Table of contents for December 2018 in Windows Help & Advice

We’re almost getting the hang of this now. October is the time when Microsoft ships its second major feature update of the year for Windows 10. The October 2018 Update – or version 1809 – is the sixth major update since Windows 10 arrived back in 2015. In this feature we’ll reveal all the exciting new features and improvements that are waiting for you to find them, from a new Clipboard History tool to new ways of integrating Windows 10 with your Android or iOS phone. But the 1809 update path has not been an easy one, with the update temporarily pulled after issues surrounding the first rollout of the update. It’s exposed major issues with a twice-yearly update cycle that’s forced on the majority of users with no option…

1 Switch it on The Clipboard History feature is disabled by default, so navigate to Start > System > Settings > Clipboard and flick the ‘Clipboard history’ switch to On. From now on, all text, HTML and images (up to 4MB in size) that you copy will be automatically saved to the clipboard. 2 Carry on as normal Going forward, the Clipboard works in the same way it’s always worked: [Ctrl] + [C] to copy or [Ctrl] + [X] to cut, then [Ctrl + V] to paste the last item copied to the Clipboard. However, your Clipboard will now store all of the compatible items that you cut or copy into it. 3 Invoke Clipboard History When you’re ready to paste in a previously copied item, press [Win] + [V]…

Notepad isn’t the most glamorous text editor out there, but it’s improved over recent years and the October 2018 Update sees some of the biggest changes to it yet. When performing a Find/ Replace, you can now select ‘Wrap Around’, which means you can search the whole document without positioning the cursor at beginning or end of the document. There’s also the ability to select text and choose Edit > ‘Search with Bing…’ to trigger a web search through Edge. A new zoom feature – select View > Zoom – has been implemented, with [Ctrl] key shortcuts in place ([+] to zoom in, [-] to zoom out, [0] to reset; plus hold [Ctrl] and use your mouse’s scroll wheel to adjust the magnification). Another new keyboard shortcut sees [Ctrl] +…

1 Make sure OneDrive is running in Windows To ensure that OneDrive is working, make sure the app is running in Windows and you’ve signed in correctly. When you sign up for a Microsoft account – which is advised if you want to log into Windows 10, personalise it and download apps from the Microsoft Store – you also get OneDrive, which should load when Windows starts. If not, search for OneDrive from the Taskbar. 2 Check the icon Keep an eye on the OneDrive icon (which looks like two clouds) in the Taskbar’s notification area. This gives you a quick overview of how OneDrive is syncing, or if there’s an error. If the icon appears normal, it means your files are synced. If it has a small icon of…

1 Find the calibration options Right-click an empty area of your desktop and choose Display Settings > Advanced Display Settings > Display Adapter Properties for the screen you want to calibrate, then Colour Management twice, then Advanced > Calibrate Display. Or open the Start menu and type calibrate – you’ll get halfway through the word before the correct setting is automatically suggested. 2 The calibration window The window that opens when you choose to calibrate is very boring – a large grey rectangle. The process is a wizard, so there’s a Next button (bottom right) and an arrow (top left) that takes you back. Before you begin, you’ll need to open your monitor’s on-screen controls and reset its colour settings to the factory defaults – check your monitor’s manual for…

1 Get a photo editor Before you get started, it’s worth downloading a free photo editor so you can make simple adjustments to any pictures you want to add to your site (like cropping, rotating and adjusting colours). Adobe Photoshop Express is free from the Microsoft Store (http://bit.ly/2xWE8Mu) and is easy to use, but if you do get stuck you can find a quick tutorial here: http://bit.ly/2knXDdG. 2 Get a Wix account Visit www.wix.com and click ‘Start now’. You can log in using your Facebook or Google account, or create one specifically for Wix using your email address. To make a new account, click ‘Sign up’, enter your email address and create a password. Once you’re logged in, select the type of website you want to make. If you can’t…

1 Move the Taskbar By default, the Taskbar appears at the bottom of the screen – but it does not have to stay there. You can move it to the top of the screen, or even place it vertically to the left or right. Right-click an empty section of the Taskbar and ensure the ‘Lock the taskbar’ option is not ticked. Using the left mouse button, you can then drag the Taskbar to your preferred screen edge. 2 Hide the Taskbar You can hide the Taskbar when you’re not using it to maximise the amount of available screen space. Right-click an empty section of the Taskbar and select ‘Taskbar settings’. Enable the setting labelled ‘Automatically hide the taskbar in desktop mode’ and you’ll see that it immediately disappears. Move your…

Many useful settings are hidden away in the Registry, but if you download and run the free Ultimate Windows Tweaker 4 tool from https://www.thewindowsclub.com/ ultimate-windows-tweaker-4-windows-10 – a mere 495KB – you’ll find over 200 tweaks to wrest back control of Windows. Highlights include shortcuts to several Windows tools on the main screen, while the Customisation section contains no less than four tabs packed with settings, such as restoring the classic battery and volume control pop-ups in the Taskbar notification area. Look under the ‘This PC’ tab to restore classic system tools hidden away in Windows 10. Another favourite of ours: switch to the Additional section and then click Enable Windows Photo Viewer to bring back the classic Windows 7 photo-viewing tool. You then navigate to Settings > Apps > ‘Default…

Make sure your hard drives are in tip-top condition. You can check their physical health using tools such as Speccy (www.piriform.com/speccy),which uses a drive’s S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) status to alert you to early signs of potential disk problems. Also periodically run the Disk Check tool outside of Windows to pick up errors the Windows-based tool seems to miss. To do that, right-click the Start button and choose ‘Command Prompt (admin)’, then type the following line: $ chkdisk c: /f /r Press [Y] when prompted, then reboot your PC to run the disk check, which will attempt to fix any errors it finds. If the disk check keeps appearing on startup, click Start > Settings > ‘Update & security’ > Recovery and click ‘Restart now’ under ‘Advanced start-up’.…

There’s no foolproof way to completely stop yourself from receiving spam – if your email address falls into the hands of a spammer, all you can do is find effective ways of filtering it out. Consider installing a third-party tool such as Mailwasher (www.mailwasher.net) that you can use to screen your emails. Once installed, take the time to ‘train’ the app so it recognises the kind of spam emails you receive and then configure it so it deletes them automatically before they reach your inbox. You can also minimise spam by switching to plain text view by default and never opening a spam message – it’ll almost certainly contain some form of tracking device to alert the spammer to the fact your address is active and in use. If you…

Want to play DVD-Videos in Windows 10? Both Kodi (www.kodi.tv) and VLC Media Player (www.videolan.org/vlc) offer free support (including menu access) – VLC should work with non-region 2 discs, too. Simply pop the disc in and it should play like normal. Blu-ray discs are trickier – the following free add-ons should enable you to play most older AACS-encrypted discs along with a handful of BD+ discs. Point your browser at https://vlc-bluray.whoknowsmy.name/,then download the Keys database and place it in C:\ ProgramData\aacs. Next download the relevant AACS dynamic library for your PC (either 32-bit or 64-bit), then place the downloaded DLL file inside your VLC program folder. on your PC. Launch VLC (a portable version is also available from https://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/vlc_portable) and pop your Blu-ray into a compatible drive. In the VLC…

Moore’s Law is dead and quantum computing isn’t coming to the rescue. Although, not any time soon. So, is there anything that can keep conventional computing moving forward? One promising technology is carbon nanotubes, one of those wonder technologies with seemingly infinite possible applications, from space elevators to solar cells. But how can they help computing? One of the key theoretical advantages of transistors built from carbon nanotubes could be much lower power consumption. That would allow for more powerful chips to operate within the limited energy budget of a device like a smartphone. Physically, it’s easy to fit a desktop-class processor die inside a smartphone. Powering it is the problem, and carbon nanotubes might solve it. Optical interconnects both between and within chips are another big opportunity. Just as…

Windows FILE EXPLORER’S GLITCHY BEHAVIOUR Q I’m currently having two problems with Windows 10: clicking on the Recycle Bin icon on the desktop opens File Explorer, so I can’t empty it, and if I open File Explorer from the Taskbar I’m unable to create a new folder – clicking the button does nothing. Can you help please? Dave Carlile Rob’s solution We were able to ascertain that the Recycle Bin was working correctly – clicking it does simply open File Explorer, and Dave confirmed he was able to empty the recycle bin from there or by right-clicking the bin itself). The second problem is almost certainly linked to a third-party program that adds additional commands to File Explorer, typically through the right-click menu. What you need is a program that enables…

Start by stress-testing your desktop to verify that everything works as it should – sometimes the repair can introduce more problems than it solves, in which case if you’re running Windows 8.1 or 10 you can undo the changes. Go to Start > Settings > ‘Update & recovery’ > Recovery and look for an option to go back to your previous version – click ‘Get started’ and then follow the prompts. If the repair doesn’t appear to fix your underlying problem, Windows 8.1 and 10 users can take one more intermediate step – the reset or repair. It will see you waving goodbye to all those desktop programs you’ve installed (including MS Office and your third-party security software), but it will preserve your Microsoft Store apps, files and Windows settings.…

Once Windows is reinstalled, open Windows Update to bring Windows fully up to date – don’t be surprised if there are hundreds of updates still to apply in the case of Windows 7 and 8.1. Once it’s fully up to date, consider reinstalling Macrium Reflect Free and taking your first drive image – a vanilla backup you can restore in future instead of reinstalling Windows itself. Next, it’s a case of reinstalling your core apps. Once in place, open CloneApp from your data drive. If you click the Restore button, every single program setting you backed up will be restored – if there are any backup settings you don’t want to restore, select Options to locate the backup folder, then open it and move any program folders you want to…

1 Partition hard drive You’ll need to partition your drive to free up space on which to store your copy of Windows. The best tool for the job is AOMEI Partition Assistant (www.aomeitech.com/aomei-partitionassistant.html). Start by clicking Make Bootable Media under Wizards to create rescue media. 2 Shrink main partition Select your Windows drive (typically C:) and click Resize/ Move Partition under Partition Operations. Use the slider to free up at least 30GB space to the right of the Windows partition. If your drive is an SSD, click ‘Advanced>>’ and tick ‘Allow partition alignment…’ Click ‘OK’. 3 Add new Windows partition Now select the newly created Unallocated space to the right of drive C and click ‘Create Partition’ under Partition Operations. Verify NTFS is the file system and click ‘Advanced<<’ to…

£1,249 | $1,299 www.microsoft.com Microsoft surprised the world with the launch of its first-ever dedicated laptop in 2017, the Surface Laptop. We almost immediately asked, why launch a laptop that’s straight down the middle when you’ve become the tastemaker in touch-led mobile computing? As it turns out, the Surface Laptop 2 is an even more distilled answer to that question than the first. While it doesn’t iterate on much, this sequel is frankly what the original model aspired to be: a pure, powerful Windows 10 laptop experience. Sure, the Surface Laptop 2 could hugely benefit from an updated port (or several more) given its somewhat unconventional 13.5-inch size on the diagonal. But, the lack of those features doesn’t necessarily sour the experience or even the utility of the device to…

1 “BAZILLION” Number of phone calls allegedly made by a tiny gecko using a touchscreen desk phone in an animal hospital in Hawaii. The calls were inadvertently made by the gecko, thanks to the sticky pads on its feet, after he’d snuck into the Ke Kai Ola Marine Mammal Centre on the US island. 220GB Number of files apparently lost by one Windows 10 user after upgrading to the October 2018 Update (version 1809), with numerous other reports of similar issues from users who’d signed up to Windows Insider. Microsoft temporarily halted the rollout of the feature update in October until it was able to resolve the issue. 6  The new name for the next version of Wi-Fi, otherwise known as 802.11ax. The Wi-Fi Alliance is adopting the new number…

Microsoft first attempted to release the October 2018 Update on 4th October. Within a day there were reports that the update was deleting key personal files from user folders – Microsoft promptly pulled the update. Many people – ourselves included – had successfully installed the update on one machine without problems, and if you’re one of those people you can breathe a sigh of relief. If you updated and found files missing, then the advice involved running data recovery software to try and get those files back. Of course, if you’ve followed our previous advice and keep regular backups of your system drive, then your files will have been safely stashed away in your backup, enabling you to restore them using your backup tool’s restoration feature. If not, the three-step…

Windows 10’s existing features gain some major improvements, too. Let’s start with the Game Bar, which develops further after its major overhaul in the previous April 2018 Update. Now accessible through the Start menu as well as by pressing [Win] + [G], you gain built-in audio controls to direct your game’s sound to the correct output device, and it can be used to set independent volume levels for different apps, games and other parts of your system. The previous update introduced Game Mode, which improves gaming performance by reducing the priority of background tasks. It’s now automatically enabled for all games – toggle this on or off via Settings > Gaming > Game Mode. In addition, all Windows Update driver installs and other interruptions (like restart notifications) are suppressed. One…

You should now be aware of the most visible changes to Windows 10, but there are lots of smaller, incremental updates to take account of. One notable addition, for example, is the addition of two Power Usage fields to Task Manager’s Processes tab. They’ll be of most interest if you use a laptop or tablet, since they’ll help determine which apps and processes are draining your battery. The ‘Power usage’ column gives you a real-time view of which apps are currently using the most power. The ‘Power usage trend’ column enables you to monitor longer term effects, though the Task Manager window must be left open for at least two minutes before you can start to record this. Some related hardware monitoring improvements: you can now keep an eye on…

1 Set up a new document To start a new document, either open a template or choose File > New. The New Document window is fairly straightforward, asking you the paper size, whether it’s a spread or a single page, and what the margins are. You also get the choice of whether to link to or embed image files (so you don’t ‘lose’ them). Here we’re making a simple A4 colour page at 300dpi. 2 Add some text In DTP apps, text lives in frames that can be moved around and coloured as you wish. Choose the Text Frame tool that lives about two-thirds of the way down the toolbar, and drag a frame that will contain your text. You can move and resize the frame once you’ve drawn it.…

1 Choose a photo Your choice of image for your pop-art portrait is important – anything with a busy background is going to take much longer to separate the subject from what’s behind. That said, Photoshop Elements 2018 has some clever tools that can help. You also need a strong, recognisable facial expression, as we’re going to mess around with it a lot, and we don’t want something indistinct. 2 Select your subject We need to remove the background, and Elements’ tools can help. We tried Auto Selection, which is an option for the Quick Selection tool that sees you drag a box around what you want selected. Elements analyses the image and gives its best guess. For our image, it got confused between the model’s hair and her shadow,…

Kodi is an extremely versatile open source application. It offers a very elegant way to manage all your TV shows, films and music in one place. Each aspect of Kodi can be changed from its themes (known as ‘skins’) to the addition of various plug-ins, which support extra features such as YouTube playback. One particularly useful feature concerns Kodi’s video and audio scrapers. These scour the Internet to match your media files to a particular movie, TV programme or song. The resulting metadata is displayed in the app. The aim of the Kodi project is to turn your PC into a home media centre. To this end, the application also supports a number of remote controls, including official touchscreen apps for mobiles and even game controllers. Point your web browser…

1 Access the Action Centre The Action Centre icon can be found in the notification area of the Taskbar in the bottom-right corner of your screen (it looks like a speech bubble). When you have a notification from an app, you will notice the icon displays the number of unread messages you have. Click it and you’ll see a panel slide out to the right of the screen – click a notification to be taken to the relevant app. 2 Limit notifications with Focus assistant By enabling Focus assistant – previously known as Quiet hours – you can ensure that you’re not bothered by notifications at inopportune times. In Windows 10’s Settings, open Settings, head to the System section and click ‘Focus assist’ in the left-hand pane. Here you can…

You could say that if there’s one thing Windows is guaranteed to be good at, it’s annoying people. With each new release comes a host of new features, while existing features get dropped or moved somewhere obscure. Then there’s the frustrating problems caused by glitchy hardware or misbehaving apps, never mind the shortcomings of the Internet and the questions of security and privacy. We’ve rounded up over 40 of the biggest annoyances we’ve come across – with your help through the pages of Support Squad – in the years we’ve been running Windows. We’ve dug out workarounds and fixes, and found ways to restore missing features. We’ve focused on those niggles that have most universal appeal, and made sure our solutions are easy to follow. We cover everything from fixing…

Problems with your CD or DVD drive? There’s no longer a dedicated troubleshooter for this problem, so you’ll need to search for a solution at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314060 – here you’ll find a handy step-by-step guide that covers most of the steps you’ll need to follow to resolve the issue, such as making sure the drive is visible in Windows, and that third-party burning software – particularly if it was installed prior to you upgrading to Windows 10 isn’t responsible for the problem. If you’re struggling to burn DVDs or CDs, eliminate all software problems before assuming the drive itself is faulty (remember, some drives use different lasers for CD and DVD, so the drive may appear to work when in fact it needs replacing if you’re able to burn or read…

Microsoft is incredibly keen for you to use Office 365, which is why Windows 10 will regularly prompt you to download and install it. But if you get fed up with its nagging, click Start and locate the ‘Get Office’ shortcut. Right-click this and choose Uninstall to remove it. If you’re an Office 365 user you may be frustrated by the way it works with OneDrive, saving directly to the cloud rather than to your local OneDrive folder. To stop this behaviour, you need to open each Office app in turn, then choose Options from the File tab on the Ribbon. Select ‘Save’ and tick ‘Save to Computer by default’. You’re not done yet – next, click ‘^’ in the Taskbar notification area, right-click the OneDrive cloud icon and then…

1 Reboot for media If you’re running Windows 7, or have Fast Boot disabled, insert your boot media and start your PC. Look for a ‘Press any key to boot from CD or DVD’ option (even if you’ve booted from a USB flash drive) – press the key and you should find the Windows install process starts. 2 Tweak boot options If you boot back into Windows, restart your PC again, but this time press a key, such as [F11], when prompted to open a boot menu. Do so, select your boot media (choose UEFI if the option appears) to boot; otherwise, enter Setup to change the boot device order. 3 Windows 8.1/10 If Fast Boot is enabled, open Settings in Windows and navigate to ‘Update & recovery’ > Recovery,…

£450 | $370 www.synology.com/ While most networks can benefit from the addition of a network attached storage (NAS) device, not every home will get enough use to justify the cost – one increasingly popular NAS use for the home, though, is for storing and serving up media collections to all your devices. This could mean running a Plex media server to stream content to a TV, phone, tablet or PC. In the past, if you wanted to stream 4K content it meant using an actual PC as a server. But NAS boxes like the DS418play are powerful enough to handle such duties. It enables you to store huge amounts of video and photos, and stream them to any device on your network. It also provides an extra backup option, with…

1 VLC Media Player  www.videolan.org/ VLC Media Player is a name that crops up time and time and time again when talk turns to free video players. And with good reason – it’s simply incredible. Out of the box, this is an impressively powerful program that supports everything from 360-degree video to 8K formats, and it can be used to play local files, contents on a network, online video, DVDs and more. There are advanced controls for tweaking the look and sound of videos so you can get the best possible experience whether you’re watch on a laptop, streaming to a TV, or projecting onto your living room wall. Should you find that VLC isn’t quite feature-packed enough for you, extensions can be used to expand its capabilities. The app…

Microsoft Surface family From £350 www.microsoft.com/surface Looking to treat yourself this Christmas? Pop along to your local Microsoft Store and feast your eyes (and starve your wallet) on the company’s updated Surface line, which includes the Surface Desktop 2; the Surface Laptop 2 (reviewed on page 78); the Surface Pro 6; and the all-new, on-ear Surface Headphones. Our pick is the delicious Surface Laptop 2, which now boasts a choice of eighth-generation Intel Core i5 or Core i7 processors; up to 16GB of RAM and up to 1TB of ultra-fast SSD storage, depending on configuration, plus true all-day battery life of up to 14.5 hours. Other goodies include a 13.5-inch PixelSense display and a new colour, Black, which joins the existing Platinum, Cobalt Blue and Burgundy versions. Team it with…

If, in future, you run into the problem of missing folders after installing a feature update, you’ll be able to restore them from your backup tool – if you’re using File History, navigate to C:\Users\{Username} in File Explorer, then open each folder in turn (such as Documents) and click the History button to see what’s recoverable. In most cases, the latest version of the files displayed are the ones you want – simply click the green button at the bottom to restore them. In the case of a drive image, If you use Macrium, simply double-click the backup file in File Explorer to mount it as a virtual drive, then copy the missing files back from the Users\{Username} folder on that mounted drive to your PC’s drive; If you’re using…

Windows’ Snipping tool is a little fiddly to set up and use for capturing screenshots, but the October 2018 Update helps to simplify the process. Once your screen is prepared, press [Win] + [Shift] + [S] and you’ll be presented with three options at the top of the screen to take a rectangular, free-form or full-screen snip. This grab is then sent to the clipboard – yes, it’ll be stored in Clipboard History for future retrieval – and you’ll see a pop-up screen inviting you to open the clip in the renamed Snip & Sketch app for further editing and marking up.…

If you search using Cortana (or the Taskbar’s search bar), you’ll notice the search window is now a lot wider when opened. That’s because it now includes a preview window. Start typing your search terms and it’ll display one of two things depending on which item is selected as the best match. If it’s a program, file or system setting, you’ll see a series of options, from clicking Open and accessing a list of recently opened files for programs to opening a file’s parent folder. If the best match is a web search, you’ll see a list of Bing search results. These are taken from the first page of the Bing search engine, so may include an extended preview of the first result, related information, and options to search by…

Once again, Microsoft continues to tinker with Edge as it attempts to wrest users away from Chrome and Firefox. There’s a major redesign of the program’s menu and Settings page, with larger buttons for key commands like ‘New Window’ and ‘New Tab’. The Settings page – rather unwieldy in previous versions – has now been split into four more manageable categories. Head to Settings > Advanced and you’ll see a new option that enables you to control whether or not sites can play videos automatically – we recommend setting this to Block. You can then enable specific sites to autoplay media by clicking their lock or ‘i’ icon on the Address Bar and clicking ‘Media autoplay settings’ to set or clear permissions. Edge’s jump list (when you right-click its Taskbar…

When it works, Microsoft’s OneDrive service is fantastic. It’s built into Windows 10, and enables you easily to synchronise your files and folders with other Internet-connected computers, tablets and smartphones. It means your files are easily accessible from a range of devices – provided they can get online. However, OneDrive can occasionally encounter problems syncing your files. This can be frustrating, especially if you’re away from the home or work PC the files originated from, as your files won’t be properly synchronised with your other devices, and that can make them impossible to download, edit or share. The good news is that these issues are relatively rare, and that if you do encounter them, then they’re pretty straightforward to fix. So, before you start panicking that your files aren’t syncing…

1 Open the app and sign in The first thing you need to do is to download the Your Phone app from the Microsoft Store. When you first open the app there isn’t a lot going on – you need to sign in with your Microsoft account, so click the ‘Sign in’ button (no, the app won’t use your Windows sign-on information). If you can’t find it, press the [Win] key and type Your Phone to locate it. 2 Get the app on your phone Download the companion app onto your Android device. This will help your phone and PC communicate. When prompted, enter your phone number on the screen. Ensure you select the correct country code if your phone is registered in a different place than the display language…

1 Update Windows Kodi will only work with the latest version of Windows 10. You can check if your system is up to date by heading to Settings > ‘Update & security’ > Windows Update. Save and back up any files that you’re currently working on, then click on ‘Check for updates’. If your PC needs to reboot, let it do so, since you won’t be able to install Kodi until the update is complete. 2 Download Kodi Fetch the latest stable version of Kodi by opening the Microsoft Store and typing ‘Kodi’ into the search bar. Click ‘Get’. If you want the most up-to-date version of Kodi, open your browser and navigate to https://kodi.tv/download. Click ‘Windows’ under ‘Choose your weapon’, then Nightly Build. When you first launch Kodi, Windows’…

Let’s start by checking that System Restore is enabled (it’s switched off every time Windows 10 performs a major update). Type system restore into Cortana’s search box and then choose ‘Create a restore point’. Check your system drive – if it’s off, select it and click Configure… Choose ‘Turn on system protection’, then set the slider to 5GB or five percent of available space before clicking OK. Worried that Windows Update might suddenly attempt to reboot without warning while you’re using your PC? Click Settings > ‘Update & security’ and choose ‘Change active hours’ under Windows Update. Set your start and end times – and Windows Update won’t automatically restart during these hours. While you’re here, select Advanced Options > ‘Choose how updates are delivered’, then select ‘PCs on my…

One of the annoying things about upgrading Windows is when you suddenly discover that your older hardware is no longer supported. You plug it in, and either nothing happens, Windows tells you drivers aren’t available or – in the case of AMD graphics – it installs a basic display adapter that’s stuck at a low resolution. Before you throw out the baby with the bathwater, press [Win] + [Pause/ Break] to open the System Control Panel and confirm your operating system type (32-bit or 64-bit). Now visit your hardware manufacturer’s website and seek out the latest version of its driver, making sure it matches your system type – Windows 8, 7 and even Vista drivers should work. If you own two or more printers, it can be a hassle switching…

Let’s start by tightening Windows 10’s privacy controls. Even if you diligently went through the setup wizard when you installed the current October 2018 Update, it can be confusing knowing which settings to pick – and even then, you’ll find that there are other privacy tweaks you should consider applying. Windows 10 thoughtfully scatters these settings far and wide throughout your PC, but by downloading the latest version of the free O&O Shutup10 tool from www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10 you can view and manage them easily. Once downloaded, double-click OOSU10.exe and give it administrator access when required. If you’ve previously run the tool, it’ll detect previous settings; otherwise, you’ll see a list of switches you can click on for an explanation. Either toggle switches manually, or go with O&O Shutup10’s recommendations via the…

When a program controls a file association, it will always open when you double-click that file type. Windows 10 makes it harder for third-party programs to seize control of file associations, but it’s still possible, and every time a new Windows update is released, you can easily be tricked into handing back associations to Microsoft’s choice of app, not yours. Start fixing problems by clicking Start > Settings > Apps > ‘Default apps’. From here you can quickly switch or set defaults for email, maps, music, photos, video and web browser – just click the appropriate button and choose your desired app. Other universal changes can be made, too – start by clicking ‘Set defaults by app’ to access a list of all your programs. Click one to find out…

Fifty years is a long time for any prediction to hold true. It’s an aeon when it comes to predicting the future of cutting-edge technology. But it’s pretty much how long Moore’s Law has held together as a predictor of progress in computing power. But now just about everybody agrees that Moore’s Law is done. Computer chips are no longer doubling in complexity every two years. Intel’s most recent roadmap update, to take just one example, pushed volume shipments of its next-gen 10nm processors out to 2019. That’s almost five years after Intel began pumping out 14nm chips in significant volumes. Likewise, Intel’s 14nm node came three years after 22nm. Welcome to the post Moore’s Law era, where faster computing for less money is no longer an automatic assumption. That’s…

Not all reinstalls require a complete wipe of your hard drive. A repair or refresh installation leaves your programs, settings and files in place, and restricts itself to installing a fresh copy of your Windows files over the top of your existing copy. If your problem is linked to a corrupt file or Windows setting, the repair installation can usually fix it. All repair installs share one common characteristic: you must launch them from Windows itself. You can’t boot from your install media and repair Windows through that; you need to boot into Windows, then start the repair process from there. If you’re unable to boot into Windows, therefore, you’ll need to skip to page 72 and perform a full destructive recovery instead. Start the repair Starting a repair install…

Reinstalling Windows from scratch – namely, wiping your system drive to install a fresh version of Windows on to it – is the ultimate choice for anyone looking to revive a slow PC or resolve a major, non-hardware issue. Here we’ll step you through the entire process – if you’re simply looking to repair an existing Windows install, turn to our guide on page 70. Before you begin, make sure your PC is fully backed up by following the ‘Back up Windows 10’ tutorial on page 43 of issue 148. A full reinstall really is destructive – nothing left on your C drive will exist once you’ve finished. If you’d like to transfer selected program settings from old installation to new, download the portable CloneApp tool (www.mirinsoft.com) to your backup…

£379.99 | $399.99 https://gopro.com/ GoPro’s three-pronged attack on the action camera market has enabled it to offer a Hero for everyone. And with the new Hero7 Black flagship, it’s offering a significant boost to the video stabilisation technology, one of its most critical features. The Hero7 Black has the same 12MP sensor and wide-angle lens, as its predecessor, while the top video specs of 4K/60fps and Full HD at a maximum 240fps for 8x slow-mo footage are unchanged. It’s the new features that make it much more powerful than before. The most significant of these is HyperSmooth, a form of video stabilisation that GoPro ranks as being the equivalent to using a gimbal. Using a combination of hardware and software, it presents a clear advantage for anyone who finds using…

£129 | $150 https://creative.com Getting a sound boost on a PC used to be invasive – requiring you to buy and install a sound card to get the best audio from your PC. Portable DACs and amplifiers have made it easier, but console gamers haven’t always been so lucky. But that’s a problem Creative’s new Sound BlasterX G6 hopes to solve. Somewhere in between an external sound card, amplifier and an exceptional DAC, the G6 is anything but a one-trick pony. Creative has made it versatile enough to work with Windows, the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and even the Nintendo Switch. Design The G6 is the successor to the G5, but also carries the legacy of the E5, a mini-amp that worked wonders with both PCs and mobile devices. With…