Table of contents for 640 in Computeractive

Mobile networks have called on local councils to support the building of more phone masts in order to provide better social care. Trade body Mobile UK, which represents Three, EE (owned by BT), O2 and Vodafone, also argued for business-rates relief to make it more affordable to build infrastructure. Networks say the measures, proposed in Mobile UK’s Connected Care report (www.snipca.com/43086), are vital to ensure that 5G is delivered to the whole of the UK. In addition they want councils to appoint ‘Digital Champions’ to focus on delivering better signals, and also “sell the benefits and opportunities of digital investment”. The report claims that only 40 per cent of social-care staff use phones and tablets in their work, forcing many to rely on pen and paper. It argues that this…

The UK’s official statistics body has ruled that the Government’s £400 discount on energy bills won’t appear in its inflation calculations, ending hopes that it might help to limit broadband and mobile price rises next year. Most leading internet providers and phone networks increase their prices every year by the rate of CPI inflation plus a set amount. BT and Vodafone, for example, both raise prices by inflation plus 3.9 per cent, which led to rises of 9.3 per cent in April. With inflation expected to reach 15 to 18 per cent by early next year, it had been hoped that the Office of National Statistics (ONS) would interpret the £400 payment as a reduction in prices – and therefore help to bring down inflation. Instead, it will see the…

VODAFONE TEACHES OVER-65s DIGITAL SKILLS Vodafone has teamed up with charity Independent Age to help the over-65s “gain digital skills, save money, and feel more connected”. The ‘Hi Digital’ scheme aims to reach 50,000 older people in the first year, offering advice on using a search engine, shopping online and keeping in touch with family. Join at www.snipca.com/43183. MALICIOUS ADD-ONS TRACK YOUR PURCHASES Security firm McAfee has warned people to avoid five malicious browser extensions that take a cut of items you buy online. The extensions, for Chromium browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave), have been installed 1.4 million times. Google has since removed the most popular extension, Netflix Party, from its Web Store, but the others, including a screenshot tool, are still available. Check the extensions on McAfee’s blog: www.snipca.com/43185. OCR…

If your ancestor left a will, an executor would have taken it to the probate court to have the right to deal with the estate confirmed, receiving a ‘grant of probate’. If no will was left, an inventory of their goods might still have been drawn up, and an executor appointed by a court through a ‘letter of administration’ to dispose of them. Today, in England and Wales, the probate process is handled by the HM Courts & Tribunal Service, from which copies of wills and related documents after 1858 can be bought for £1.50 each (https://probatesearch.service.gov.uk). These are emailed within a few days, after which you have 31 days to download it to your computer. Scottish wills from 1513-1925 are available from www.scotlandspeople.gov.uk, while for Northern Irish wills (1858-1965)…

LAPTOP | £749 from Amazon www.snipca.com/43060 The Prestige 14, from Taiwanese firm MSI, is a well-rounded laptop: smart, solid, not too flashy and with enough muscle to chomp through even the most demanding Windows tasks. It even has the graphical power to make sure games like Microsoft Flight Simulator run without turbulence. It’s also priced competitively for a laptop that comes with one of Intel’s latest 12th-generation processors (the twelve-core i5-1240P) and separate graphics hardware (the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3050). In recent weeks we’ve seen this laptop available for around £670, so it’s worth shopping around as prices are extremely volatile at the moment. “Solid, well-priced all-rounder that can perform the most demanding Windows tasks” It has a very traditional design, from the 16:9 aspect ratio to the grey colour.…

MICROPHONE | £100 from Currys www.snipca.com/43067 The microphone that comes built into your laptop or headset might be good enough for calling friends and family, but if you regularly use your PC for work video meetings or recording your voice, it’s worth upgrading to a more sophisticated model. This is a decent option, offering plug-and-play setup alongside high-quality recording. It should satisfy the demands of even the most discerning listeners. There are plenty of controls on the microphone itself, which let you fine-tune the way recordings sound. Yes, there is plenty of software that also lets you do this, but it’s convenient to have all the controls available on the mic. For example, a button on the mic lets you mute it quickly, while another lets you control the volume…

What is it? Instead of building bulky speakers into TVs, LG recently demonstrated how it could use a TV screen as a speaker, vibrating it to produce sound. This would avoid the need for traditional speakers, which need a lot of space and prevent sets from getting really thin. What does it do? Just as regular speaker drivers use vibration to create sound waves in the air that are picked up by your ears, a screen fitted with LG’s Film CSO (Cinematic Sound OLED) screen does the same thing. The movements are so minute that you won’t notice the screen vibrating. What’s the catch? It’s only available in a 97in demonstration model (similar in size to the £25,000 LG OLED Evo, pictured) and is still some way off being launched.…

What you need: WinDbg software Time required: 30 minutes When your computer crashes, and you find yourself looking at the infamous Blue Screen of Death (BSOD), it isn’t always obvious why – unless you know where to look. Windows helpfully keeps track of everything it was doing and which software was running on your computer at the time a crash occurred, logging it in a place from where it can be easily retrieved. It does this to help you diagnose the problem and fix it. Once you know where these logs are, and how to interpret them, you can work out what went wrong, when and why the crash happened, and – if possible – to avoid a repeat in the future. Alternatively, if you don’t have the skills to…

The cost of living crisis has caused many of us to think twice about upgrading our phones, laptops and other devices, and focus instead on saving money to cover the soaring cost of household bills. But the old tech we no longer use, and currently have stashed away in cupboards and drawers, can earn us some extra cash to cover other expenses and put towards the price of new devices. A study conducted by Vodafone last December (www.snipca.com/43144) found that Britain’s homes contain an average of £814 worth of unused technology – mainly smartphones, laptops and tablets. Few of us feel comfortable simply tossing old devices in the bin – whether for environmental reasons, privacy concerns or in case we ever need them again – so a massive amount of…

You’ll soon notice when checking prices for your old devices that resellers offer a lot more money for Apple and Samsung products. This is partly because phones and tablets from those two companies cost more when sold new, and also because there’s more demand for refurbished and second-hand models, so resellers can charge more money for them. However, that doesn’t mean you won’t get a fair price for LG, Motorola, OnePlus, HTC and Sony devices, especially if they’re less than two years old and cost you a few hundred pounds. Timing your sale so that it doesn’t coincide with the launch of a new phone from a manufacturer will help maximise your profit – new handsets invariably decrease the value of older models and tempt buyers to upgrade to them…

PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT Can I still activate Windows 7? Q I have an old Toshiba laptop. Recently, I was able to get a copy of the original Windows 7 Home from a computer dealer. When I try to activate it with the code on the underside of the laptop, it doesn't work. Is there anything I’m doing wrong? Is it not possible to activate it any more? There’s no help on the Microsoft site that I can find. Should I go back to the dealer? Kevin Docherty Q Windows 7 has been out of official support for more than two years, so Microsoft could decide to stop the activation facility at any time. However, it is still possible at the moment. So, as it sounds like you got Windows 7 installed,…

2.4GHz Wireless networks working at this frequency have longer range, but are more prone to interference. 32bit/64bit A measure of how much data a PC can process at once. Most older computers are 32bit, more modern ones are 64bit. 3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 5GHz Wireless networks working at 5GHz have shorter range, but are less prone to interference. Administrator Someone who can make changes to a computer that will affect others who also use it. AI Artificial Intelligence. Intelligence demonstrated by a machine rather than a human being. Often used to describe technology that can perform human-like tasks. AMOLED Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode. An alternative technology to LCD for creating flat-panel displays. Most commonly used in smartphones,…

Data-transfer speeds will double to 80Gbps using a new version of USB4, which has just been approved. When released, USB4 2.0 will become one of the fastest connectivity standards available, beating Thunderbolt 4, which – like USB4 1.0 – can’t go higher than 40Gbps. But what makes the news so significant is that you’ll be able to use it with your existing USB-C cables, rather than having to buy new ones. This means existing USB4 cables that can currently reach 40Gbps will be able to hit 80Gbps when the new standard is launched. One example is the £20 cable pictured, available from Cable Matters on Amazon (www.snipca.com/43208). Another benefit of USB4 2.0 is that when performing two tasks simultaneously, it can prioritise how much data it sends to each, ensuring…

Plex (www.plex.tv) has urged users to change their passwords after some account information was stolen in a security breach. The media-server app, used by about 20 million people worldwide, said in an email that a “third-party was able to access a limited subset of data that includes emails, usernames and encrypted passwords”. It added that while there’s no sign that the hackers could decrypt the passwords, it was worth creating new passwords as a precaution. Plex said that “credit card and other payment data are not stored on our servers at all and were not vulnerable in this incident”. The cause of the breach has been found, Plex claimed, adding that it’s performing “additional reviews to ensure that the security of all of our systems is further hardened to prevent…

When is an advert not an advert? Ask Microsoft, and it might reply that it’s when you’re advertising your own products. You may have seen its messages recently in Office 2021 encouraging you to subscribe to Microsoft 365. Or in the Windows Start menu, suggesting you switch your browser to Edge. Such self-promoting messages are nothing new – when Windows 10 launched in 2016, Microsoft bombarded Windows 7 and 8 users with banners urging them to upgrade. It toned these down after complaints, but adverts in its products are becoming more prominent again. In Office, these appear as banners along the top of the screen (see below, and at www.snipca.com/43191). Microsoft uses classic design tricks to tempt you – that bright ‘Redeem Offer’ button 1 is just begging to be…

There’s no such thing as the perfect crime, as this Bradford pair have discovered. The cunning duo fitted high-tech tracking devices to victims’ vehicles so that they could ransack their homes when they were out, stealing £150,000 in a sting the police described as a “highly organised criminal conspiracy”. Thankfully, it wasn’t quite as well organised as the police initially thought, because evidence from one of the devices led them to both offenders’ addresses. They found cash hidden under a sofa, and computers connected to websites used to track the victims. There’ll be no need to track their whereabouts for the next 15 years – they’ll be residing in one of Her Majesty’s less glamorous establishments.…

EARBUDS | £179 from Google www.snipca.com/43068 There’s a lot of choice around at the moment if you’re in the market for earbuds. Google’s latest offering is the Pixel Buds Pro, a top range alternative to its standard £80 Pixel Buds A-Series (www.snipca.com/38650), which we reviewed in Issue 609. These Pro alternatives come with all the features you’d expect, including noise cancellation and the ability to maintain a Bluetooth connection with two devices simultaneously. They also have an impressive 31-hour battery life (with noise cancellation switched off), are compatible with Google Assistant and have customisable on-ear touch controls. On paper they’re a viable rival to Apple’s AirPods Pro. However, we were less than impressed by the very basic sound quality during testing, specially compared with rivals such as Sony’s WF-1000XM4 (£198…

Find out what other products we liked. Buy our new 2021 Back Issue CD: £17 from www.snipca.com/42077 LAPTOP Lenovo Yoga 6 Gen 7 £663 from www.snipca.com/42509 Tested Issue 637 Lenovo’s new laptop has an amazing screen, a fast processor and lasts 15 hours on a single charge. It has all the ports you need, including two USB-C, two USB 3.0 and HDMI. At £663. It represents stunning value. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 New Intel CPUs and a taller screen make this a more powerful, all-round slim laptop. Prices start at £999 from www.snipca.com/42979 ANDROID TABLET Samsung Galaxy Tab S8 £649 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…

What you need: AdGuard DNS Time required: 30 minutes Every time you visit a website, your PC passes a request for the site’s contents to your internet service provider (ISP). The ISP looks up the server hosting the site using a Domain Name System (DNS) directory, retrieves the site’s content and sends it back to your browser. As a result, it can – if it chooses – keep track of what you’re doing online. Using a third-party DNS provider instead, like the recently upgraded AdGuard DNS, cuts out your ISP so they can’t see what you’re doing online, while routing your requests over a secure connection. STEP 1 Visit www.snipca.com/43090 and work through the two-screen sign-up process, providing an email address and password for your new AdGuard account. At the…

Chrome’s side panel lets you access your bookmarks from any tab, as well as pages you’ve saved to your reading list. If you don’t like having the panel on the right-hand side of your browser, here’s how to move it to the left in Chrome 105. 1 Type chrome:flags into Chrome’s address bar and press Enter to load the Experiments page. Find the entry Unified side panel 1, click the dropdown menu next to it and choose Enabled 2. 2 Relaunch Chrome and click the ‘Show side panel’ button that sits between your extensions toolbar and profile icon 1. This will open a redesigned side panel on the right-hand side of the browser 2. 3 To move the panel to the left, click Chrome’s three-dot menu button and choose Settings,…

Get club-specific email addresses While there are plenty of free email services you can use for your club, it looks more professional to create an email address that includes your club’s name. To do this, you’ll need to buy a domain name and email package from a hosting company. Here, we’re using Fasthosts (www.fasthosts.co.uk), although there are other UK web-hosting companies that offer the same service at a similar price. Create a user account on the site, then use the option to buy a domain name for your club – such as www.myclub.co.uk. This is what people will need to type into a browser to visit your site. Prices vary by domain: expect to pay around £4.99 a year for an address that ends with the suffix. website, and £11.99…

Every mobile phone has a unique 15-digit International Mobile Equipment Identity (IMEI) number, which resellers may ask for to ensure the handset you’re selling isn’t lost or stolen. It’s useful to have your IMEI to hand before you start comparing prices and you can often use it to look up your phone’s exact model. The easiest way to get your IMEI number is to dial #06# on your phone, but this option may not work on newer devices. An alternative method on an Android phone is to open the Settings app and choose ‘About phone’ – or General, then ‘About device’ – and look for the IMEI there. On an iPhone, go to Settings then General and choose About. If you’re selling a phone someone’s given you, check it hasn’t…

• A wireless phone charger, with handy suction cups to hold the charger to your device while charging • A clever kickstand props the device in either landscape or portrait mode, keeping you hands-free, all while charging • Indicator lights provide status of device charging as well as current battery charge. ORDER SECURELY ONLINE Visit our website or scan the QR code with your phone for quick access to our online store. computeractive.co.uk/offer Quote Offer Code: D640T Please allow 28 days for delivery, UK only. Future Publishing Limited reserves the right to limit offers of this kind to one per household. SCAN ME Other great reasons to subscribe.. • Benefits of subscribing to the world’s handiest technology magazine include.. • Every issue of ComputerActive delivered direct to your door. Save…

Scenario 1 You just want to cut the cable If you simply want to get rid of your wired internet connection and you don’t care about the fastest possible speeds, you’re in an enviable position. You should be able to buy a wireless adapter for around £20. The Linksys WUSB6300 (www.snipca.com/43101, pictured below) is a Wi-Fi 5 dongle that connects to a USB port on your computer and weighs less than a pencil. The Wi-Fi 5 standard has been around since 2014, so there’s a good chance your router already supports it. And because each new generation of Wi-Fi is designed to support older hardware when possible, the adapter should continue to work even if you upgrade your router, or other devices on your network, to Wi-Fi 6. Bear in mind,…

Apple has released a rare security update for old iPads and iPhones to fix a flaw that allows websites to run malware on your device. The company says it’s possible that hackers have already tried to exploit the flaw (www.snipca.com/43196). The update is for iOS 12, which Apple released in 2018, taking the version number to 12.5.6. The flaw affects the iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air, iPad mini 2, iPad mini 3, and iPod touch (6th generation). Apple stopped releasing feature updates for these devices when it launched iOS 13 in September 2021, but said it would continue to provide security fixes if they were needed. To install the update, tap Settings on your device, followed by General, then Software Update (see screenshot right). You’ll like…

Microsoft is suing a UK woman over a reading tool she has invented called Word Windows (pictured). Kate McKenzie, 40 from Northampton, invented the device to help dyslexic children learn to read, having been inspired by her son’s literacy problems. It covers lines of words, but leaves a gap – or a ‘window’ – in the middle so the child can concentrate on one specific word. They can then close the gap with a slider. She told the BBC that the device “isolates the first letter of the word, a sound in the word, a prefix or a suffix”. “They can learn those letters very easily at school, but when they’re suddenly put together in a word it can become much harder to see,” she added. Microsoft sent her a…

Amazon’s price rise is first since 2014 Thanks for your feature on whether it’s time to cancel Amazon Prime (Issue 639, page 60, pictured right). However, while it’s true that Amazon has just increased its price, it’s the first rise since 2014. Given the times we are living in, a company that doesn’t put prices up hasn’t a chance of surviving, has it? Yes, they were foolish not to increase prices for so long, leaving them having to ‘catch up’, but I don’t think the once-in-eight-years rise is unreasonable. I think you should have made this clear in your feature. Tom Boyd Amazon Prime is better value than the BBC There have been some interesting letters recently arguing both for and against the TV licence fee. Those for it typically…

LAPTOP-TABLET | £949 from Dell www.snipca.com/43047 Cast your mind back to Issue 638 and you’ll remember us raving about the Dell Inspiron 14 2-in-1, which only failed to knock our current Buy It favourite laptop, the Lenovo Yoga Gen 7, off its top spot thanks to the latter’s cheap price of £624. As its name suggests, the 16in 2-in-1 is a bigger version of Dell’s bendy laptop, with a larger screen that flips right over to become a tablet. It’s also more expensive. “A little laptop with plenty of power that transforms into a big-screen tablet” It has a very similar specification to the 14in version. It comes with an Intel Core i5-1235U processor, which includes Intel Iris Xe Graphics hardware, and is supported by 8GB of RAM. However, it…

Can you suggest a laptop with a large hard drive? Q I’d like to buy a new laptop to replace my Lenovo G500. I bought it in 2015 and it has an Intel i3-3220M processor, 8GB RAM and a 930GB hard drive. However, none of the laptops I’ve seen recently offer storage above 512GB. Why is hard-drive capacity lower now than it was years ago? My current hard drive is about half-full, with 459GB free, so I’m worried that a 512GB drive would quickly fill up. Frank Downs A Most laptops have switched to SSDs, which are much faster than traditional hard drives, but cost more per GB. Manufacturers therefore sell laptops with smaller SSDs to keep prices down. However, you can still buy laptops with larger drives. We’d recommend…

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Add faster broadband speeds to router’s QoS Regarding the question on page 64 of Issue 638 (‘Why is my BT Full Fibre so slow?’), I was recently given a broadband speed upgrade by Virgin Media, but couldn’t see any improvement on my home network when I tested it using the Ookla speedtest app (www.speedtest.net/apps). My Virgin Super Hub 2ac is in modem mode, connected to a D-Link DIR-882 router. Putting the Super Hub back into normal mode and retesting on one of its ports showed that Virgin had delivered as promised, so something in my home network was causing the problem. I had forgotten that the QoS Engine (as D-Link calls it) has to be manually updated with the new figures for my provider’s broadband upload…

PhotoShow Chromium www.snipca.com/43049 Firefox www.snipca.com/43051 Making out the content of small online images, such as thumbnails on YouTube or pictures in Google search results, can be difficult without clicking through to the relevant web page. PhotoShow saves you this hassle by enlarging images instantly when you hover your cursor over them. The extension uses AI to display high-definition versions of any picture on the 140 websites it supports, which include Amazon, Facebook and Wikipedia. You can use keyboard shortcuts to rotate images and switch between different viewer sizes. Right-clicking a thumbnail lets you open the HD version in a new tab (see screenshot) or download it. Set up an activation key, such as Shift, Ctrl or Alt, to avoid triggering PhotoShow accidentally. If you don’t like that, try… Imagus Chromium…

Er – when did that happen? 1865, according to Google. Weren’t you taught about it at school? Can’t recall that far back. So it wasn’t John Wilkes Booth? Well, that’s what some historians claim. But until recently if you typed ‘When did Snoopy assassinate Abraham Lincoln?’, Google showed the answer as April 14, 1865 (see screenshot right). And Google can’t be wrong. Or can it? Well yes, obviously it can. Does it have an excuse? Yes, it blames how its ‘featured snippets’ work. These are the boxes that appear at the top of its search results, showing excerpts of text from a website. The idea is that the box will show you the information you’re looking for, saving you the hassle of clicking any of the results below. They work…

Several gadget-recycling services, including MusicMagpie, Envirofone and Fonebank (www.fonebank.com) let you donate the money you earn to charity – just choose this option at the checkout. Other ways your old devices can help worthy causes include Three’s Reconnected scheme (www.snipca.com/43128, see screenshot) and O2’s Community Calling partnership with charity Hubbub (www.snipca.com/43132). These distribute phones to disadvantaged people to help them get connected – request a prepaid pack from either site to donate your old phone. You can also send phones, tablets, computers, routers and other tech to WeeeCharity (www.snipca.com/43134) or arrange a collection if you have a large hoard. The charity recycles, refurbishes and resells old devices to raise money for community projects. Alternatively, you can safely dispose of old tech by taking it to an electrical recycling point. Search…

Windows 11 has finally overtaken Windows 7 for market share (www.snipca.com/43205), but it took nearly a year from its launch last October - and it’s still far behind Windows 10. Microsoft hopes that the new tools in the operating system’s first Feature update, called 22H2, will see it gain more ground. So what can we expect? Here we’ve selected eight tools that we’re reasonably sure will appear in the update, because they’re all in the latest preview builds available to Windows Insiders. We’ve excluded a few that we think Microsoft will remove before 22H2 is released, even though they appear in the preview builds. The most notable of these is tabs for File Explorer, which we hope will arrive before the end of the year. 1 Create Start menu folders…

Can I install ChromeOS Flex on my tablet? Q Having read Issue 638’s How To on installing ChromeOS Flex on an old laptop, I was wondering whether it would also work on my old Lenovo B8000-F tablet, which runs Android 4.4.2 and is displaying an ‘end of life’ message? K Clews A We don’t have a Lenovo B8000-F tablet to try this on, but we think it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll be able to install ChromeOS Flex on the device. That’s because Google states in Flex’s system requirements (www.snipca.com/43094) that it works only on devices with an Intel or AMD processor. Full access to the device’s BIOS is also required. Most Android tablets (including the Lenovo B8000-F) have ARM processors, and don’t have a traditional PC BIOS, effectively ruling out installing Flex.…

I am now at an age when trying not to look my age has become an uphill battle. The further the hair on my head recedes, the more it pops up in other places; despite eating fairly healthily, I can pinch more than an inch around my waist; and the bags under my eyes appear to be packed for a fortnight’s holiday. Still, I live in hope that through a combination of dye, moisturiser and breathing in, I can fool people that I’m a few years younger, rather than them offering me their seat on the bus. “I felt like an archaeologist brushing the dust off an ancient artefact” Computers, of course, show their age through a decline in performance rather than outward physical signs. So I was stumped the…