Table of contents for 688 in Computeractive

Depending on what you read, AI will either create a disease-free future of carefree bliss or wipe us all out with the flick of a switch. We think the reality will turn out to be less extreme – sometimes bad, mostly good – and that the key benefits will be to our everyday way of life, not the creation of a utopian society. Robert Irvine was guided by this belief in his Cover Feature. He ignored much of the hype about AI’s potential, and looked instead at how it can improve your computing here and now. He reveals how it can restore damaged old photos, boost your security by detecting malware and help you search the web faster. He also explains how AI has improved audio and video editing, and…

FILE MANAGER Files 3.5 www.snipca.com/51182 What you need: Windows 10 or 11 Unlike many Windows programs, which are updated only once a year, this brilliant File Explorer alternative receives frequent attention from its developer, and this is its fifth major release of 2024 (so far). Rather than apply a few minor tweaks, Files 3.5 has a fresh design – with Windows 11-style rounded corners – and a host of useful new features. These include the ability to view detailed information about images in folders, simply by hovering your cursor over their thumbnails. When you do so, a tooltip appears showing the size, dimensions and file format of the picture, as well as the date it was last modified. Files has added a ‘Network locations’ widget to its Home screen, which…

The majority of mini PCs have a fairly generic design, with only minor differences to their dimensions or the number of ports they offer. The Minisforum AtomMan X7 Ti provides an alternative to the norm. It’s closer in design to our current favourite mini PC, the Minisforum UM780XTX (£649 from www.snipca.com/48917 – see page 32), because it’s slightly larger than average at 48.6x145x145mm (HxWxD) and also has a small stand that holds the case at an angle (as pictured right). “It has a striking design and powerful chip, but can’t quite match our favourite” The AtomMan takes things further, replacing the UM780XTX’s illuminated tiger face with a screen showing basic system information or an attractive digital clock face. It also has a webcam built into the case, which lets you…

The Samsung Galaxy A55 is a bit of a bridge smartphone, spanning the gap between the South Korean manufacturer’s budget models – such as the Galaxy A35 (£239 from www.snipca.com/50899, reviewed in Issue 687) – and the top-of-the-range Galaxy S24 (£799 from www.snipca.com/51111). “A decent, robust mid-range phone with a sharp screen and durable battery” That said, at first glance the A55 looks like a member of the S24 family, with its trio of cameras on the back. It also has a microSD card slot, letting you add up to 1TB of storage. It’s significantly larger than the A35 thanks to its 6.6in OLED screen. This sits between the 6.2in and 6.7in displays of the S24 and S24+, and while it can’t match those phones for pixel density, its 1080x2340-pixel…

If you tend to speak into your computer a lot – for video chats or voice recordings, for example – then a good-quality microphone is a must. German manufacturer Elgato is renowned for producing PC peripherals that are exceptional quality, environmentally friendly (using recycled materials) and value for money. Its latest Neo range of microphones is no different. The Wave Neo is the cheapest in the range and has a sturdy metal stand, a black pop filter (which you place over the top to get a clearer recording) and a nylon-braided USB cable. The cable can be conveniently secured within the dedicated cable holder at the rear of the device, maintaining a sleek and organized appearance. There’s a single button on the microphone which is a handy tap-to-mute control and…

OneOdio’s Monitor 60 headphones are designed to provide a more perfect sound and wearing experience. They have industry-leading, ultra-high-resolution audio, capable of reproducing rich details. Its engineers conducted thousands of sound adjustments and tried hundreds of earmuffs for the perfect cavities to achieve the ideal sound performance. The Monitor 60 has 50mm speaker drivers and 38-Ohm impedance, delivering beautiful, balanced and accurate sound over the entire frequency range. Solid bass, clear mid-range and high pitches and vocals amplify every detail of music. Ergonomically designed, these headphones have a substantial but flexible headband that fits the head perfectly, as well as wider earmuffs, and softer, more breathable, elastic ear pads. It comes with a 3m audio cable that lets you connect to your TV and other devices. To enter this competition,…

SOFTWARE Use Touch Portal as a remote control for your PC I play Microsoft Flight Simulator and, like many users, I’m always looking for extra screens to help with the multiple control options. I discovered the free Touch Portal (www.touch-portal.com), which lets you control PC software as a ‘remote control’ through your phone or tablet. Once you’ve installed it on your device, you just need to connect it to your PC via Wi-Fi. Even more interesting is that you can use it on an old phone without a SIM card, providing it also has Wi-Fi access to your network. My photo (pictured below left) shows my simple setup for autopilot commands in Flight Simulator. You can programme the buttons, and change their colour and shape, to suit the PC software…

WINDOWS 11 See all your devices on one screen Microsoft recently updated Windows 11 PCs with a feature that shows on one screen all the devices you’re signed into with your Microsoft account. First, tap Windows key+I to open Settings, then click Accounts (1 in our screenshot below). Scroll down and click ‘Linked devices’, which is a new option between ‘Sign-in options’ and ‘Email & accounts’. You’ll see how many devices you’re signed into 2, and what they are 3. WINDOWS 11 Get 24H2 update early The next major Windows 11 feature update, called 24H2, already comes with the new Copilot+ laptops (see page 24), but it won’t be generally available for users to download until the autumn. You can access it early, however, by temporarily joining the Windows Insider program.…

The past few years have seen a worrying rise in a type of phone scam known as SIM swapping (www.snipca.com/51171). Also called simjacking, SIM splitting and port-out fraud, this involves criminals transferring your phone number to a new SIM card, so they can access your calls, messages and personal data. If you fall victim to this scam, you’ll be cut off from your mobile network and could even lose access to your bank account – while fraudsters empty it. Here’s how to avoid being simjacked. How do SIM-swapping scams work? SIM-swapping scams are a form of identity theft, where fraudsters use your personal details to impersonate you. They may obtain this data from a website security breach, or use phishing techniques – particularly smishing – to trick you into entering…

AMAZON LAUNCHES FIRST TV SOUNDBAR Amazon has released its first soundbar, at a limited price of £100 (usually £120). The Fire TV Soundbar (pictured) is 61cm long, has a pair of 20W speakers, supports Dolby Audio and comes with HDMI and optical outputs for a TV connection and Bluetooth for music streaming. It’s available now for pre-order and will go on sale in late July: www.snipca.com/51179. CREATE AND EDIT DOCS IN PROTON DRIVE Proton Drive now lets you create and edit documents, like Google Docs and Microsoft’s OneDrive. Documents benefit from the end-to-end encryption Proton applies to its other tools, such as its VPN and password manager. You get 2GB storage for free, and can increase this to 5GB by performing tasks using Proton’s tools (www.snipca.com/51193). Read Proton’s blog for…

Google has turned off continuous scrolling in search, meaning you’ll need to click a button to go to the second page of results. It added continuous scrolling to PCs in 2022, giving you endless results as you scrolled down a page of results. This mimicked the scrolling effect in search results on phones and tablets, introduced in 2021. But it has now decided to turn it off. It’s been disabled already on PCs, and will be axed on mobile devices in the coming months. It’ll be replaced by the traditional extended Google logo and numbers below indicating which page you can click to (see screenshot). This is called the pagination bar. On PC results you can also click ‘Next’, while on phones and tablets you can click ‘More results’. Continuous…

LEAD CASE Shouldn’t Currys have reminded me about insurance payments? Q In January I realised month for its Whatever Happens plan for an HP laptop that I bought more than 10 years ago. This means I’ve paid more than £800 for insurance I never used. Shouldn’t Currys have reminded me more regularly about these payments? David Wirth A Yes, Currys should have sent David regular reminders, but how often and how many depends on the duration of the plan he took out. If it was an annual plan, the company should have notified him that it was about to renew at least 14 days before each date. Currys told David it had sent him a reminder in 2018, but it never followed this up. David said he never saw the email,…

I’m colour blind, so which photo editor can I use? Q I’m partially colour blind and can’t find a photo-editing tool that suits me. The only one I’ve ever been happy with was Windows Photo Gallery in Windows 8.1. What can I use instead now that it’s discontinued? David Norris-Kay A Without knowing exactly what type of colour blindness you have, it’s difficult to know how it affects your photo-editing experience. There are several different types of colour blindness, with more than half affecting red/green perception, a couple affecting blue/yellow, and one in which there is no colour perception at all. You may find you get best results by desaturating your image before editing. That way, you can focus on brightness, contrast and detail rather than individual tones, then return the original…

CHROME Pin useful browser features to your toolbar Unlike Microsoft, which has added lots of clutter to Edge’s interface, Google has resisted the urge to stuff Chrome with unnecessary options – and recently removed the ‘Show side panel’ button. But a new experiment in Chrome 127, released mid-July, lets you customise the browser by ‘pinning’ specific features to its toolbar. This is similar to pinning your favourite extensions, and gives you one-click access to frequently used tools. To try this experiment, type chrome://flags into Chrome’s address bar and press Enter to load the Experiments page. Search for the entry Toolbar pinning, select Enabled in its dropdown menu and click Relaunch. When the browser reopens, click the Customise Chrome button in the bottom-right corner of a New Tab page, and click…

MICROSOFT ONENOTE Use the new Sticky Notes Microsoft has been testing improvements to Sticky Notes, and has now added them to the version of OneNote that’s available in the Microsoft 365 subscribers. It has a revamped interface, alongside a feature that saves the URL of any screenshot you take in the app. To access the new Sticky Notes, open OneNote in the Microsoft 365 app then click the Sticky Notes button (1 in our screenshot below). This will open the new Sticky Notes tool in a pop-up window 2. Click the Screenshot button 3 to capture snippets from a web page. A link to the page will appear in Sticky Notes above the images you captured 4. Microsoft plans to eventually let everyone use the new Sticky Notes app from the…

From the Copilot button in Windows 11 to AI summaries of Amazon customer reviews, there’s no escaping artificial intelligence, and this is only the beginning. The first AI-enabled PCs went on sale recently, new PC keyboards now include a Copilot key and Google is now showing ‘AI overviews’ above its search results in the US. This rapid AI onslaught has annoyed and confused many people, who aren’t as excited about the technology as tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Apple – which will launch its own AI system, Apple Intelligence, later this year. It also obscures the fact that there are genuinely useful AI tools among the many gimmicks. As we explained in our ‘Give up Google for ChatGPT’ feature in Issue 682 (page 60), AI gives more detailed…

Freesat no longer lets you record TV shows through its Android and iOS apps. The company has removed Freesat ID accounts, which means you can’t sign into the app to use the Remote Record feature. Previously this feature connected your phone or tablet to your Freesat box, allowing you to record programmes to it by tapping the R button (see screenshot). Many viewers used this feature to record shows if they remembered something they wanted to watch was on but they weren’t at home. Freesat made the decision in June, saying it was due to a “change to our internal systems”. It added that you can still use your remote control to record shows to your Freesat Recordable 4K TV Boxes, which come in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB models. “We…

This is what living skin tissue looks like on a robot. It’s been developed by a team at Tokyo University who want robots to have an “increasingly lifelike appearance”. They said it could help train plastic surgeons. Watch closely at www.snipca.com/51197 and you’ll see it can even smile. THE WORLD’S GONE MAD! This is Chinese influencer Lisa Li on a date with her ‘boyfriend’, a chatbot called Dan which is a hacked version of ChatGPT. They flirt every day, and many of her 943,000 followers now want their own version. Li says Dan has “no flaws” – apart from the obvious one: he doesn’t actually exist.…

WATCH OUT FOR… Chrome extensions containing malware What’s the threat? Chrome extensions containing malware remain available online for over a year on average, security researchers have said. A study from Stanford University in California and the German CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security found that malicious extensions remained on the Chrome Web Store for 380 days, while those with more general privacy vulnerabilities were available for 1,248 days. The longest surviving malicious extension, called TeleApp, had been available in the store for eight and a half years, from 2013 to 2022. They also found that 280 million people installed a malware-infected Chrome extension between July 2020 and February 2023, while a further 63 million people installed a tool that breached Google’s privacy policy. How can you stay safe? Google claimed…

Vpnify’s punishment for declining upgrade I always thought free VPN apps sounded too good to be true, but I was still stunned to read that 90 per cent of them share your data with other firms (Issue 687, page 11). The report, from VPN-testing site Top10VPN, named some well-known companies (Bitdefender, F-Secure, Kaspersky), as well as Hong Kong-based Vpnify (www.snipca.com/51145), which is the most popular free app in the Play Store’s Tools category, with 10 million downloads. One of those downloads was mine. My preferred free VPN is Proton (https://protonvpn.com), but it has severe limitations (no streaming), so I often wonder if there’s anything better. The perfect free VPN may be out there somewhere, but Vpnify is certainly not it. As soon as I opened the app it asked me…

ANDROID & iOS Share your screen with audio in WhatsApp video calls WhatsApp has made several improvements to its video-call function that bring it closer in line with rival services such as Zoom and Skype. The most useful is the ability to share your screen with audio when you’re chatting to someone. This allows you to discuss what’s displayed on your phone, such as information in a document, web page or other app, without needing to capture and send a screenshot. To use this new feature while on a video call (it doesn’t work in audio calls), tap the three-dot icon in the video controls and choose ‘Share screen’. Tap ‘Continue’ to allow WhatsApp to cast from your device, then press ‘Start now’ (see screenshot 1 below). The app will…

Is there a workaround to get VoIP from Plusnet? Q In Issue 684 (page 66) you advise John Weight on using his existing landline phones and answering machine with FTTP. My understanding is that his provider Plusnet isn’t providing VoIP services after the copper switch-off, so this won’t be possible for him unless he changes to a different provider and asks to retain his existing landline number. Is that true, or is there a workaround that lets you stay with Plusnet? Clive Brown A John Weight’s main query in Issue 684 was about how he would receive broadband after the copper switch-off, so our response was designed to explain, in general terms, how this would work. But you are correct to point out that Plusnet does not currently provide its…