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If someone sneaked on to my PC behind my back, they’d be able to find out that I recently installed the new version of Paint.NET (see page 18); that my Windows clipboard contained gobbledygook from Lenovo (page 21); and that I’ve been chatting online with Winston Churchill (page 49). So far, so harmless. But if they dug deeper, they might also access passwords I’ve saved and personal details that get automatically added to forms. That’ll be more useful to them than knowing I’m on first-name terms with Greatest Briton (www.snipca.com/44807). None of this information will be available in future because I’m taking Robert Irvine’s advice in our Cover Feature and wiping it using PrivaZer and Privacy Eraser (both free). His instructions also cover removing old software and all the files…

PayPal users have also been targeted in a credential-stuffing attack, with hackers attempting to access close to 35,000 accounts between 6 and 8 December. The company said hackers logged into customer accounts and could access their full names, dates of birth, postal addresses, social security numbers and individual tax identification numbers. It claimed that its systems weren’t breached by the hackers and that there’s no evidence the passwords were obtained from its database. PayPal is contacting users whose accounts were affected (www.snipca.com/44829) and has reset the passwords of hacked accounts. It claimed the attackers didn’t attempt to perform any transactions from the PayPal accounts accessed. To change your PayPal password, sign into your account then click the top-right Settings cog. Click the Settings tab above your name, followed by Update…

PRICE RISE FOR AMAZON MUSIC UNLIMITED Amazon is increasing the cost of its Music Unlimited streaming service by £1 to £10.99. It announced the rise, which kicks in on 21 February, at www.snipca.com/44820. Customers in the middle of a trial period or who have used a promotional offer will continue to pay the discounted rate. Turn to page 62 for ways to save money on Amazon. 51 MORE EXCHANGES LOSING PHONE LINES Openreach has announced the next batch of UK exchanges that will have their copper phone lines switched off. It covers 51 exchanges that provide lines to 513,000 premises. To see them on a spreadsheet – from row 692 to 731 – visit www.snipca.com/44818 then follow the ‘Click here for list of exchanges in each tranche’ link. Openreach aims…

TRADE IN OLD TESCO MOBILE PHONES Tesco Mobile customers can now trade in their old phone or tablet for money or a Tesco voucher. Visit www.tescomobile.com/trade-in then click the blue button to go to a site run by Tesco’s partner Assurant. You can post your device to Assurant for free using its print-at-home pre-paid label. If it’s accepted, you’ll get your money or voucher within three to five days. SEARCH FOR PLANETS BEYOND SOLAR SYSTEM You can help Nasa find planets outside the Solar System by joining its Exoplanet Watch project. It launched in 2018 with a limited number of participants, but is now letting anyone analyse data collected by telescopes. You can also submit data captured by your own telescopes. Read Nasa’s blog (www.snipca.com/44798) for instructions on downloading data…

KeePass 2.53 www.snipca.com/44714 The latest version of KeePass, one of our favourite free password managers along with Bitwarden (see page 38), has added the option to compare changes you’ve made to a password entry. First, sign in with your master password then double-click a password entry, followed by the History tab at the top. Now press Ctrl+click to select two changes you’ve made (1 in our screenshot), then click Compare 2. In the box that appears you’ll see changes highlighted in yellow 3. In our example, we’ve changed the password title, user name and the password itself 4, as well as the icon that represents it. There’s also a new option to quickly see changes you’ve made recently – click the File option at the top of the main interface,…

I read with interest Issue 648’s Cover Feature on ditching your landline (pictured). One area you looked at was how your landline number would migrate after the end of copper lines, but perhaps a more core question is whether there is now any practical or financial benefit for an individual having a geographical number. The problem with geographical numbers is that you are calling a building, not a person. Also, your mobile phone’s contact list is much easier to use than the small address book in a traditional phone. Financially, the mobile is invariably going to be cheaper to use due to the inclusive minutes that come as part of the package. When we recently moved house, we acquired a new geographical number. We’ve not even given it to our…

In 1999, I bought my first desktop PC, and over the next 10 years I experimented with three or four broadband suppliers. Speed was always low, the signal wasn’t great, and I suffered from endless buffering. In 2010, I switched to a two-year contract with BT. Every two years since I’ve haggled with BT and got a decent deal. Last October, BT told me my contract was ending on 5 November. I spoke to a very helpful man in a call centre in Falkirk and asked him if I could renew at the same price or less, to save me looking elsewhere. He gave me the same price, plus the game Halo 3 for free, along with a new router and a speed increase to 100Mbps. The router arrived promptly,…

www.snipca.com/44795 What you need: Windows 10 or 11, macOS or Linux Less than six months after its previous major release (see Issue 640, page 18), this powerful software for recording and streaming live video has received another big update. Notable new features include support for encoding videos in AV1 format on PCs with AMD RX7000 and Intel Arc graphics processors. AV1 was previously limited to Nvidia GPUs and makes it easier to share videos online by reducing their file size without sacrificing quality. To use AV1, click Settings then Output and change the Output Mode to Advanced. Click the Recording tab and you’ll find the new AV1 settings in the Encoder menu (see screenshot). OBS Studio has also added two new audio filters, to let you normalise the volume in…

Can I create an online magazine? Q I help produce a village magazine, but as we’re struggling with enormous increases in paper and print costs, we’re considering publishing it online instead. Is there a PDF editor that lets you create an online publication with pages you can turn like a printed mag, rather than scrolling endlessly? David Lee A Flip HTML5 is an online service that turns documents and PDFs into digital magazines. Although supported by ads, the free version lets you create and share publications of up to 500 pages. You’ll need to pay for a subscription to remove the ads and unlock extra features, including the ability to add videos to your publications. Prices start at £122 per year. To use it, first create the content for your…

Hundreds of patients of the Askern Medical Practice near Doncaster had a nasty shock before Christmas when they received an erroneous text message warning they had an “aggressive lung cancer with metastases”. Those who received the message included a 57-year-old property developer who was waiting for lung-cancer test results. When he tried to ring the surgery to find out what was going on, he couldn’t get through, because lines were jammed with other worried patients frantically trying to contact the doctor. Another patient, Sarah Hargreaves, told the BBC that she “felt sick to my teeth and broke down” when she received the original text. The surgery quickly realised the error and sent an apology message an hour later, wishing patients a “very merry Christmas and a happy New Year” (see…

PHONE | £399 from Amazon www.snipca.com/44726 This mid-range smartphone is the latest offering from up-and-coming Chinese manufacturer Oppo and has some interesting features that make it well worth considering. The MediaTek Dimensity 1300 processor that powers it is as mid-table as the phone itself. It’s powerful enough for most everyday tasks, including all but the most demanding games, as long as you don’t use the highest graphics settings. Navigating menus and apps feels slick and snappy. The phone itself measures 161x73x7.7mm, with a 6.4in OLED screen. It weighs 179g and feels light to carry. That doesn’t mean it’s comfortable to hold, however, with flat edges and angular corners that look slick, but don’t sit snugly in the palm of your hand. The screen itself is large and bright enough for…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2022 Back Issue CD: £17 from www.snipca.com/44660 LAPTOP Acer Swift 3 14in £999 from www.snipca.com/44367 Tested Issue 648 Comes with a powerful 12th-generation Intel processor and 1TB SSD to make Windows tasks feel incredibly fast. Also has a decent 2560x1440-pixel IPS screen and comes with plenty of ports, including two Thunderbolt 4-compatible USB-C. ALTERNATIVE Lenovo Yoga 6 Gen 7 Also has a fast processor, long battery life and plenty of ports, but not as cheap as it once was. £652 from www.snipca.com/42509 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 £529 from www.snipca.com/42211 Tested Issue 634 Samsung has replaced its own Tab S7+ to become our favourite Android tablet. It’s fast with a stunning 11in screen, and has a longer battery life…

Birda Free Android www.snipca.com/44729 iOS www.snipca.com/44730 This birdwatching social network lets you log sightings of different species of birds with details of where and when along with photos, as well as browse sightings submitted by other users. When you submit a sighting it will be located at least 400m away from your real address so other users can’t see precisely where you live. DaVinci Resolve Free* iPadOS www.snipca.com/44731 The iPad version of the powerful video-editing and colour-correction software offers the same features as the PC program but has been optimised for touchscreens. DaVinci Resolve’s editing process has been streamlined to make it as simple as possible, with all the essential tools located on the home screen. Wordicate Free Android www.snipca.com/44738 Like a cross between Scrabble and Tetris, Wordicate challenges you…

LIBREOFFICE WRITER & MICROSOFT WORD Add comments to headers and footers Unlike Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer lets you add comments to headers and footers in documents. To do this, you simply need to right-click inside the header or footer and select Insert Comment, or press Ctrl+Alt+C. A yellow comment box will appear to the right of your document (see screenshot). If you right-click a header or footer in Word, you’ll notice that the ‘New Comment’ option is greyed out. Microsoft has removed this option, probably because headers and footers are designed to be printed on every page, while comments are not. You can get around this by using text boxes. Double-click inside a header or footer then click Insert, then the Text Box dropdown menu and select Simple Text Box.…

Amazon makes it easy to check what you’ve previously bought from the site. This is more than just interesting to know. You can use this information to check whether the price for an item you’re buying for a second time has changed. Log into your Amazon account on a computer (not on a phone or tablet), then click ‘Accounts & Lists’ in the top right followed by Your Orders. You’ll see how many orders you’ve made in the past three months. Click the dropdown menu to show what you’ve bought in each year going back to 2018.…

NEW ‘BASIC’ OFFICE GIVES 100GB STORAGE Microsoft has launched a new Basic version of its 365 Office subscription service, giving you 100GB storage and access to the web versions of Word, Excel, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook (without adverts) and PowerPoint. It replaces the ‘OneDrive Standalone 100GB’ package, and is priced £1.99 a month or £19.99 a year. For details visit www.snipca.com/44719. VIRGIN MOVING PHONE CUSTOMERS TO O2 Virgin Mobile is moving all its three million customers to O2 from March, following the two companies merging in 2021. It said the “vast majority” of customers won’t need to replace SIMs, or change phone numbers and billing dates. It also claimed no customers will pay more, while most will receive unlimited texts and voice calls and “either double the data or unlimited data…

‘Failed’ vehicle tax payment I received an email claiming to be from DVLA Electronic Vehicle Licensing, with the subject line ‘ID: 68862’, claiming that “From our records it seems that your latest vehicle tax payment has failed”. It wanted me to “avoid vehicle tax suspension by using our encrypted link”, which was a long URL containing loads of random letters and numbers. The email was signed ‘Yours sincerely GOV.UK’. I had a slight moment of doubt, so I checked my bank statement, only to see that my tax had been paid. I’d like to make other people aware of this in your pages. Doug Morrison Warn your fellow readers about scams at letters@computeractive.co.uk…

Can Ebuyer fob me off with partial refund? LEAD CASE Q In November 2019, we bought an Asus graphics card from Ebuyer (www.ebuyer.com) for £570.98, with a manufacturer’s three-year warranty. In early 2022, the card developed a fault. Asus told us to contact Ebuyer, which handles warranty enquiries. Ebuyer finally offered us a partial refund of £312.32, but shouldn’t we be entitled to a full refund if the graphics card can’t be replaced or repaired? Mike Garrard A It hinges on the wording of Asus’s warranty. Manufacturers and retailers can add any conditions they like, and must stick to them. Mike didn’t mention whether Asus’s warranty offers refunds. It probably does, but the only information we have is that Asus will repair the graphics card, or send a ‘reconditioned’ replacement…

Barry Collins puts the boot into tech villains, jargon-spouting companies and software trying to trick you The VPN market is a bit of a viper’s nest, so when I spotted PaladinVPN on the Microsoft Store, offering a “100% unlimited free VPN service” (as pictured below), it twanged my Balderdash Radar. When I first installed PaladinVPN, it actually worked as promised. I selected a server in the US and, sure enough, I was given the American version of the BBC News website. It also hoodwinked Netflix into thinking I was in Las Vegas (see screenshot right). Yes, it did also cut my download speed from hundreds of megabits per second to just below 10, but I could just about live with that. But then I visited https://paladinvpn.com, keen to find out…

PC | £1,055 from Cyberpower www.snipca.com/44675 The gaming PCs we’ve reviewed recently have all tended to break through the £1,000 mark by some distance – see the £1,500 Wired2Fire Predator X7 (www.snipca.com/44481) we reviewed in Issue 649, for example. However, you can spend a whole lot less and still get a reasonably good gaming PC, as this Cyberpower model demonstrates, although it has stiff competition from the £999 Palicomp Intel Hellfire (www.snipca.com/43653) we reviewed in Issue 644. “A decent PC that handles basic games well, but cheaper rivals are faster” Cyberpower has cut some costs on the processor. The Ultra 55 Pro has an AMD Ryzen 5 5500 rather than the Ryzen 5 7600X of the Predator X7. In our benchmark tests that measured only the processor, the 5500 ran…

Can you suggest a phone offering long-term updates? Q The time has come for me to replace my beloved OnePlus 3T smartphone. I’m disappointed that it stopped receiving updates after only two years and I’m hoping you can recommend a similar sized, mid-price phone that is guaranteed to be updated and supported for longer. The camera is the least important feature to me, but I do need a good screen that can easily be seen in bright sunlight. Ethel Trueman A Only a handful of manufacturers state how long they will support updates for. If this is your key consideration, it’s worth opting for one that offers you guarantees. The best manufacturer in this regard is Google, which supports full system updates on all its phones for three years, and…

The Nighthawk M2 Mobile Router by NETGEAR brings Gigabit Class LTE speed to your home. It delivers maximum download speeds of up to 2Gbps in selected areas, bringing your mobile-broadband experience to unparalleled new heights. Maximum upload speeds are also impressive – hitting 150Mbps. With the Wi-Fi/Ethernet offloading feature, the Nighthawk M2 Mobile Router delivers a fast home broadband alternative without sacrificing speeds – whether you browse online or stream your favourite shows. An always-on connection means you can share with up to 20 devices over Wi-Fi, helping you stay productive wherever you are. 4G connectivity helps you to email, share files, stream content and browse the web anywhere. It requires one Data SIM Card (not included). To enter this competition, answer the question at www.snipca.com/44692 and submit your details.…

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Add colours to cells that have bold text Issue 649’s tip (page 47) for identifying which Excel cells contain bold text will prove useful to some people, but I like to go a step further by adding colour to these bold cells. The instructions are similar to those you gave. First, select your cells then press Ctrl+F to open the ‘Find and Replace’ box. Click the Format dropdown menu and select Choose Format From Cell. Move the dropper icon that appears to a cell containing bold text then click it. You’ll notice that ‘Preview’ next to the Format menu will turn bold (1 in our screenshot). Now click the Replace tab and at the right of ‘Replace with’ click Format followed by the Fill tab. Now…

Scone Free Android www.snipca.com/44757 iOS www.snipca.com/44758 Calculate and lower your carbon footprint by using this app to analyse your current habits and identify ways you could be greener. Scone asks questions about which forms of transport you use, the food you eat and your living situation, then provides tips and challenges from its community and team of eco experts. Best For Cutting your carbon footprint Too Good To Go Free Android www.snipca.com/44754 iOS www.snipca.com/44755 Too Good To Go helps reduce food waste by telling you which local shops, cafés and restaurants have surplus supplies. You can then buy a goody bag of leftover grub for as little as £2, and collect it at a specified time. Participating businesses include Greggs, Starbucks and Nisa. Best For Reducing food waste Treeapp Free…

Share club videos via Dropbox The easiest way of contacting club members en masse is by maintaining a list containing their email addresses and sending messages to them. But that’s not recommended if you want to show members a video – you don’t want to be accused of clogging their inboxes with huge video files. Uploading the video to your club’s YouTube page is one alternative, but it might be easier and certainly more private to save it to an online-storage service like Dropox and share a link to it that members can click to access it. We’ll explain how to do that. Upload your files What we really like about Dropbox is that it works like an online version of Windows File Explorer. In fact, its desktop version adds…

The 3G switch-off won’t just affect older phones but other devices that use the 3G network, including telecare devices such as panic alarms. Contact your device supplier or service provider to check if your device will be affected and, if so, ask to be upgraded to one that works over 4G, so the switch-off doesn’t leave you at risk. Additionally, losing 3G may mean you don’t receive emergency alerts. This new government service, which is being introduced in the UK this year, will use 4G and 5G phone masts to broadcast alerts when there’s “danger to life nearby”. All 4G and 5G phones and tablets will receive these alerts, which contain advice about how to stay safe, and will make a loud sound and vibrate. Devices that can’t connect to…

We applaud Norton for quickly detecting this attack and alerting those affected. Its reaction contrasts with LastPass, which has been accused of misleading users over the scale of its recent breach. On page 38, we explain how to switch from LastPass, but we’re happy to keep recommending Norton - it’s a powerful antivirus tool with an excellent record of protection. The lesson here is never to reuse passwords across multiple accounts. If you do, you risk being hacked sooner or later.…

The longer it’s been since you bought an item, the more likely it is you’ll have to settle for a compromise that’ll leave you feeling dissatisfied. That’s the position David Ball has found himself in after Currys said it couldn’t fix his Lenovo laptop and refused to retrieve the data on it (see Issue 649). David bought the laptop over six years ago, so he was no longer covered by the Consumer Rights Act. Instead he used a warranty he bought from Currys at the same time as purchasing the laptop. This was an extended warranty for which he paid monthly. He says the warranty covers retrieval of data, but Currys disagreed and said David would have to pay £350 for this. It also said that the parts needed to…

www.snipca.com/44794 What you need: Windows 10 or 11 The first major new version of Paint.NET since 2014 drops support for Windows 7 and 8.1, but also introduces plenty of useful features and improvements that will delight the many users of this popular free image editor. Paint.NET 5 switches to using your PC’s graphic processor (GPU) to render (display) images and apply nearly all of its adjustments and effects. This makes the software faster and more stable, improves picture quality and colour accuracy, and boosts battery life on your laptop by requiring less processing power for editing tasks. By default, the program uses what Windows calls the ‘performance GPU’ for rendering, but you can tweak its settings if necessary by clicking the Settings cog (top right) and selecting Graphics. There are…

WHAT THEY SAY Lenovo on its new Project Chronos (pictured) www.snipca.com/44707 “Built as a home computing device for the tech-forward creator, Lenovo’s Project Chronos concept offers a glasses-free, full-body-movement-driven experience that enables consumers and creators to virtually control their life-like avatar without the need for any motion-capture (mocap) wearable.” WHAT THEY MEAN We’ve no idea what this does, so we’ll just make it sound pointlessly futuristic instead.…

What are they? Intel launched a small number of new processors, its 13th generation, at the end of last year. These were all designed for desktop PCs such as the PCSpecialist Arc Elite R, which we reviewed in Issue 648 – though sadly PCSpecialist has now stopped selling it. However, at the CES tech show in Las Vegas in January, Intel announced the rest of the chips in this range, which includes cheaper and more efficient processors that are more suitable for laptops. We expect to see devices featuring these processors soon. How do they work? They are able to use the latest versions of various components, such as DDR5 RAM. They come with more cores than their predecessors, providing greater processing power that can be shared around when using…

What is it? The Lenovo Yoga Book 9i (pictured) is a folding laptop with two 13in OLED screens and a detachable Bluetooth keyboard. What does it do? The screens are joined on their long edge, but this isn’t a flimsy fold that creates a seamless larger screen – instead it’s two distinct screens, connected by a hinge. The device can be arranged like a single-screen laptop, with the removable keyboard covering the bottom two thirds of the lower screen, or you can have both screens fully visible in any orientation. What’s the catch? The screens are permanently attached to one another, so you can’t arrange them as you’d like. It’s also likely to be expensive – expect prices to start at around $2,099 (£1,715). So can I do without it?…

CHROMIUM Detect which online articles were written by AI The new artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT has taken the web by storm and, along with other AI models, is already being used by some sites as an easy way to generate content – we’ve even tried it ourselves in this issue’s Easy When You Know How column (see page 74). If you’re intrigued to know whether a news story, blog post or online article was written by a human or an AI bot, you can use Detect GPT (www.snipca.com/44677) to find out. This extension analyses the content of the page you are viewing to identify if the text has been generated using the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) language model. Click the toolbar button to view its findings and discover how…

iOS Block trackers in emails using Proton Mail When we reviewed Proton Mail in our ‘Stop Using Gmail and Outlook’ Cover Feature in Issue 644 (get it on our Back Issue CD from www.snipca.com/44660), we praised its ability to block trackers in emails so the senders can’t tell you’ve opened their messages. This feature has now been added to Proton Mail’s iOS app (www.snipca.com/44736), to let you read emails more privately on your iPhone or iPad. Invisible trackers in emails are now blocked by default to prevent the senders from seeing when you opened the messages and using your IP address to identify your location. Proton Mail pre-loads remote images on its own servers rather than on your device, so they can’t be used to track you, but the rest…

WINDOWS 10 Replace Groove Music with Windows 11’s Media Player Microsoft has replaced its Groove Music app for Windows 10 with the Windows 11 version of Media Player, which launched in late 2021. Groove Music appeared in 2015 but never caught on, and Microsoft hasn’t updated it in years. To install the Media Player, open the Microsoft Store in Windows 10 or visit https://apps.microsoft.com, then search for ‘Windows Media Player’. Searching for ‘Groove Music’ also redirects you to Media Player. If that doesn’t work, look for Groove Music in the Updates section of the Store. Click ‘Update’ and Windows will replace the app with Media Player The new Media Player is much better than Groove Music because as well as music it plays most types of video file, from homemade…

Unlike many free privacy tools, Privacy Eraser and PrivaZer don’t nag you to upgrade to their paid-for editions, though there are some benefits to doing so. As mentioned above, buying a licence for Privacy Eraser – for $19.95 (£16.44) a year – unlocks its Drive Wiper and the full set of security options for deleting files. You also get free ‘24/7’ technical support and automatic updates when new versions of the program are released. The only notable features missing from the free version of PrivaZer are the cleaning of Shellbags – registry files containing data about the size, position and icons of folders – and automatic clean-ups of data. Upgrading to the Donors version for the amount of your choice – from £10 upwards – will unlock these options along…

Why does my virtual Ubuntu keep aborting? Q I’ve had problems with Issue 647’s How To (page 35) on running a virtual version of Ubuntu using VirtualBox (www.virtualbox.org). I’ve downloaded Ubuntu correctly, but at this point in your instructions when I try to click Start so VirtualBox will boot into the installer, I see a message saying that ‘Ubuntu 22.04.1 has aborted’. What’s going wrong? Brian Buck A Problems with virtualisation can often be tricky to diagnose, as they depend on a variety of factors, including the host PC’s hardware, the settings of the virtual machine (VM) you set up, the operating system used on the guest PC – and any combination of the above. We’d suggest taking a look at the settings for your VM first. Open VirtualBox, click…