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I sometimes feel like an enthusiast trapped inside the body of a sceptic. My first, second and third reactions to new technology or software are typically “that’ll never catch on”. But by my seventh reaction, I’m usually raving about the very thing I thought was pointless just days earlier. That’s how it was when Google’s Chrome browser launched, back in 2008. First, I didn’t think it could ever compete with Internet Explorer or Firefox. It took about two weeks for me to realise it was the best browser ever made. I had a similar Damascene conversion earlier this year, when I dismissed Microsoft’s revamped Edge as a non-starter. But it has now ousted Chrome as my favourite browser, for all the reasons Nik Rawlinson explains in our Cover Feature. Please…

The UK’s top cyber-spies have banned the words ‘whitelist’ and ‘blacklist’ because they claim they’re racist. In cyber-security, the terms are commonly used to describe programs that are allowed to access a network (whitelist) or have been blocked from doing so (blacklist). They are also used to classify which passwords are safe to use. But the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ, said there are “obvious problems” with equating white with things that are good, and black with things that are bad. Writing on the NCSC’s blog (www.snipca.com/34755), Emma W, Head of Advice and Guidance at the centre, said: “In the name of helping to stamp out racism in cyber security, we will avoid this casually pejorative wording on our website in the future”. From now…

Microsoft now automatically updates its new PowerToys collection of programs, so you don’t have to keep checking for updates. PowerToys first appeared in Windows 95 as a package of 15 programs offering advanced functions for the operating system. It included TweakUI, which let you change some of the operating system’s more obscure settings, and FlexiCD, which let you play an audio CD from your taskbar. PowerToys was also part of Windows XP – adding tools like CD Slide Show Generator that let you make a slideshow from photos burned to a CD – before being left out of Vista, 7 and 8. When Microsoft relaunched PowerToys last year it contained just two tools: a guide to Windows 10 keyboard shortcuts and FancyZones, which lets you divide your desktop into resizable…

Several readers have asked us whether we have further news from Symantec about why it requires customers to enter their bank or card details to register its Norton security software, We covered this in Issues 562 and 570, explaining that Symantec wants your payment details whether you bought the software directly from its website or from a third party, such as PC World. Previously, the company asked you to enter only your licence key to activate the software. Symantec told us that it asks for these details because it ensures the software will renew automatically at the end of the initial period, providing what it calls “continuous protection”. Without your bank details, it wouldn’t be able to take your payment, and the software would stop working on your PC. This…

IMAGE EDITOR Inkscape 1.0 www.snipca.com/34789 What you need: Windows 7, 8.1 or 10 Unlike Gimp (www.gimp.org) and Paint.Net (www.getpaint.net), which are both raster graphic editors, Inkscape is a vector editor. What does this mean? Well, whereas images created with raster editors will start to pixelate as you zoom beyond 100 per cent, a vector image is infinitely zoomable without pixelation. There are, of course, downsides to using vector graphics - most notably they’re not suited to fine detail – but they’re perfect for creating logos and illustrations. For example, you could create a logo for a local club that looks as sharp on a website as it does when printed on a 10ft banner. Don’t let the version number fool you - Inkscape isn’t a new program. Originally released in…

WARNING: JUNK AHEAD Junk offender: Speed Up My PC Free When a tool has the word ‘free’ in its name, that usually means it shouldn’t cost anything, right? Well, try telling that to the people behind Speed Up My PC Free (www.speedupmypcfree.com) – a program so bad, that its poorly chosen name is actually the least of its problems. You could be forgiven for thinking otherwise, given all the seemingly glowing testimonials plastered around the tool’s web page, but – make no mistake – this software is so dreadful on so many levels, that I’m genuinely not sure where to start. Download and install Speed Up My PC Free and you’ll eventually discover that Speed Up My PC Free isn’t even called Speed Up My PC Free. It’s easy to…

What is it? Developed by Intel and first seen in PCs in 2015, Thunderbolt 3 is a peripheral interface based on the PCI Express (PCIe) serial expansion bus. In plain English, it’s a fast connection between a computer and external accessories. Unlike Thunderbolt and Thunderbolt 2, which provided two 10Gbps lanes over a modified Mini DisplayPort connector, Thunderbolt 3 has four lanes and uses a USB-C socket (pictured). What does it do? A Thunderbolt 3 connection theoretically allows external SSDs to write and read up to about 4GB of data per second. It also supports eight-lane DisplayPort 1.2, enabling monitors with higher than 4K resolution, as well as serving all of the same purposes as an ordinary USB-C port. Unlike USB, Thunderbolt supports ‘daisy-chaining’, which relies on peripherals having a…

You can use the JBL Charge 4 portable Bluetooth speaker to wirelessly connect up to two smartphones or tablets. Its built-in rechargeable Li-ion 7500mAH battery supports up to 20 hours of playtime and charges your device via a USB port. It’s rated as IPX7 waterproof, and has a rugged exterior, so you can take it to the beach or the pool without worrying about spills or even submersion in water. It’s powered by JBL’s own driver, which intensifies the sound with strong deep bass. Together with JBL Connect+, it can wirelessly link more than 100 JBL Connect+ enabled speakers to elevate your listening experience. To enter this competition, email your home address to cacomp@dennis.co.uk with ‘JBL’ in the subject line by midnight Tuesday 2 June. You can buy the JBL…

WINDOWS 7, 8.1 & 10 Avoid typing long file names Command Prompt and PowerShell are great for running powerful, text-based commands (see our Workshop on page 40 on how to use PowerShell to tidy up folders). However, the commands are often long and tricky to type. You can quickly cycle through previous commands using the up and down arrow keys, but you can also get both Command Prompt and PowerShell to type file or folder names into the directory you’re working in. To do this, start typing your command as normal. Then, when you reach the point where you need to add a file or folder name, press the Tab key. Command Prompt (or PowerShell, if you’re using that) will now add the name of the first file or folder…

What is it? It could be the next version of Windows, though it’s nothing to do with Microsoft. Eh? How can that be? For now, it’s just a concept, a vision of what Windows might look like if it was redesigned. Phew. For a moment, I thought I’d missed the next 10 versions of Windows during lockdown. Don’t worry. Microsoft hasn’t changed its official line that Windows 10 will be the final edition of the operating system. So if not Microsoft, who’s behind Windows 20? Kamer Kaan Avdan, a Turkish medical student who somehow finds time to reimagine how Windows could work. His portfolio already contains updated versions of Windows 95, XP (pictured below) and 7, plus what Windows 11 might look like. He has even created a version of…

Microsoft appears to have delayed the release of the May 2020 Update in order to fix a problem with how people log into Windows. On 16 April it released what it expected to be the final preview version of the update, suggesting the final edition would arrive in the first half of May. But this was replaced with another preview version on 30 April which fixed a bug with NPLogonNotify – a tool that tells programs when you’ve logged in. Since then, Microsoft seems to have revealed that the update will be released between Tuesday 26 and Thursday 28 May. The company published the dates on its Driver Shiproom Schedule, which is a guide for computer manufacturers to make sure they don’t release driver updates at the same time. This…

Internet use in the UK has risen sharply during the lockdown, driven by people using the internet to work from home, and children using it for school work. There’s also been a sharp rise in TV streaming, gaming and video chats. A survey of 2,000 adults from broadband-comparison site uSwitch shows that people are spending an average of 41.3 hours online every week, up from 32 hours before social restrictions came into force. The biggest increase has been in working from home, which has risen from just over five hours a week to eight hours, 30 minutes. This has overtaken social media to account for the biggest share of internet activity. The average time spent on video calls has increased from two hours 48 minutes to four hours 12 minutes,…

The hacker who created the world’s first major computer virus has admitted his guilt, 20 years after his malware attacked millions of machines worldwide. Onel de Guzman (pictured), from the Philippines, said he released the Love Bug virus to steal people’s passwords so he could access the internet without paying. He confessed while being interviewed for Crime Dot Com, a forthcoming book on the growth of hacking (pre-order on Amazon: www.snipca.com/34756). The virus, released on 4 May 2000, infected computers when the victim opened an email attachment titled “LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU”. It contained code that stole passwords and sent copies of itself to the victim’s Microsoft Outlook contacts. Within 24 hours, it had infected 45 million machines around the world, and overwhelmed organisations’ email systems, causing disruption running into billions of pounds.…

You were absolutely right to call the current 5G conspiracy theories “deranged” (Issue 579, page 6). I don’t understand the mentality of people who believe that viruses can be spread by radio waves. You might as well say that switching channels on the TV by remote control gives you tuberculosis. The problem with arguing with conspiracy theorists is that their default response is always denial. You simply can’t win. If you point out the facts, they always respond by saying that’s exactly what the experts want you to think. In their warped minds, proof that something is true merely confirms that it’s false. And conspiracy theories last for decades, even centuries – just think of the Moon landing, the JFK assassination, and flat Earthers. But at least those theories are…

Following your article on Amazon Prime scams (Issue 576, page 60), I reviewed all Amazon payments since joining Prime in February 2015 and was quite startled to find many duplicate payments over the years. I emailed Amazon and within a day received a courteous response from their Executive Customer Relations department acknowledging that all did not seem right and an enquiry would be set up. Within two days a further email arrived which highlighted problem areas, followed by a phone call at which a settlement was proposed. It transpired that the problems were of my own doing as we had been using two email addresses and three card accounts. Nevertheless all duplicated payments were refunded within days. I must say I was most impressed by the level of customer service.…

What can I use to redesign my garden? Q Can you recommend a tool to help plan my garden makeover? Nothing too dramatic – just moving a few borders and vegetable plots around. I’d rather not use a phone app as I find them too fiddly. Kevin Broadhurst A Although intended as an interior-design tool, Sweet Home 3D (www.snipca.com/34795) can be used to plan your new garden. And unlike most landscaping software, it’s free. It doesn’t have specific garden-related tools, but you can recreate your garden by first setting up a new room (press Ctrl+Shift+R) to match the size of your garden, then giving it a soil texture (right-click the room, ‘Modify rooms…’, then Texture - see screenshot). Next, create another room on top of this to match the grass…

PHONE £419 from Apple www.snipca.com/34773 Core value When we reviewed the iPhone 8 in 2017, our first comment was that it didn’t feel very new. Replacing it as Apple’s cheapest smartphone, the iPhone SE (2020) still looks the same. It’s a relatively small phone with borders above and below the screen and a single camera on the back. But it hardly matters, because this is the best-value iPhone ever, and – for the first time in years – a real alternative to Android for those who don’t want to spend a fortune. “Its camera is one of the best, and apps and games run superbly” It could have been even cheaper: thanks to the exchange rate, this is the first Apple product to launch with a higher number after the…

Q I have an old but perfectly functional desktop PC with an Intel Celeron processor, upgraded to Windows 10. I’d like to watch Freeview on it. There’s a spare PCIe x16 and two PCIe x1 slots. Could you suggest a reasonably priced TV tuner card that I could fit and connect to my rooftop TV aerial? Neil Howells A There’s no need to fiddle around inside your PC to add a digital TV tuner card: just plug in a USB dongle such as the August DVB-T210 (£25 from Amazon www.snipca.com/34742, pictured), which comes with Freeview viewing and recording software, a co-ax input and a remote control. But it’s simpler and as reliable these days to watch free channels over the internet. On a PC, this is done via your web…

What was it? When Google invested $542m (then about £315m) in Magic Leap in 2014, it was still unclear what the four-year-old firm was making. Its augmented reality (AR) glasses (pictured) were unusual in using light-field technology to create not just a stereo image of a scene but a ‘3D light sculpture’ projected on to the user’s retina. Why did it die? By 2016, AR – mixing CGI with a camera feed – was already familiar to mobile-phone users, millions of whom spent months hunting down imaginary Pokémon characters with no need for special glasses or light-field projection. The problem of motion sickness with virtual-reality (VR) helmets, which Magic Leap had promised to solve, was overcome by different technologies in products like the Oculus Rift. In 2018, a prototype ‘wearable…

TIP OF THE FORTNIGHT Listen to soothing countryside recordings I’m a long-standing Computeractive subscriber, and it suddenly occurred to me that I should make you aware of a new page I recently put online to help people save their sanity during lockdown. It contains a selection of my high-grade natural soundscape recordings, made during hikes in wild parts of Devon and Cornwall. You’ll find the site at www.snipca.com/34599. Scroll down and click one of the blue Download links (see screenshot right). The recordings include being on the low) mountain-like tip of a headland near Perranporth, with a three-vent blowhole just below us, and also with eerie ‘breathing’ sounds coming from a rock fissure nearby. Talking of eeriness, there’s a beautiful middle-of-night sea soundscape near Cape Cornwall, with Manx shearwaters making…

MICROSOFT WORD & LIBREOFFICE WRITER Start typing anywhere on the page When you open a new Word or Writer document, your cursor will appear at the top-right. If you want to enter text in the middle of the page, for example when creating a poster, you’ll probably find yourself using tabs and spaces to get there. However, you can avoid this rigmarole. In Word, you need to enable the ‘Click and Type’ feature. To do this, click File, Options, then select the Advanced tab down the left side. In the ‘Editing options’ section on the right, scroll down to ‘Enable click and type’ and tick the box next to it. Now click OK. Writer has a similar feature, but it’s called Direct Cursor and you’ve two ways of turning it…

3G/4G/5G Technologies that deliver faster mobile broadband. 4K Video with a resolution of at least 3840x2160 pixels. 720p A common resolution of high-definition video: 1280x720 pixels. 802.11ac A standard for wireless networks that allows for much higher transfer speeds than 802.11n. 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard with speeds up to 10 times faster than 802.11ac. Also called Wi-Fi 6. 1080p Of the common types of high-definition video, this is the best quality: 1920x1080 pixels. AMOLED Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode. An alternative technology to LCD for creating flat-panel displays. Most commonly used in smartphones, tablets and smartwatches. Backhaul The process of sending data to a wired access point to reach the wider internet. Beta A version of software that’s being tested. Beta versions are often released so problems can be ironed out. BMP…

Microsoft has released a new version of its cheapest Windows 10 laptop-tablet, the Surface Go 2 (pictured). It has a 10.5in screen, half an inch bigger than the first Go, and an eighth-generation Intel Core M processor, which Microsoft claims makes it 64 per cent faster than the original. It has the same ports as the first Go: a single USB-C port, the Surface Connect port for charging and docking, and a microSDXC card reader. At 10 hours, battery life is an hour longer. It has a 5-megapixel front-facing camera, making it good for video calling. Pricing starts at £399 from the Microsoft Store (www.snipca.com/34822), with the Type Cover keyboard costing an extra £124.99. Read the company’s blog for details on more new Surface products, including the new £1,599 Surface…

THREE OFFERS FREE NHS VIDEO CHATS Customers on the Three mobile network can now have video consultations with doctors without paying any extra data charges. The NHS is providing video consultations using the Attend Anywhere service to help reduce face-to-face outpatient appointments. Three said that most patients using this service have done so on mobile phones, which would normally be expensive because consultations last 20 minutes on average. BEWARE MOTORHOME SCAMS ON EBAY Scammers are posting fake listings for motorhomes and camper vans on eBay to exploit people’s desire to travel once the lockdown is eased. Anti-fraud group Buster Jack says scammers are hoping buyers will hand over thousands of pounds to buy the vehicles despite not being able to inspect them in person. Read more on Buster Jack’s Facebook…

Computer analysts have cracked a secret code that paedophiles use to share child sexual abuse material online. A team of 13 experts at the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) spent months deciphering thousands of coded words and slang phrases predators used to find and share photos and videos. The IWF, a UK-based charity for finding and removing child sexual abuse from the internet, said it was a “significant breakthrough” in the fight against online paedophilia. In total, it identified 3,681 “seemingly innocent” words and phrases that abusers type into search engines, so they don’t attract suspicion. Paedophiles know they have double meanings that direct them to abusive material. These words will now be used by internet companies, including search engines, to block any searches that would produce illegal content. The research…

WATCH OUT FOR… Fake NHS Coronavirus website Criminals have hidden malware in a fake version of the NHS website (see screenshot) to exploit public interest in the Coronavirus pandemic. The malware, which is a Trojan, is installed on your computer if you click one of three links on the site: ‘Advice about staying at home’, ‘Use the 111 Coronavirus service’ and ‘How to avoid infection’. If you click any of these you’ll see a message asking whether you want to save a file called ‘COVID19’. By installing this file you’re giving the scammers access to your passwords and payment-card details from browsers, files and other data stored on your computer. Kaspersky, which discovered the fake website, said the global lockdown hasn’t affected criminals’ ability to target people. Scammers are used…

LEAD CASE Can I return my Chromebook because it’s not Windows? Q I bought a Chromebook from Argos’s website, not realising the operating system isn’t Windows. I wanted a Windows laptop instead, so tried returning it only for Argos to refuse because it had been used. Can Argos do this? Diane Freidman A No, Argos can’t do this because fewer than 14 days had passed since Diane’s purchase. This is how long customers have to examine an item bought online before deciding whether to keep it. This law means that, within 14 days, you can return an item even if there’s nothing wrong with it. Once you’ve told the retailer you’re returning an item, you must send it within the next 14 days. There’s one caveat though, which was added…

Back up and share your records As your photo and document collection grows, you’ll want to back them up and find a way to share them with others. One free option is to upload them to FamilySearch.org’s Memories section, thereby saving them as a backup and – by tagging them to specific people in your tree – as shareable content also. Upload your files The quickest and simplest way to transfer files stored on your PC is to upload them through your web browser. Go to www.familysearch.org and sign into your account, then click the Memories dropdown menu at the top of the window and choose Gallery to go to your personal archive. From here, click the big green plus button to upload your first item. Read the submission agreement…

During one of many lockdown clearouts I discovered two ancient hard drives (the IDE type that use those old ribbon-style cables) stashed at the back of a drawer. Keen to find out what they contained, I used an IDE-to-USB adapter (similar to this £20 model from PC World www.snipca.com/34782) and hooked them up to my PC. The first didn’t deliver much (just an old XP installation), but the second was jam-packed with MP3s from nearly 20 years ago. Back then I had a Creative DAP MP3 player (one of the first to include a built-in hard drive), on to which I’d loaded the MP3s. The DAP is long gone, but I was overjoyed to find that the original MP3 files were intact on this hard drive. Although I now use…

LAPTOP £550 from Amazon www.snipca.com/34688 Abracadabra! This lightweight metal-caseed laptop looks pricier than it is, especially in the darker Spaace Grey option, even if the blue stripe round the lid is dubious. In the UK, retailers are stocking both colours (the other is Mystic Silver)but only one configuration, with an AMD Ryzen 3500U processor, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. The solid chassis supports a good-quality keyboard, though it’s not backlit. Our test unit had a proper UK arrangement, with the double-height Enter key, but models advertised here all show a US layout, so you might want to check this before buying if it’s important to you. The touchpad felt a bit cheap, but worked well, supporting Windows 10 gestures. The fingerprint reader offers a quick login. The Full…

PC £1,849 from AlphaBetaPC www.snipca.com/34700 Lightning in a bottle The photo right shows off AlphaBetaPC’s spectacular glass-box chassis, not the specific configuration tested here, although you do get the huge RGB-lit fans on the front and top. In reality, this desktop PC’s secret weapons are AMD’s 3.9GHz Ryzen 7 3800X processor, with eight cores running two threads apiece, and a GeForce 2080 Super graphics card, second from top in Nvidia’s current consumer range – together worth nearly a grand. Peek in and you can literally see where your money went. “Power, speed and expandability are clear for all to see” It’s the GPU that takes the biggest chunk, and when it comes to playing the latest 3D games at maximum quality it won’t disappoint. Although we saw no results below…

MOUSE £100 from Logitech www.snipca.com/34651 Magnetic attraction According to an air-accident report published in April, a French defence industry executive given a ride in a Dassault Rafale B fighter jet was so startled by the g-force on takeoff that he grabbed on to a lever that activated his ejector seat at 1300ft. Fortunately, he landed safely in a field. We were reminded of this story when contemplating the MX Master 3, which looks so lethally efficient, with its vertiginous tilt and dramatically splayed thumb rest, that we were almost afraid to touch its knurled steel knobs. It is an impressive piece of engineering, albeit made for Excel more than Exocets. The big left and right buttons are the most conventional – and, with a high-pitched click, least stealthy – feature…

LAPTOP HP Envy 13 (2019) £900 from www.snipca.com/34674 Tested Issue 568 Thanks to eighth-gen Intel processors and dedicated Nvidia MX250 graphics, this sleek aluminium laptop offers a practical combination of all-round processing power and portability, topped off by 8 hours 30 minutes battery life – and the touchscreen is now excellent too. ALTERNATIVE Dell XPS 13 Gets the most out of Intel CPUs, now tenth-gen, but there’s no GPU option and the cheapest sensible configuration is £1,049 from www.snipca.com/33309 ANDROID TABLET NEW ENTRY Samsung Galaxy S6 £526 from www.snipca.com/34752 Tested Issue 571 Although it resembles the iPad Pro, this competes more directly with the basic iPad and, considering the included S Pen stylus and generous 128GB of storage, costs about the same. It’s less powerful, but a great tablet if…

iOS Quickly transfer files between iPhone and PC There are several ways to move files between your iPhone or iPad and Windows, but most of them are very long-winded. Moving them to Dropbox or iCloud, then retrieving them in iOS or iPadOS is one option – and so is emailing them from your computer to your phone or tablet, but none of these is as simple as a couple of clicks in your browser. File Explorer Root Browser (£2.99 from www.snipca.com/34715) lets you carry out this simple function very neatly. Install and launch the app on your mobile device then, on your PC, open a browser window and visit the IP address displayed within the Root Browser app (see screenshot right). As long as your phone and PC are on…

Record a podcast with other people remotely Wth social-distancing rules in place, now may not seem like the ideal time to record a podcast with multiple presenters. However, thanks to a new tool called Anchor (a free podcast-creation and distribution service owned by Spotify), you can now invite up to four other people to join your recording session, no matter where they are. There’s a web-based version of Anchor (www.anchor.fm), but to use the new remote-recording tool you’ll need to set up the recording session on the mobile app (iOS www.snipca.com/34753; Android www.snipca.com/34754). Anyone joining the recording of your podcast can do so from any device, and they won’t need an Anchor account to do so. Invite others to join To start recording your podcast, select Record at the bottom…

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Set up his printer for home schooling Less than one minute into my first attempt at home-schooling, my six-year-old daughter raised her hand: “Can I ask a question?”. Excellent, I thought, she’s going to ask me about hidden meanings in Alice in Wonderland, or how many prime numbers there are up to 100. But no. “Daddy, when’s play time?” I had lost her attention in less time than it takes to boot my laptop. The problem, she said, was my handwriting. She couldn’t read the maths sums I’d written: “Daddy, at school we have nice printouts to read – with pink writing”. Pink writing! My black scribbles couldn’t compete with that, not when there’s a trampoline to be bounced on in the garden. So this is how I was shamed…