied. First, click the Start button followed by the Settings cog, and then click Apps followed by ‘Default apps’. Now, in the…

Q For some time now I’ve lived with French spam arriving into the Junk Email folder in Outlook.com (Hotmail). It’s now getting beyondajoke! I know that’s what the Junk Email folder is for but I've blocked dozens of domains and other methods to stop anything in French getting in but haven’t yet found an answer. Can you help? Mal Bradley A This one of those rare occasions where we have to say no, we can’t really help. Your Outlook.com is already reliably identifying the offending emails and duly plonking them into the Junk Email folder – so it’s doing its job. Short of stopping the spammers sending the messages in the first place, there’s really nothing else that can be done. This might be achievable at state level – assuming…

Do I need a new USB stick to create a recovery drive? Q I was given a recovery USB stick when I bought my current computer from PC World, several years ago. Back then the computer ran on Windows 8.1. So, now that it runs on Windows 10, should I create a new recovery stick as you suggest in your reply to Anton Davenport in Issue 567’s Problems Solved (page 68)? If so, what size USB stick will I need to buy? I assume I cannot use the original as it will overwrite the original rescue details – would that be correct? James Thompson A Microsoft says that the minimum size for a Windows 10 USB recovery stick should be 16GB (www.snipca.com/33798 – see screenshot below), so that’s the answer…

Change Windows 10’s default colours For the past week there have been five splodges of green paint on our bedroom wall at home. Well, I say green, but I’m told by my better half they’re actually different shades of avocado. “Which one would look best?” I’m asked. Scared to admit that they all look the same to me, I point at one randomly. “That one”. “You’re wrong,” I’m told, “it’s that one over there”. Thus are decisions made in our house. Happily, I’ve got more control over how Windows 10 looks on my computer. There’s not a trace of avocado. There’s not a trace of much, in actual fact. For too long I’ve left the colours as Microsoft’s default. This isn’t because I think Microsoft knows best. It’s because I’m…